Marcuse, Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974

Paris Lectures

at Vincennes University, 1974

From the Marcuse Archives
Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition

Photo Credit: Ulf Andersen
Limited Edition Publication presented at

International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference
November, 2015
Salisbury University, Maryland, USA
ii
Paris Lectures
at Vincennes University, 1974
From the Marcuse Archives
Herbert Marcuse
Edited and
Published by
Peter-Erwin Jansen
Charles Reitz
With
Introduction by Sarah Surak
Afterword by Douglas Kellner
Frankfurt a. M.
Kansas City, Missouri
iii
“To create the subjective conditions for a free society
[it is] no longer sufficient to educate individuals to
perform more or less happily the functions they are
supposed to perform in this society or extend
‘vocational’ education to the ‘masses.’ Rather . . [we
must] . . . educate men and women who are
incapable of tolerating what is going on, who have
really learned what is going on, has always been
going on, and why, and who are educated to resist
and to fight for a new way of life.”
―Herbert Marcuse,
“Lecture on Education, Brooklyn College” 1968
Published with permission of Peter Marcuse, executor of Herbert

Marcuse’s literary estate; also with permission of the Library of the Goethe
University, Frankfurt a. M., Germany.
Copyright, Peter Marcuse
Cover Art by Antje Wichtrey, Granada, Spain

Printing: CreateSpace, Charleston, SC
iv
Contents
Herbert Marcuse,
Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974
Sarah Surak, Introduction vii
Herbert Marcuse, First Presentation 1
Herbert Marcuse, Second Presentation 13
Herbert Marcuse, Third Presentation 21
Herbert Marcuse, Fourth Presentation 31
Herbert Marcuse, Fifth Presentation 37
Herbert Marcuse, Sixth Presentation 45
Herbert Marcuse, Seventh Presentation 55
Detlev Claussen, One-Dimensional Man, the ’60s German

Student Movement, and Political Economy 71
Peter-Erwin Jansen, One-Dimensional Man, Yesterday

and Today: Apocalypse or Politics? 81
Charles Reitz, Critical Education and Political Economy 95
Douglas Kellner,
Afterword to Marcuse’s Paris Lectures, 1974 115
Notes on Contributors
v
vi
Introduction to Marcuse’s 1974 Paris Lectures
Sarah Surak
Introduction
Herbert Marcuse’s Paris Lectures, 1974:
In 1974, Herbert Marcuse delivered a series of lectures

in English at the new Vincennes campus of the Sorbonne, the
University of Paris. Over the course of four weeks, the
“philosopher of the student revolts,” already in his mid-
seventies, spoke to packed audiences in sessions lasting up to
three hours including lively post-lecture discussions.
The French paper, Les Gens,1 reported Marcuse’s arrival with

the photo above (Herbert Marcuse, center, with Reinhard
Lettau, left, and an unidentified woman) accompanied by
1 Les Gens, no date on clipping, presumably April 11, 1974.

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Sarah Surak
the following headline:
Peter-Erwin Jansen corresponded recently with Ulf

Andersen, who attended these 1974 lectures. This volume
publishes for the first time Andersen’s photos of Marcuse at
the podium and gives us a feel for the verve and vivacity of
the campus setting at the time. Andersen stressed that
Vincennes (officially called University of Paris VIII) was
founded on the heels of the social unrest of 1968. It was an
experimental academic center in the humanities and a popular
venue for events open to the general public addressing global
social issues.
viii
Responding to the tenth anniversary of the publication

of One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse addressed the causes and
consequences of the stabilizing forces of American monopoly
capitalism as well as possibilities for radical transformation of
economic and social relations. The lectures, while grounded in
his initial critique of American advanced industrial society,
reflect the increasingly militant tone found in his subsequent
writings.
Forty years later, a flurry of activities commemorated

the fiftieth anniversary of One-Dimensional Man’s publication.
Multiple conferences in the United States and Brazil as well as
articles in various popular press magazines attest to the
continuing relevance of the philosopher of the New Left. On a
more regular basis, the International Herbert Marcuse Society
(IHMS), founded in 2005, holds biennial conferences bringing
together scholars from across the globe to discuss Marcuse’s
work along with that of related critical theorists.
This limited-edition publication is prepared in

conjunction with the 6th International Herbert Marcuse Society
Biennial Conference at Salisbury University (USA) November
12–14, 2015. The conference, “Praxis and Critique: Liberation,
Pedagogy and the University,” emphasizes the broad
pedagogical concerns of cultivating a radical re-envisioning of
social relations to formulate a praxis of liberation, a task
Marcuse initiated with these lectures. A keynote presentation
explores prospects for liberation within institutions of higher
education and is followed by roundtable workshops ranging
from the teaching critical methodologies to how students use
Marcusean theory to physically confront the neoliberal
university. Conference events fuse theory and practice to seek
emancipation from the totalizing force of a one-dimensional
society.
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Sarah Surak
The Paris Lectures:

Seven Presentations and Contemporary Analysis
Marcuse’s series of seven lectures expand upon the

thesis of his influential 1964 work. He addresses what Kellner
(2014) terms “proto-neoliberal” themes such as growing
exploitation in globalizing capitalism, declining organization
of labor, restrictions on civil rights, “de-politicalization” of the
opposition force of radical groups, and crisis capitalism.
Setting aside minor details such as references to the current
(but soon to end) Nixon presidency, comparisons with the
Soviet Union, and labor statistics from the 1970s, the contents
of the lectures today might easily be taken for a contemporary
economic critique.
Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz, editors of this

compilation, undertook the organization of this text, including
Marcuse’s seven lectures and four supplemental chapters,
with several goals in mind. First and foremost, the publication
serves to expand access to previously unpublished works of
Marcuse; the transcriptions of the lectures were only recently
discovered by Jansen in the Marcuse archive. Found just after
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of One-Dimensional
Man, this series of lectures also illustrates not only the text’s
continuing relevance, but Marcuse’s ongoing application of
his concepts to current situations and revision of his analysis
in consideration of changing economic and social conditions
as well. The critique of the shifting operation of capitalism in
the 1970s towards what we today consider neoliberalism is
clearly laid out.
Marcuse’s analysis provides solid ground for

contemporary scholarship and critique. It illuminates the
Reagan and Thatcher era, and furnishes insights that might
well apply to the 2008 financial meltdown and the current
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Greek debt crisis. The text and accompanying material are

arranged with the intention of use as a course text or in a
reading group to further encourage scholars, especially those
new to critical theory, to engage Marcuse’s analysis. Marcuse’s
lectures are directed toward students and emphasize
specifically how they might play a role in the realization of
liberation.
In the seven presentations, Marcuse describes newly

emerging contradictions of monopoly capitalism. Marcuse
describes how monopoly capitalism undermines its logic and
opens up the possibility of radical change led by the working
class, albeit in a new form that comprises all alienated
workers―including those in the newly emerging knowledge
industry. The American experience is unique, though
increasingly less so, in its concentration of economic power;
the global reach of multi-national corporations; tight and
reinforcing relationship among political, economic, and
military powers; and highly efficient control of the population,
each of which are themes that remain unfortunately relevant
today. An evolving but still present and dominant bourgeoisie
of corporate CEOs, politicians, and the military serve as the
agents of repression, preserving the un-unified but
increasingly rigid system at all costs. The results for society
are stark: losses of civil liberties, economic stratification,
pervasive surveillance, repression of alternative ideas,
economic and political violence, “mafiazation” of the business
sector, and continual fiscal and environmental crisis, the
burdens for each unequally applied depending on class, race,
and gender.
Despite the concrete impacts on the lives of citizens

both home and abroad in the ten years since his initial
analysis, Marcuse’s re-examination makes evident the
intensification of both the harms and contradictions of
capitalism. Wide popular support for the practices of the
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Sarah Surak
economic and political systems (though not necessarily the

government or those in power) are maintained by a variety of
tactics: suppressing imagination through the support for
particular forms of knowledge production; decreasing
systemic critique by creating a feeling of powerlessness for
changing the system, even if one finds various aspects
problematic; increasing living standards or perceived luxury
for a large section of the labor force; threats or awareness of
surveillance of the activities of daily life that do not conform
to the needs of capital; and the threat that a record of
rebellious activity will have a lasting effect on your ability to
secure a comfortable standard of living.
The implications could seem grim. Marcuse, however,

in a more optimistic framing than found in One-Dimensional
Man, emphasizes throughout this text, “The impossible is not
impossible, but is very realistic.” To counter systemic stability,
we must recognize how the modes of production take new
form under monopoly capitalism. Increasing efficiency of
technology shifts employment to the service sector and
focuses production not to alleviating “poverty and misery”
but rather to the “waste of abundance,” and the necessary
production of luxury goods to drive continued production. In
this way, capital produces its own negation though the
inherent conflicts with labor and surplus value, or what
Marcuse terms the twentieth-century contradiction of
capitalism. At the same time, he emphasizes, we must also be
aware of how proto-neoliberal capitalism produces a new
subject, more efficiently integrated into the reproduction of
capitalism, through an increasingly repressive desublimation.
Revolutionary change is possible, but requires both a change
in the mode of production as well as in the production of the
subject in the form of a humanity with “new motives for
revolution, new needs for revolution, and new goals for
revolution.” This is an alternative that Marcuse contends is on
xii
the horizon, but not guaranteed. It requires action. Marcuse’s

lectures are a call to action.
The final four chapters of this volume draw upon

themes of Marcuse’s lectures. The first, an interview with
Detlev Claussen conducted by Peter-Erwin Jansen, describes
the influence of Marcuse’s work, in particular of One-
Dimensional Man, on the League of Socialist German Students
(SDS) during the student movements of the 1960s and the
text’s continuing significance today. Unlike its reception in the
United States, France, and Italy, members of the German
student movement found the American focus of the book
diminished its relevance to both the theoretical basis of their
movement and its practical organizing needs. Marcuse
nonetheless did influence the German SDS, as is evidenced by
Hans-Jürgen Krahl’s engagement with Marcusean theory even
while critical of Marcuse’s lack of a “revolutionary
Reakpolitik” and his lifelong friendship Rudi Dutschke.
Claussen describes the lasting legacy of One-Dimensional Man
as the continuing relevance of Marcuse’s own method of
constant reinterpretation of theory. Critics of the economy
must situate themselves within the current conditions,
revising when necessary, and be astute observers of the
relationships labor, space, value, and the forms of commodity.
Peter-Erwin Jansen’s chapter provides a concise

overview of Marcuse’s life and work, highlighting his critique
of technological rationality and the importance of the aesthetic
dimension found in One-Dimensional Man. Jansen outlines
how Marcuse’s theory of capitalism in advanced industrial
society evolves throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Jansen
connects these developments to how we might approach the
teaching of One-Dimensional Man (at one time required
reading for students of the social movements of the 1960s, but
frequently assumed to be less relevant or dated now). Jansen’s
interactions with Dr. Angela Siebold’s class at Heidelberg
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Sarah Surak
University highlight the continued relevance of Marcuse’s

critique, especially to students who feel the loss of freedom at
the same time as technology, such as the smart phone, is said
to be increasing social interconnection. In their final summary
report for the class, the students raise critical questions as to
how to find emancipation: “Is there any opposition outside
the first dimension? Where is this outside? And how do I get
there?” This volume, Herbert Marcuse’s Paris Lectures, 1974,
offers a radical political-economic discussion that responds to
these questions and moves toward action.
Charles Reitz argues that institutions of higher

education can and should prepare the intellectual and political
terrain for a democratic socialist future, i.e. a green
commonwealth alternative. Students and teachers must
collaborate in this effort and develop a critical understanding
of U.S. political economy and prospects for radical change.
Using Marcuse’s analysis, he lays out a clear, theoretically
grounded, critical analysis of how the accumulation of wealth
directly leads to inequality, yet has the potential for a society
of abundance. He offers a key curriculum component that can
help identify the contradictions of capitalism and also open up
the free space to posit realistic alternatives to the current
structure of exploitation.
Finally, Douglas Kellner argues that Marcuse‘s lectures

offer a sharp presentation of many of his key theses, cogent
arguments, concrete political examples, and a constant effort
to relate his ideas to movements for radical social change.
Further, Kellner attempts to show the relevance of Marcuse’s
1974 Paris Lectures to political issues and struggles of the
contemporary era.
xiv
Teaching Marcuse:
“The impossible is not impossible, but is very realistic.”
There are multiple pedagogical possibilities with

regard to these Paris lectures. In conjunction with the 2015
International Herbert Marcuse Conference, I am teaching an
upper-level undergraduate political theory course titled
“Creating the Impossible: Utopian Political Theory.” The
intention of the course is to introduce students to Marcuse’s
work and to highlight the call of the 1968 Paris student
movement “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” Or, as
Marcuse states in the lectures, “The impossible is not
impossible, but is very realistic.”
I will provide supplemental readings illustrating the

continuing relevance of Marcuse’s analysis. For example,
while reading his first presentation, students will also read
articles on the current standard of living in the U.S. in
comparison to other countries, the changing pace of
unionization in the U.S., and campaign funding and
democracy. Each of these issues is addressed in the lectures
and each warrants consideration in present-day critiques of
policy and the economy.
In addition to reading this text, An Essay on Liberation,

and portions of One-Dimensional Man, students will read a
primer on Marxian economics and texts describing concepts of
utopia and radical change, with examples from fiction as well
as practice in acts like Occupy Wall Street and the creation of
autonomous zones. Additional readings from David Harvey,
C. Wright Mills, Richard Wolf, and others describe the history
of neoliberalism, class structures, the social movements of the
1960s, and recent attempts at challenging economic structures.
As the course is taught in conjunction with the

conference, students are given partial course credit when they
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Sarah Surak
participate in conference activities. Students will have options

to present a paper, work in groups to write reviews of each
panel for publication after the conference, or to develop
pedagogical resources engaging with Marcuse’s work for use
in future courses (and also to be disseminated beyond
Salisbury University). It is my hope that students will leave at
the end of the semester equipped with the tools to think
critically and apply course concepts to theoretical frameworks
and concrete problems. They, and all of us, must be able to
identify current political formations and evaluate barriers and
possibilities for emancipatory change. Information regarding
the conference and its outcomes will be posted on the
International Herbert Marcuse Society website at
www.marcusesociety.org.
xvi
Herbert Marcuse’s First Presentation1
I want to start by giving you the features which I

consider to be characteristic of American society today and
which, in my view, justify a treatment of American society
somewhat different from that of other developed capitalist
countries.2
I think that American society today presents the most

advanced stage of monopoly capitalism in the following
terms: First, the highest degree of concentration of economic
power among advanced capitalist countries. Secondly, the
scope of imperialist penetration into developed, as well as
backward, countries under the leadership of the U.S.-
dominated multinational corporations. Thirdly, the
amalgamation of political, economic, and military power, an
amalgamation which in many cases puts the representatives of
particular interests into the government and administration.
And, lastly, the U.S.A. is the most advanced country as far as
the efficiency of the scientific-technological control of the
population is concerned, a highly efficient control of the
population which is still to a great extent―by no means
exclusively―without overt force and keeps itself within the
1 April 10, 1974.

2 Audio tapes of these presentations were transcribed, and
the typescript of each presentation is annotated in Marcuse’s hand.
This publication incorporates his revisions, deletions, comments.
The transcription nonetheless contains sentence fragments and
spaces indicating missing words. The overarching themes led the
editors to title this originally untitled series as we have. Audience
questions, though indicated, were generally omitted in the
typescript. We have made several silent alterations, adding notes
when needed. ―Eds.
1
Herbert Marcuse
framework, although reduced framework, of American

democracy.
At the same time I think we can observe in the United

States a phenomenon of great importance which I would like
to call the decomposition, even disintegration, of the
bourgeoisie as a dominant class. Of course, the bourgeoisie
still is the dominant class, but as such it has undergone
significant changes. The difference between legitimate and
illegitimate business is constantly being obfuscated, 3 and the
economic and political power of the so-called Mafia4 extends
itself to all branches of economic and political life.
3 Marcuse’s observation here is all the more true today. See

especially the recent account of New York Times reporter, Gretchen
Morgenson, and financial researcher, Joshua Rosner, Reckles$
Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to
Economic Armageddon (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2011) in
which they document the predatory lending and fraudulent
marketing practices of Wall Street banks that led to the 2008
financial meltdown. See additionally The Financial Crisis Inquiry
Report by the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial
and Economic Crisis of the United States (New York: Public Affairs,
2011). This concluded that the financial crisis was avoidable, yet
caused by failure of political will in financial regulation and
supervision on the part of the Securities and Exchange Commission
and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which indicated
systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. In 2015 Notre
Dame University released a study of business ethics among elite
financial professionals in the U.S. and Britain. About a third of the
people who said that made more than $500,000 per year reported
they had witnessed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing,
and many leaders had been asked to sign confidentiality
agreements that would prohibit them from reporting illegal or
unethical behavior to the authorities. See Andrew Ross Sorkin,
“Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed” The New York
Times, May 19, 2015, B-1. ―Eds.
4 Marcuse elaborates this point below at pages 25-26. ―Eds.
I think we should keep in mind that this bourgeoisie is

decidedly different from the classical bourgeoisie of preceding
stages of capitalist development. The difference appears
against the background of growing violence, legal and extra-
legal violence, often gratuitous violence, which penetrates the
entire society. And, to a great extent, it is political violence. I
only recall to you the series of political assassinations
beginning with that of Malcolm X and coming to an end―and
I would say so far to an end―with the assassination of the
Kennedys and the attempted assassination of Governor
Wallace.5
Now undoubtedly the bourgeoisie is still developing

the forces of production. This is supposed to be the function of
the dominant class, but it is developing them in an ever more
wasteful and destructive way.
But with all these negative features, U.S. society

sustains a high standard of living for the majority of the
population. The material base for the effective integration of
even oppositional forces into the society is, in my view, to a
great extent due to the still existing high standard of
living―certainly high if compared with preceding generations
also of the working class. And the same high standard of
living explains―at least to some extent―the absence of any
organized Socialist-Marxist-Anti-Capitalist opposition even
among the majority of organized labor.
There has been a Marxist tradition in the United States.

It has been violently suppressed in the Twenties and the
Thirties. But this does not sufficiently explain the absence of
such an organized mass opposition in the United States today.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination is of course

5
encompassed in this frame. ―Eds.

3
Herbert Marcuse
This integration of the majority of the population also explains

the abstract, the unrealistic character of the radical
minoritarian groups on the Left which find themselves
without a mass base and are desperately trying to establish
such a foothold―sometimes with success―among the working
class.
It is the same integration which may explain the easy

cooption by the establishment of the so-called counter-
cultures. There is, in my view, no doubt that in the Sixties
there was in these counter-cultures a truly radical element, a
truly radical force. However, this now has almost
disappeared. You find plenty of dope, of drugs, amongst the
highest strata of the economic corporate directorate, and you
find vice-presidents of great corporations with huge beards
and long hair.
This same integration explains another sad

phenomenon―which I hope we will discuss in more detail
subsequently―namely what we may call the de-politization of
the opposition offered by the oppressed racial and national
minorities in the United States. There is no doubt here, too,
that at the beginning of the Sixties there was a radical element
in the opposition among Blacks, among the Puerto Ricans,
among the Chicanos.
This political element has been weakened recently. The

opposition has democratized itself, which means within the
framework of American democracy. The sole exceptions,
perhaps, are very small groups among the Blacks and the
Chicanos, the Mexican mostly farmworkers in the deep South
and Southwest of the United States.
Now this integration―and I want to stress that with all

clarity here at the beginning―does not mean that the
American society today is a society of docile 6 people. It does

not mean that at all. Nor have I forgotten―I have not become
that individualistic7―that there cannot and will not be a
capitalist society without class struggle. But what we have in
the United States is that this class struggle is still well kept
within the framework of the existing social system where it is
to an overwhelming extent an economistic class struggle
managed by the great trade unions. Here, too, changes
announce themselves, which I shall presently discuss.
Let me sum-up what I have said so far. U.S. capitalism

still retains a considerable degree of stabilizing power.
Capitalism retains this stabilizing power in a reorganized
form, reorganized on the national as well as global scale. A
few indications of this reorganization: On the national scale, in
the recent years we have witnessed a considerable and still
growing restriction on civil rights and liberties by the courts,
by administrative decree, by legislation. We have observed a
continued and a growing manipulation of the still-existing
democratic process, as if it would not have been manipulated
enough already before. If it is impossible to become a
candidate in the elections without disposing of a fortune of
around a million dollars, this is in any case a strange form of
democracy.
But even these restrictions have lately been extended.

And here the most interesting development is perhaps―and
that may be indicative of a long-range trend―is the obvious
self-abdication of Congress in favor of the Executive Branch of
the government. A trend which, as you may know, may be
characteristic of the development towards neo-fascist and
6 This was rendered “social people” in the tape transcription,

yet that does not seem to fit the context. ―Eds.
7 This was rendered “visualistic” in the tape transcription,
which does not seem to fit the context. ―Eds.

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Herbert Marcuse
authoritarian regimes.
This self-abdication of Congress, the unwillingness of

Congress to effectively curb the Executive power, has not been
changed through the Watergate scandal.8 We still have not
seen any serious effort of impeachment, and it is doubtful that
even if impeachment should be voted in the House, that the
Senate will convict the President. What is behind this
hesitation, again, we may have an opportunity to discuss later
on.
The reorganization on the national scale is

accompanied by a reorganization on a global scale, mainly
8 This was the era of the Nixon White House, and Nixon’s
eventual resignation is a possibility Marcuse mentions below, page
29. Decades later, after revelations of secret and brutal “enhanced
interrogation techniques” at Abu Graib, Congress was similarly not
motivated to challenge the power of President George W. Bush or
Vice-President Dick Cheney who utilized torture as a valid means
to political goals of national security and social control. It is public
knowledge today that President Obama personally oversees “kill
lists” against suspected terrorists including U.S. citizens, and
authorizes drone flights noted for the “collateral” killing civilians,
yet Congress has not challenged this use of war-making powers.
This indicates the continuing manner in which the democratic
process (small “d”) continues to be further diminished.
Nonetheless, President Obama did issue an executive order against
torture in 2009. The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report
on the C.I.A.’s hidden use of torture in December 2014. As we go to
press, the Senate has voted to turn the Presidential ban on torture
into law. Yet recent Republican-led measures have most notably
challenged the executive authority of the President in a reactionary
manner: preeminently to contest his leadership on the Affordable
Care Act, including its extension health care benefits to the poor
through Medicaid, and his anti-nuclear-proliferation negotiations
with Iran. ―Eds.
through the new forms of imperialism and of colonialism, so-

called indirect colonialism, which in many cases seems to be
even more profitable that the direct previous forms of
colonialism, which, at least in Latin America, have long since
been replaced by―or, rather, taken over by―the indigenous
ruling classes and the indigenous armies which do the job for
metropolitan capitalist countries.
Another highly important factor of the global

reorganization of capitalism is the . . . I would like to use a
term which is as neutral as possible, because I’m convinced
there may be a battle about it anyway. This very important
aspect of global reorganization is the arrangement with the
Soviet Union. Arrangement. I leave it to you whether you
want to take this relatively neutral term or whether you prefer
détente or cooperation or collusion; there’s a whole
vocabulary. In any case the facts are there and the facts have
their important repercussions on the domestic scene, too. A
question of equal seriousness―which I shall not answer for the
simple reason I do not know the answer, but you may help in
discussing alternatives―is whether such an arrangement
exists or is in the making or will be in the making also with
the Peoples Republic of China.9 What is noticeable there in the
foreign policy of China may not have any effect on the
progressive internal policy in China. It seems to me there
everything is still open. And, as I said, I certainly would not
dare to give an answer.
9 Nixon, while continuing the Vietnam War, visited China

and the Soviet Union in 1972. The U.S. sought closer ties to China,
and this is conventionally thought to have brought a new balance
overall, reducing tensions and enhancing stability. Such was the
“arrangement” that ensued.
7
Herbert Marcuse
Now to the question I want to discuss with you in these

sessions. Are there any tendencies, are there any forces at
work which may weaken the relative stability of American
capitalism and indicate the beginning of a disintegration of its
cohesion, a weakening in its economy, a weakening in its
politics, and (an aspect which I tend to stress throughout these
sessions) a weakening of what we may call the operational
values, the social morality without which no society―not even
a terroristic one―can for any length endure? If people no
longer adhere not only in the ideology but also their actions,
in their normal behavior at work and at leisure, if they no
longer adhere to the operational values which help to keep the
system going, then we can indeed speak of a beginning
disintegration. We no longer deal only with the sphere of
ideology. Social morality in action is far more than ideology
inasmuch as it determines the daily behavior of the people.
To the question whether there are such tendencies of

disintegration and weakening, I suggest an affirmative
answer. Given this intention, here are the various topics under
which I want to discuss the forces of weakening and the
prospects of radical change: First of all, which forces today
have this potential? Because we speak always so far of
potential development which can be cut off. Which are today
the social and historical agents of radical change in the United
States? First among the working class. And here again I would
like to take the opportunity to correct a widespread, as far as I
know, and cheap misunderstanding. I never said that the
working class can be replaced by any other class in the
transition from capitalism to socialism. I have never said that,
for example, these students could such a replacement. What I
did say is that under the pressure of integration and in the
place of a still not actually revolutionary working class, the
preparatory educational political work of such groups as these
students assumes all-important significance. I will discuss the
historical agents and subjects of social change under three
headings: First, as I just mentioned, among the working class.

Secondly, among the intelligentsia, mainly the student
movement. And, thirdly among the women’s liberation
movement.
Now this throwing together of the working class, the

students, and the women may sound like the nightmare of a
super-revisionist, or whatever you want to call it. I still at the
beginning want to underscore my belief that the women’s
movement today is one of the most important political
movements potentially. And this again we will have the
opportunity to discuss.
I think given the basic condition of American society, it

is no wonder, it is explicable, it is even in line with basic
Marxist conceptions, that the opposition at this juncture
assumes very unorthodox, very unfamiliar forms. Still, they
are not ideological. They are not utopian. They are not
unorthodox. These strange new forms of opposition simply
indicate that at this stage of capitalist development,
possibilities of liberation, possibilities of freedom, have
matured or are maturing which did not mature at previous
stages of the development.
I hope to be able to show you that what is at stake

today is not only perhaps the largest and perhaps the most
radical change in history. The Twentieth Century or the
Twenty-first Century revolution would either be such a
radical revolution or it would not be at all. What is at stake is
not only the establishment of new institutions and new basic
social arrangements, those of socialism. What is at stake in the
process of establishing these institutions, in the process of
working out the new social relationships, what is at stake is a
radical transformation of all basic values of Western
civilization. A radical transformation of all basic values of
Western civilization, which, as you know, was and still is a
9
Herbert Marcuse
patriarchal civilization. This is only to indicate the place which

the discussion of the women’s movement will have in the
context of what I want to submit to you.
As to the prospects of radical change, I would like to

talk briefly―I’m afraid it has to be briefly―about the
alternative with which we are faced, and I’m afraid faced not
only in the United States: namely, the transition to socialism
or to neo-fascism. I would like to say right now that as far as
the present juncture is concerned, I believe that the
authoritarian anti-democratic tendencies in the United States
prevail over their opposites. They are stronger than the
tendencies that may lead and accelerate the transition to
socialism. That will be one topic under the heading of
“Prospects of Social Change, Transition to Socialism or Neo-
Fascism.” And we should never take comfort in saying, “All
right, it may well be that fascism will come, but it will not last
and in the long run socialism will triumph.”
The question every one of us should ask and should

always ask is: How long is the long-run? Because it may well
be that at the end of the long run there is hardly anyone left
who can still undertake the transition to socialism. We know
so far of no case where fascism has been definitely defeated
entirely in the internal and domestic dimension.
The next problem, and in all likelihood the last I can

take up―and I hope we can still get to it―is the problem of
organization. Given, as I believe, the existence of tendencies
toward radical change, which forms of organization in a
highly integrated society where organized labor, to a great
extent, takes part in this integration, which forms of
organization are open to activate the potential opposition, the
potential anti-capitalist position throughout the society?
And the question I would like to discuss will be in

terms of mass parties, authoritarian mass parties, and also
grass-roots initiatives. In the United States the term “grass-
roots”―that is to say the initiatives and changes from
below―is still a very strong and still a very valid concept. The
question is whether the so-called grass-roots democracy as it
exists now cannot be transformed into a political force.
And the second item I want to discuss under problems

of organization is the possible role of an avant-garde today
or―in the way they are called in a negative way, an elite―the
role of the avant-garde versus mass spontaneity, and the
question of who is or could be the avant-garde today, which
could assume―again, only in a preparatory way―educational
functions in activation the existing tendencies of radical, or for
radical social change.
This is the program I want to submit to you.
11
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse’s Second Presentation10
I will begin with an etiological discussion of how to

evaluate the prospects of radical change today. In Marx’s
theory prospects of change are correctly discussed in terms of
the relation between what is called the subjective and the
objective conditions. The relation between the subjective and
objective conditions. The objective conditions being, for
example, the ripening/rotting11 of the productive forces, but
again of the disfunctioning of the capitalist system.
Disfunctioning economically, disfunctioning politically.
Furthermore, objective condition is the strength or weakness
of the State or the ruling class and the strength or weakness of
the working class. Of the working class, I would like to
add―according to Marx―as the majority12 of the population.
That’s one of the things we should never forget: that to the
very end Marx and Engels believed that the working class
must be a majority of the population if the revolution is to
mature. These are the objective conditions.
The subjective conditions can be summed up under the

title: “The Consciousness of the Working Class and the
Consciousness of the Ruling Class.”
10 April 12, 1974.

11 This word is indecipherable. ―Eds.
12 Marcuse indicates that by 1970 this is about 90% of the
population (below, page 42). Working class for Marx and Marcuse
meant all those, whether employed or unemployed, whose income
is dependent upon wages and salaries in exchange for labor, rather
than those whose income flows primarily from property holdings,
in the form of as dividends, interest, profit, or rent, i.e. as returns to
capital. ―Eds.
13
Herbert Marcuse
I would like to give you now two examples of what I

consider an inadequate, even a false, interpretation of the
relation between the subjective and objective conditions. The
first of these inadequate and false interpretations is the
famous theory of post-industrial society. The post-industrial
society. I believe that the notion itself is sufficiently known to
you. What is involved is the idea that there is a change in the
making, but that this change would be the transition from
industrial capitalism to a post-industrial and post-capitalist
society. This so-called post-industrial and post-capitalist
society would be characterized by the highest degree of
automation, by the full application of technical progress in all
the years of society, and, above all, by the rise, by the growth
quantitatively and qualitatively of a new class, the so-called
knowledge class, a class of intellectual workers which would
participate to an increasing degree in the control and
organization of society.
I believe that the core of the concept of post-industrial

society is the opinion that knowledge is becoming a decisive
productive force. Knowledge is becoming a decisive
productive force, and consequently, the difference between
manual and intellectual labor is progressively being reduced.
Now I believe that this concept of a post-industrial

society as it is in the United States mainly developed by John
K. Galbraith and more recently by Daniel Bell in a huge book
titled The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. I believe that this
notion is highly and thoroughly ideological and amounts to a
falsification of the facts. The ideological concept of a post-
industrial society serves well to mask13 and to conceal the
actual power structure which rules at the present stage of
13This word is rendered “cache” in the tape transcript which

does not seem to fit the context. ―Eds.
capitalism. Post-industrial society as a concept serves well this

concealing purpose by substituting the technical and
functional intention for the actually ruling class. It would be
nonsense to deny the constant growth, quantitatively and
qualitatively, of the so-called knowledge workers and the role
of knowledge rather than manual labor in the productive
process as a whole. However, three points of criticism have to
be made.
First, the notion of intellectual workers and of

knowledge workers subsumes under one and the same
category those strata and individuals which definitely belong
to the working class, either directly or indirectly, namely
intellectual or mental labor directly applied in the process of
production, and under the same category the top management
of the corporation inasmuch as they include―which they
rarely do―technically and professionally educated individuals
or groups.
Secondly, the concept of post-industrial society

overlooks the rather important fact that the application of
knowledge in the process of production remains dependent
on the actually ruling class. The vast majority of these so-
called knowledge workers does not by themselves make
decisions which actually would control the development of
the economy. Their knowledge and at least the application of
their knowledge remains subordinated to this interest, and the
very idea that post-industrial society would be ruled by what
is called technological rationality is ideological. At the
advanced stages capitalism does not move under the impact
of technological rationality; rather the opposite is the case. The
growth and impact of technological rationality is methodically
restricted, restrained, and subordinated to the interests of
profitability and power.
15
Herbert Marcuse
The last point in criticizing the ideological notion of

post-industrial society is the concept of knowledge itself
which plays such a central role in this field. Knowledge adds
decisive productive force. What kind of knowledge―what
kind of knowledge? There is not the slightest doubt, in my
view, that the notion of knowledge applied, used, in this
theory is functional from beginning to end. That is to say, only
that is considered really knowledge [which functions] as a
productive force, as a resource, [for] the productivity of the
existing capitalist system.
Functional reason is identified with reason as such.

Functional rationality with rationality as such. Functional
knowledge is identified with knowledge. And I think it is
most interesting and rather important that nowhere is there in
this theory any consideration of what, in my view, is
becoming today more and more a potential productive force,
namely knowledge founded upon and derived from
imagination. You here should remember well what it meant in
1968. This has not been lost. And more than ever before, this
striving for the allegedly impossible, this use of the
imagination as a cognitive faculty, as a rational faculty of the
mind, the use of imagination as a faculty which can show you
that the impossible is not impossible, but is very realistic,
which can show you that there’s hardly any more room today
for the notion of utopia.14 This is completely excluded from
the perspective of post-industrial society.
14The often-cited slogan of rebellious students in Paris, 1968,

was: “Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible”―“Be realistic, demand
the impossible! Marcuse’s theory of “second-dimensional”
knowledge through the imagination as cognitive quality of mind is
developed both in Eros and Civilization and in The Aesthetic
Dimension. As he sees it, “utopian” politics are attainable. ―Eds.
I think one example for this tendency is clear: the

systematic dodge at this stage of all knowledge of all
rationality which essentially is or can be non-functional, non-
conformist, and can come closer to the repressed forms of
knowledge today, namely the almost systematic and
methodological reduction and repression of growth in the
humanities and the non-conformist part of the social sciences
compared with the continued growth of the natural and
mathematical sciences. Again, a development which fits
perfectly15 with the general trend to conceal by the term “post-
industrial” a society which is in fact nothing more than
another stage in the development of advanced monopoly
capitalism on a global scale. And it is by no means the
transition to a new society.
I would like to add a second example for simplification.

It is said again and again that the absence of an organized
radical mass opposition in the United States is based on the
fact that the subjective conditions lag behind the objective
conditions. This fact that the consciousness of the majority of
the population is not on a level with the objective conditions
explains the absence of a radical opposition. And under this
assumption the task of political education would be, as it says,
to raise the level of consciousness―to raise the level of
consciousness. And then the link would have been established
between the objective economic conditions and the political
consciousness, a pre-condition for the emergence of a pre-
revolutionary situation.
Now I suggest that this presentation is inadequate and

false. I believe that the consciousness of the conformist
majority of the population is on the level of the objective
15 The typescript reads “imperfectly,” which seems a

transcription error. ―Eds.
17
Herbert Marcuse
conditions and what is lagging is not the consciousness of the

objective conditions, but there is a strong and overwhelming
feeling of powerlessness. Powerlessness: “absence de
puissance.” One can do nothing. Yes, these are the objective
conditions which one knows well: It is repression; it is
corruption; capitalism no longer works without inflation,
unemployment, etc., etc. But what can one do? Nothing at all.
There is a feeling of powerlessness which I think explains
better than the theory of lagging consciousness the degree of
integration16 within the United States.
Now while the consciousness of the conformist

majority, if in this sense of power, corresponds to the objective
conditions, the radical consciousness is way ahead of the
objective conditions. It projects potentiality in the objective
conditions. It anticipates possibilities not yet realized.17
The consciousness, the radical consciousness, being

ahead of the objective conditions―and this being ahead, in my
view, is one of the decisive elements in the relation between
the subjective and objective conditions. In this case, relations
between theory and practice. I hope to be able to come back to
this. Here I only want to remark that this being ahead, that
this anticipating character of its concepts belongs to the very
essence of Marxian theory. Marxian theory deals with
tendencies and not only with facts. It deals, it projects
possibilities which can be derived from the analysis of facts
16 Recall that Marcuse’s use of the term “integration”

throughout these lectures means “conformity to a nation’s
prevailing culture;” not to be confused with the dismantling of
racial segregation as U.S. readers might first expect. ―Eds.
17 Marcuse interjects at this point: “Please interrupt me if
again you don’t understand what I say; I will try to translate it into
my brilliant French (laughter). That puts us in the mood, doesn’t it
(laughter)? I don’t know who they listen to, but I try.”
but which remain anticipatory and projecting in character.

And this abstract element cannot be eliminated from Marxian
theory without falsifying the very substance of this theory.
This suspicion, this anger about the anticipating

tendencies and concepts in Marxian theory is to a great extent
responsible for the refusal to understand finally the Marxian
categories, accept what they are, namely, dialectical
categories. And these dialectical categories, historical
categories, none of them can be handled like a thing that you
simply apply to a changing situation, that you have to
dialectically develop the Marxian categories themselves in
order to bring out their anticipated and, at the same time, their
truly comprehending character and content.
Now from this presentation I’ve tried to give you, it

follows that in the present situation we have a false
consciousness, a false consciousness among the conformist
majority of the population inasmuch as it is integrated
consciousness is blocked, arrested, and cannot see the
possibilities of the radical potential in the given conditions,
whereas the radical consciousness is also false consciousness
inasmuch as it refuses to develop the Marxian categories
corresponding to and comprehending the changes in the
structure of capitalism itself which have taken place in the
long development from Nineteenth Century laissez-faire
capitalism to the advanced capitalism of the Twentieth
Century.
Nobody denies such changes have taken place, but they

generally refuse to draw the consequences for the
development of the basic Marxian categories. Now this is as
far as I can go today.
19
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse’s Third Presentation18
I see the United States as representing the highest stage

in the development of monopoly capitalism, yet what I think
is the entire picture of American society today varies. The
unusually high degree of social cohesion, integration, the high
degree of popular support for the established system. Not for
the government, but for the system itself as such. And this
high degree of social and popular cohesion has applied when
the economic and political difficulties of American capitalism
are increasing.
They are increasing on a global scale. They make

themselves felt at home. And still there is not in the United
States any organized opposition. There is no radical
opposition, in fact, on the mass scale. There is not even an
equivalent to, let’s say, the British Labour Party and the Social
Democratic Party in Germany.
And all this, not only at the time of increasing capitalist

difficulties, but also at the very time when new forces of
radical change make their appearance for the first time in
history.
In order to be able to understand this strange

phenomenon, it will be necessary to have a close look at
integration. I will presently define the term. I will start by
pointing out that this integration, this popular support, takes
place on a large material and cultural base. In other words, it
18 April 18, 1974.
21
Herbert Marcuse
is certainly not merely and ideological phenomenon. It has, as

I will try to show you, a strong material base.
Secondly, we will have to discuss the emergence of

historically new forms and forces of disintegration and
liberation. I see in the situation of the United States, and
certainly not only in the United States, precisely this as the
most important aspect: the emergence of historically new
forms of disintegration which have not yet become aware of
their own potentiality, their own power, which have not yet
developed their own consciousness. Ultimately, I believe that
the Twentieth Century revolution, if it is to come, that this
revolution will be the most radical and the largest in scope in
all history, that it will not only be a political and economic
revolution, but also a cultural revolution in the sense that it
will transform, it will engage, some of the most basic values of
our civilization.
Let me now briefly show how this integration of the

population with the established system works. I mean by
integration the acceptance of, and even the identification with,
the capitalist system among the majority of the population,
including the majority of the working class. It follows, if this is
a fact, that they will try to keep others, who certainly exist in
the United States, within the framework of the capitalist
system and, perhaps, even within the frame work of the
capabilities of capitalism.
Now this integration takes place on three very

different levels. First, in the sphere of consumption American
society today has succeeded in satisfying material and cultural
needs. In other words, in satisfying the needs beyond the mere
subsistence needs for a large part, perhaps for the majority, of
the population, the increasing productivity of the service
industries churns out more and more comforts, luxuries, and
services like organized vacations, traveling, and so on and so

on.
These are powerful mechanisms which bind people to

the established system, especially if and when the people
cannot imagine a better alternative. I have mentioned that
before. Whatever they may understand by socialism is
certainly not Marxian socialism or anything near it. It is, at
best, the system as effected in the Soviet Union today and the
people do not consider this a better alternative. Now, this
much for the popular integration with the system on the first
level.
The second level is what we may call the management

of the mind. The management of the mind means the
consciousness as well as the unconscious. I don’t think it is
necessary to go into detail here. You know too well, I suppose,
the progress which by virtue of the electronic industry has
been made in surveilling19 an entire population secretly, if
desired. We don’t have to go into details, but I would like to
point out two less noticeable phenomena, namely, the release
and the satisfaction of primary aggression, aggressiveness on
a large scale. The increasing violence of films and television.
The increasing aggressiveness in sports and entertainment,
and so on.
We know from Freud that to the degree to which a

social system frees the aggressive instincts of man and woman
and at the same time succeeds in keeping them within the
established framework so that they don’t blow up the society,
that this satisfaction of aggressiveness strengthens the society
19 The typescript has “surveying.” Marcuse’s comment is

quite prescient given Edward Snowden’s revelations forty years
later. ―Eds.
23
Herbert Marcuse
which produces such satisfaction.
Similarly, strangely enough, with the opposite impulse,

namely, sexuality. It is well known that at the present stage of
capitalism, when a considerable liberalization of sexual
morality has taken place, that the family is being weakened,
not only from within but also from without. In other words,
what we see is what I have called repressive desublimation.
Repression is reduced, repression is eliminated socially, at
first impression, but at the same time without releasing the
explosive force of erotic energy. We will discuss the difference
between the two later on.
In any case, the mere release of sexuality within the

system leads to the widespread commercialization of sex.
Most importantly, sex itself becomes a commodity,
merchandise, and thereby loses the liberating forces that may
have been present. Again, it is a mechanism that serves to
bind the population to the system.20
The last level on which integration takes place is

systematic and overt repression. Students know all too well,
for example, that if there is anything that indicates radical
activity on their record, it will be all but impossible for them
to find a job, especially with the entirely negative job market.
20 In One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse warned against

the social control function of the “happy consciousness” of popular
entertainment and consumerist pleasures. These deliver a
superficial sense of satisfaction through the unrestrained use of sex
and violence. This repressive desublimation substitutes reactionary
emotional release in place of rebellion. The personality remains
totally absorbed in the system of commodity production. ―Eds.
Allied with this systematic repression we witness a

reduction of civilized sensibilities. You only have to look at
some of the decisions made by the Supreme Court in the last
years in order to see the dangerous extent of this reduction of
civil liberties and, at the same time, the systematic and
methodical increase in the power of the police, the National
Guard, and other so-called forces of law and order.
This may suffice in order at least to outline the

integration, the popular support of the system and some of the
basic mechanisms which engender this support.
And I want now briefly to discuss with you the

question of who is the actual agent21 of this repression. Or,
who is actually the dominant class, the ruling class which is in
control of American society today?
I think it is generally agreed that it is still definitely the

bourgeoisie, although in a rather different form, different from
previous periods. I mentioned before one aspect of this
difference, namely, that the division between legitimate and
illegitimate business has become increasingly obscured, if not
wiped out altogether. We can speak of a “Mafiaization”22 of
the American economy. And you know well enough that
21 The typescript has “subject.”

22 Any internet search under the terms “Mafia,” “business,”
and “leader” will reveal several websites purporting to highlight
the competencies business leaders can adapt from the Mafia. See
also, Louis Ferrante, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the
Legitimate Businessman (New York: PenguinRandomHouse, ebook,
2011).
25
Herbert Marcuse
mafia connections have been reported even with the White

House, the Executive Branch of the government.23
This bourgeoisie is certainly different from the classical

bourgeoisie which controlled the development of previous
stages of capitalism, and the difference is great. Is this
bourgeoisie a monolithic group? It is not a monolithic group
and the differences within, the conflicts within, the
bourgeoisie may be sharper than the conflict, whatever there
is left of it, between the people―I will try to elaborate on this
concept subsequently―and the leaders. The bourgeoisie today
as a supreme class is definitely a failing power. A failing
power with whom? The most recent explanation speaks of the
famous difference, or conflict, between what is called the
Southern cowboys and the Eastern establishment. There is
today a contest within the economy, two antagonistic powers:
the older industries and banking firms mainly concentrated in
the East and the far more recent “parvenus” [new money,
rather than old money ―Eds.] in the South and Southwest,
especially the oil industry in Texas, Oklahoma, and so forth.
I think that this kind of geographical analysis of the

ruling class does not do it well. I think we have to reject it. We
have to reject it because it undercuts the common interests of
the bourgeoisie and it overlooks that, for example, Eastern as
well as Southern representatives seem to be equally powerful.
23 Santo Trafficante of the U.S. mafia, served the C.I.A. and

thus the Executive Branch of U.S. government in in attempting to
overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba (under Kennedy) and by
coordinating the illicit opium trade of South Vietnam’s Field
Marshall Ky with mafia in Marseille. See Alfred W. McCoy, The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)
―Eds.
I suggest to reject a second explanation of the ruling

class today, again one which I’ve briefly mentioned before,
namely, that there arises before our eyes a new class, the so-
called knowledge class or professional class and that the
highest levels of this class definitely not only belong to the
ruling class but may outclass the most important branch of the
ruling class. This has been a concept of the post-industrial
society; in my view, an entirely ideological concept because it
overlooks the fact, or wants to overlook the fact, that not even
at the highest level of the professional and technical class, the
scientists, technicians, and engineers and so on are masters of
their own decisions. They are not. They are themselves, within
the framework of the ruling class, dependent on other strata.
It seems to me that of all the analyses of the American

ruling class today, the oldest one, namely, that offered by C.
Wright Mills, is still the best. And we know that according to
C. Wright Mills domination over the capitalist societies today
is shared and organized by three groups. One, the directorate
of the large economic corporations. Secondly, the politicians.
And, thirdly, the military. Some sociologists tentatively add
another group, namely, the leading trade union workers,
which they consider part of the new dominant class.
I tend to find that this classification is basically correct.

But it raises immediately the question: Within this
conglomerate, within this hierarchy, who prevails over the
others? The economic directorate? The politicians? The
military? Who makes the final decisions, the decisions
affecting the policies of the nation as a whole and even
important branches of regional policy? I must confess I don’t
think the question can be answered, because I believe the basic
policy decisions are the consequence and the result of
compromises among the three groups, compromises all the
way along. We are inclined to say that in the last analysis it
will be big capital that decides. But, again, big capital that has
27
Herbert Marcuse
no unity. And we know, for example, that the military as well

as politics play an important role in the reproducing and in
strengthening the dominance of this group.
This ruling class, which not only is not monolithic but

permeated with antagonisms, has a common feature, namely,
the preservation of the established system with all available
means regardless of cost, not regardless of cost.24 And I think
it is important to note here that the demand to end the war in
Vietnam came not only from what can be called the Left in the
United States, but also from powerful sectors of big business
which considered this undertaking as wasteful and damaging.
I would like to draw your attention to one other point,

namely, the dialectic of the rulers and the ruled in American
society, the dialectical relationship between rulers and ruled.
The various components of indoctrination, manipulation, and
management of the mind also become―and this is the
interesting point―also become instruments for expressing the
will and the interests of the indoctrinated population. There is,
to use a horrible word, clearly Gleichschaltung.25 The
government and its institutions, the ruling class,
systematically makes what is called public opinion, but once
made, this public opinion, which is constantly being
reasserted, has in turn its own influence on the policy makers.
24 This seemingly confusing phrase does lead into the next

comment indicating the dialectical nature of the circumstance.
―Eds.
25 The typescript left a blank here indicating the transcriber
encountered an unintelligible word. The Gleichschaltung was the

Nazi practice of forcing all public expressions of opinion to “toe the
line” and all political action to submit to the dictator’s policies,
eliminating all opposition. ―Eds.
The people, in a sense, indeed participate in the rule of

the society. The people can indeed express their will, which is
no longer their will but has been made their will by the ruling
class and its instrumentalities. The people as authors, the
people as buyers and sellers, in turn influence the policy of the
rulers. And it is interesting to think back, and not too long
back, when among the American Left the slogan was “Power
to the People.” “Power to the People.” The slogan is now used
to far less a degree because the question “Who are the
people?” cannot for any length of time be postponed.
There is no doubt that the people who cast their vote in

any election are even, in the sense of the system, free people
because nobody forces them to vote. But, still, are these the
same people who can become subjects of radical change? The
people can, indeed, change politics. They can make
themselves heard.26 And one of the more conspicuous cases:
You have seen, or rather read, just yesterday where in
Michigan the Democratic candidate won over the Republican
candidate who was personally supported by President Nixon.
It is the first time in the history of Michigan for thirty-two
years that a Democratic candidate won a Congressional
election. The first time in thirty-two years.
You may well imagine what political consequences this

may have. It may be an important step in bringing about the
impeachment or the resignation of the President.27 A clear case
where, indeed, the dialectic between rulers and ruled works,
because there seems to be little doubt that the opposition
against Nixon is not primarily the popular opposition, but
comes in its greatest strength today from parts within the
ruling class itself.
The typescript has “learn” where we have “heard.” ―Eds.

26
Nixon did resign in August 1974, three months after these

27
April-May 1974 lectures by Marcuse. ―Eds.

29
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse’s Fourth Presentation28
[Eds.― In the last presentation I mentioned] working

out the dialectic between rulers and ruled, between the people
and their leaders in American society.29 I have suggested that
there is a feedback, there is indeed a considerable degree of
activity, opinions, and attitudes by the people influencing the
government, and that on the other hand at least recognize
themselves in their leaders.
I want to explain what I mean by that. The leaders of

monopoly capitalist society in the United States today―and I
underline that I am talking about the United States and not
about other countries―the leaders are very different from the
leaders of previous periods. They have drawn a picture which
corresponds to the intensifying disintegration, dehuman-
ization of the ruling class in the United States.
Perhaps a fundamental psychoanalytical category helps

here. According to Freud, as you know, the political leader is
mainly a father figure. A father figure in which the people can
find an authority which they recognize as useful and at the
same time somebody who, in one way or the other, will
accustom30 the growing child to31 the immediate impact of
society. The father who imposes upon the child the sum total
of the rules and regulations and laws which govern the society
in which the child lives.
28 April 19, 1974.

29 The transcription begins mid-sentence. ―Eds.
30 The typescript has “take;” we have “accustom.” ―Eds.
31 The typescript has “from;” we have “to.” ―Eds.
31
Herbert Marcuse
And the imposition of this kind of system of laws and

values, the so-called reality principle, has been the main task
of the father in the classical bourgeois family and the
successors of the father later on in adult life, especially the
political leaders who make up the government.
Now what has happened during the last, let’s say, fifty-
sixty years, is a fundamental change in this constellation. The
main political leader is no longer a father figure. In the United
States I think the last political leader who could still be called
a father figure was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the same
time the last who saved American capitalism with relatively
normal means, and the last who mobilized American strength
in the war against Fascism.
If you look at the political leaders today, I think it is

obvious―it is at least obvious to me―that by no stretch of the
imagination can Nixon be called a father figure. There are
many reasons. The father, as I just indicated, is first of all a
moral personality. He himself plays by the rules of the game.
The father is someone on whom you can rely, who can protect
the child and growing adult. All these qualities are no longer
in the present political leaders.
If they are not father figures, what are they? I would

say they are far more brother figures, the bigger brother, the
more successful brother. And they are the extension and
prolongation of the power of the team leader, gang leader in
street groups, in sports, band leaders, whatever it may be.
These images have replaced the father image.
And it is clear and visible how this development, this

disintegration, of the authorities of the classical bourgeois
period reflects the increasing unproductivity of the bour-
geoisie which controls the destructive and wasteful

development of the productive forces today.
I would now like to attempt the discussion of the, if

any, disintegrating forces in American society today. I have
painted a rather gloomy picture of the power of integration in
present-day American society, of the strong cohesion, the
strong popular support which you find there and of the still-
continuing growth of the American economy via imperialist
expansion and inner domestic colonization.
We will now have to have a look not only at these

forces but also whether in one way or another there are
oppositional forces which seem to be gaining power. Before I
enter this discussion, I would now like to hear whether you
have any questions . . . .32 . . . all of them are in a decisive
sense escapist, and escapist in a very cheap way. What has
happened is that after the tent had already collapsed of the
student movement, after the weakening of the opposition
which was strongest in the Sixties and began to decline ’69-’70,
the disillusion, the disappointment was so strong that they
had to find a way out in other forms of non-conformity, or, of
course, alleged non-conformity, because in reality this is a
very highly developed conformity. Any absenteeism from
political life, any absenteeism from links with political activity
is escapist and is conformist.
32 Apparently two questions are raised, but not recorded in

the lecture transcription; the first, as we infer from what follows,
asks about society’s drop-outs, hippies, and/or drug users as
oppositional forces even if they have given up on socialist
revolution; the second, about aggression as a potentially eman-
cipatory impulse. Regarding the first, as a set of alternatives . . .
[return to text above “. . . all of them . . .”].
33
Herbert Marcuse
These groups were the result of such disappointment

that the revolution which in the Sixties seemed to be just
around the corner did not come. Again, I would say that much
of the painful development could have been avoided by a
better education―all sorts of anguish [avoided ―Eds.] by a
look at history. Then we should have known that none of the
great revolutionaries came about without such feelings of
regression, regrouping, reorientation, whatever it may be, and
that we cannot possibly assume that the largest and most
radical revolution in history, namely the abolition of the
capitalist system would come about in a straightly ascending
curve and would come about in a relatively short time.
It is senseless, almost irresponsible, but I will still try to

illustrate what I mean by―and this is my personal opinion―
off the record, because all of these things are on, and there will
be an authoritative book for the record33―that I do believe, as I
said, there will be a socialist revolution. I do believe that in
order to be really global and successful it will have to occur, as
Marx foresaw, in the most highly-developed industrial
country in the world, and in order to come about it will take a
time of at least 75 to 150 years. Now there you have it. If you
want to take these dates for optimistic appraisal, it only shows
you that you still have plenty of time (laughter) to work that it
may come about sooner.
Of one thing I’m absolutely sure, if you don’t work for

it now, it will not come about in 75 years, it will not come
about in 100 years, it may not come about at all. So, that is my
answer to the first question.
33Several articles, but only one book, appeared in the

ensuing years, The Aesthetic Dimension. ―Eds.
The second [issue ―Eds.], that the increase in violence

which we see in sports, and in entertainment, and elsewhere,
is in itself repressive because it creates establishment-
controlled outlets for frustration, resentment, non-conformity,
hatred, whatever it may be.
The question now is, is whether we cannot assume the

opposite, namely that the release of aggressiveness
strengthens rather than weakens the radical potential. We
have the possibility at least to give an answer, again if we go
back to certain hypotheses of Freudian theory. But before I try
to do that, I would like to know two things first: If you
understand the question and its importance, and secondly,
would you prefer to suggest an answer? The question has to
be radical or repressive, in fact, of the least aggressiveness in
our society.34
34 This session seems to end abruptly, with the second

question unanswered or unrecorded. The typescript ends with this
confusing sentence. ―Eds.
35
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse’s Fifth Presentation35
―And now in English.36 We have reached the central

point of what I am trying to do here, namely, the evaluation of
the tendencies towards radical change in the advanced
capitalist societies. I suggest to analyze this problem in the
classical Marxian terms, namely, that the very forces which
make for the preservation and for the growth of the capitalist
system are also the forces which make for its decline and
eventual collapse. This is the classical dialectical conception,
and I’ve found that it is the only one that gives, or may give
us, an adequate understanding of what is going on.
Let me recall the typical Marxian example: At the stage

of advanced capitalism―and, which is almost the same thing,
the highest degree of technical progress attainable under
capitalism―competition compels capitalists constantly to
increase and intensify the productivity of labor. At this stage
this means that the portion of constant capital―machinery,
raw materials, factory facilities, and so on―continually grows
at the expense of the human labor employed in the process of
production. This is almost a definition of technical progress
35 April 24, 1975.

36 The typescript indicates some pre-lecture banter by
Marcuse in French which it translates as follows: “There are many
questions to which I will reply either tonight or on Friday. But in
any event I want to continue with my text and the supreme
question which I will answer right away. This is the question: What
is Love? (laughter) What is ‘die Liebe?’ My reply: It is a question that
is asked and which is answered only in the practice of it (laughter;
applause).”
37
Herbert Marcuse
under capitalism: technical progress equals mechanization

leading to automation leading to the ever-more-widespread
annihilation of individual human labor from the productive
process.
However, a price has to be paid for this increased

productivity of the system. According to Marx, as you know,
the only source of surplus value is human labor power
engaged in the process of material production, and the decline
in human labor power thus employed sets in motion the
famous law of the tendential decline in the rate of profit.
There are famous counter-tendencies, especially the

drive to further intensify the productivity of labor. Then the
search for new dimensions and regions of investment, an
extensive imperialist policy, and again, benefits, temporary
benefits, to be paid for by the increasing conflicts between the
imperialist powers and by recurring economic crises and
depressions.
This is the classical Marxian conception. I will try to

show you that considerable modifications have to be
introduced in view of the achievements of monopoly
capitalism which Marx could not foresee.
An easy example of the ambivalence of the forces

moving capitalist society is the recent energy crisis. I will only
briefly indicate how the ambivalence works there.
Undoubtedly the energy crisis has led to a fantastic rise in the
profits of the big oil corporations and their subsidiaries. At the
same time, the energy crisis has opened the prospect of vast
spheres of new investment, research, and exploitation of new
energy sources on the North American continent.
Again, two tendencies leading to the growth in the

power of capital and to further concentration of economic
power. At the same time, however, these tendencies have led

to increasingly rigid competition between the United States on
the one side and Japan and the European countries on the
other, both more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the
United States.
This, again, an example of the ambivalence of these

forces. But it is not enough simply to point out this dialectic.
In order to understand which of these forces is eventually to
prevail―and how―we have to look at the changes in the mode
of production which have taken place under advanced
monopoly capitalism. And here, I think, is the solution to the
problem.
What are these changes in the mode of production

itself? I’ll only give you a few indications here tonight. I hope I
will be able to discuss this in more detail subsequently. First,
the increasingly technological character of production―the
increasingly technological character of production, which
tends to reduce the gap between mental and physical labor
and which is expressed in proportional growth of the white
collar labor force compared with the blue collar labor force.
Second, at this stage of the capitalist mode of

production, we have the shift from employment in the
material production to employment in services. I’m fully
aware of the fact that the concept of services, or famous
tertiary sector of production, is open to criticism. It is a
category which groups too many different and divergent
occupations under one. But I still believe that it can be used,
and even must be used, in order to understand the change
that has been taking place.
A shift of employment from material production to

services, because there is decreasing need for individual labor,
as I just pointed out, in the material production and, at the
39
Herbert Marcuse
same time, an increasing need for surplus value outside

material production. The surplus value that can no longer in
adequate portions be squeezed out of the material process of
production now is being squeezed out in the sector of the so-
called services outside material production.
Thirdly, at this stage of the development, we have a

constant direct expansion of government in the economy. No
longer only by way of the subsidies directly or indirectly, but
the government itself has become directly a major economic
unit. The Pentagon in the United States today is the biggest
single industrial enterprise.
Fourth, and last, at this stage of capitalist production,

we have what is called neo-imperialism: the export of
production itself from the metropolitan countries to other
capitalist and pre-capitalist countries with lower production
costs.
I would like now to do what I have not done before,

and I will not do again. I will give a few statistics which
illustrate the point and which will lead us to understand what
in my view is perhaps the most important single item, namely
the changing composition of the working class in the United
States. I give you now―and it will, I hope, take no longer than
five to eight minutes―a few figures. They are taken from the
most recent sources available to me, namely, Daniel Bell’s
book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, in Stanley
Aronowitz’s book called False Promises: The Shaping of
American Working Class Consciousness, and in a report
submitted to the ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare
called “Work in America.”37
37 See, Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the

Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1973). ―Eds.
What do these statistics show? In 1970, 60% percent of

the workforce was employed in services. The projection for
1980 is that at least 70% of the labor force will be employed in
services. The number employed in millions is the following:
employed in the production of goods―that is to say in
industry, manufacture, and agriculture―in 1947: 26.3 million;
in 1960: 28.9 million; in projected for 1980: 31.6 million. In
contrast, employment in the services: 25.4 million in 1947; 58.8
million in 1968; and 67.9 million projected for 1980.
A look at the manufacturing industries: They occupied

in 1970: 31% white collar; projected in 1975: 34.5% white
collar. And what is even more interesting, within the blue
collar labor force we see a steady shift to non-production jobs.
That is to say: repair, maintenance, technical supervision, and
so on.
Today, only two workers in five are directly engaged in

the production and distribution of goods. Less than 5% of the
employed are in the basic industries, that is, mining, steel,
automobiles, and oil, while 12.5% of the labor force is
employed in publicity [advertising ―Eds.]. In 1850 less than
half of all employees were wage and salary workers; in 1905,
80% were wage and salary earners; in 1970, 90% of all
employees were so, and the number of self-employed
dropped from 18% in 1950 to 9% in 1970.
I think these figures almost speak for themselves.

Without evaluating the larger consequences, which we will try
to do later on, the figures show conclusively that the
dependent population in the highest stage of capitalism has
increased tremendously. The human base of exploitation has
been enlarged tremendously, and wide sectors of the middle
classes, especially formerly independent middle classes, have
become subsidiaries of large capital.
41
Herbert Marcuse
Now, this huge system with a dependent population of

about 90% reproduces, in all its wealth, poverty and
unemployment on a large scale. Here are the figures of the
official government Bureau of the Census. You can imagine
that these figures certainly will not exaggerate towards
poverty itself. In 1970, the government poverty line was $3,700
per family of four―$3,700 per family of four. Below this
poverty line, which is indeed a poverty line in every respect,
below this poverty line there were 11% of all families.
Looking only at white families, 8.6 % were in poverty.
Looking only at black families, 29.8% were in poverty. And
one-fifth of all families in the United States had an income
under $5,000.
The unemployment figures―there we know that the

official figures obviously underrate38―I take from a recent
issue of Monthly Review, according to which 9.4% of the labor
force is unemployed and 14.2 million are directly or indirectly
dependent on military spending. In other words, if you work
together, if you throw together―which as an orthodox Marxist
you might well do―unemployment and employment for the
military services, you arrive at the following figures: a total of
over 25% of the labor force, i.e. 22.3 million, were either
unemployed or dependent on military spending directly or
indirectly.
I come now to the hypothesis suggested by these trends

and by these figures. I will move slowly because I believe you
will find the conclusion astonishing. At the highest stage of its
development, capitalism reproduces itself by devoting a
growing portion of socially-necessary labor time to labor
38 Because workers who are working only part-time, even

one day a week, are counted as employed, and those who have
given up looking for work are not counted as unemployed. ―Eds.
outside of the material production of goods and to the work of

commercial and financial operators, professional supervisors,
and so on. In other words, functions which Marx himself
considered as parasitic. Or, in one sentence: Late capitalism
reproduces itself through increasingly non-productive labor―
at its highest stage, capitalism reproduces itself through
increasingly non-productive labor.
A consequence of this shift: The Marxian proletariat,

being that part of the working class deployed in the material
process of production, declines in proportion to the former or
present middle class part of the employed working force. This
is the―as you will realize―highly controversial conclusion. I
would like to point out the astonishing thing is that Marx
himself did not find it astonishing, did not find it hard to
understand, and predicted it more than a hundred years ago. I
read you three quotations, two from the third volume of
Capital, the third one from a different source, which I shall
mention, and they all point out that capitalism reproduces
itself at its highest stage in this shift away from the material
production, away from productive labor, to unproductive or
non-productive labor.
Two quotations that “not the industrial capitalists but

the industrial managers are the soul of our industrial system,
has already been remarked. The capitalist mode of production
itself has brought matters to such a point that the labor
superintendents entirely separated from the ownership of
capital walk the streets.”39
39 This is a slightly compressed version of Marx, Capital,

Volume 3, Chapter XXIII, Interest and Profit (New York: Cosimo,
2007) pp. 453-454. ―Eds.
43
Herbert Marcuse
And, another quote: “It is clear that the commercial

corporations increase to the extent that the scale of production
is enlarged. The more developed the scale of production is, the
greater, if not in proportion, will be the commercial operation
of industrial capital. This necessitates the employment of
commercial wage workers, who form the office staff . . .” 40 and
so on.
And the final quotation, which is taken from Daniel

Bell’s Post-Industrial Society, but is a quotation by Marx himself
and a most important one: “The size of the middle class
increases and the proletariat will always form a comparatively
small part of the populace, although it is still growing. This is
the true course of bourgeois society.”41
This point will, I hope, lead to an intensified discussion.

I will continue with my text in this direction either tonight
after I have answered questions or on Friday.
40 This is a slightly compressed version of Marx, Capital,

Volume 3, Chapter XVII, Commercial Profit (New York: Cosimo,
2007) p. 352. ―Eds.
41 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New
York: Basic Books, 1973) p. 60. Bell cites Karl Kautsky’s Theorien über
Mehrwert as the source of this Marx quotation. ―Eds.
Herbert Marcuse’s Sixth Presentation42
[Eds.― We have been considering . . .] whatever forces

may make for a change in the established capitalist system.43
And I have tried to answer this question by having a look as
what is actually happening in the process of production itself.
There are changes there, and I have briefly enumerated them.
For example, the increasing technological character of
production and, in connection with it, the changing
composition of the working class, the increasing portion of
white collar in relation to blue collar [workers], and the
tendential shift from the material process of production to the
production of services, which, of course, in the capitalist
system also become commodities. In Marxian terms this
would mean an increasing reliance for the production of
capitalism on non-productive labor.
I think I have to say as least a few words about this

term; it is highly debatable and controversial in Marxian
theory itself. There are two concepts of productive labor. One
is taken from Adam Smith and the classical English
economists: productive labor is only that labor which is spent
in manufacturing material goods which enter via the market
process of consumption. All other labor Adam Smith calls
non-productive. According to this concept, of course, all labor
spent in producing services would be non-productive labor.
There is, however, another concept of productive labor,

namely, the orthodox Marxian concept, which means all labor
42 April 26, 1974.

43 The typescript begins mid-sentence. ―Eds.
45
Herbert Marcuse
which yields surplus value appropriated by the capitalists in

productive labor regardless in what activity it is being spent.
I would not want to enter the controversy here to the

extent that surplus value is created in the services. It is not
necessary for what I want to submit to you.
Now, these changes―and I want to repeat it

here―which also mean the increasing reduction of the
differences between intellectual and manual labor, these
changes do not make for what has been called a new working
class. I think the concept of the new working class is highly
ideological and weighted in favor of the independent role of
the so-called knowledge workers, educated labor, whatever it
may be.
What is actually happening at this stage of capitalist

development is not the emergence of a new working class but
a vast extension of the working class, an extension of the
working class to strata of the middle classes which at previous
stages of capitalism have been independent. I have given you
figures for the tremendous decline in the self-employed in
American society over the last ten, or even more than ten,
years.
Result: At this stage advanced capitalism creates a huge

dependent population: blue collar workers, white collar
workers, dependent middle classes, all depend directly or
indirectly on capital. And facing this huge dependent
population, an increasingly smaller group of the actually
ruling class; the classical Marxian conception for the last
stages of capitalism, the famous bi-polarization between rulers
and ruled, but with a decisive modification which I am going
to discuss now, partly reiterating what I said on Wednesday.
The shift in production which we have observed

means―and I come now to the relatively difficult conditions
and formulations―and will, therefore, go as slowly as I
possibly can. The shift in production means, in Marxian terms,
that less socially necessary labor time is spent in the
production of subsistence goods. That is to say, less and less
socially necessary labor is spend in order to produce the
goods, the commodities and services for the subsistence of the
worker, for the subsistence of the individual in general. This is
relatively evident. It is simply a consequence of the technical
progress and the rising productivity of labor under technical
progress.
Now, while an ever lesser quantum of socially

necessary labor is spent to produce the necessary subsistence
goods, more socially necessary labor time is spent in the
production of goods and services over and above the
necessities of subsistence―in the production of goods and
services over and above the necessities of subsistence. That is
to say, ever more socially necessary labor is spent in the
production of luxuries, in the Marxian sense, of luxuries, of
waste, of comforts, of pleasures, and all this in the form of
commodities.
This is the so-called consumer society, which at this

stage characterizes the capitalist system. I would like to point
out here the consumer society―or “la société de l’abondance”
―is a misnomer, a highly ideological concept, not only
because vast areas of poverty continue to exist, but also for
another very important reason, namely this so-called
consumer society more than any previous society is organized
and controlled, not in the interests of the consumer, but in the
interests of the producer. And that should be kept in mind.
47
Herbert Marcuse
Now, what does this shift to an increasing production

of luxuries, waste, planned obsolescence, gadgets, comforts,
what does it mean for the inner dynamics of capitalism? It
means that now the capitalist system is compelled by virtue of
its inner dynamic to create constantly new needs and
satisfactions. Capitalism is compelled by virtue of its inner
dynamic to make the realm of pleasure, the realm of
comforts,44 the realm beyond necessary alienated labor, to
make this a realm of necessity, the realm of merchandise
which has to be bought and sold, the realm which can be
enjoyed only by continuing toil and continuing alienated
labor. But with this tendency to direct a growing quantum of
productivity into the production of luxuries, capitalism is now
undermining its own basis. It is contradicting its own reality
principle of repression and exploitation, its reality principle
which is based on the necessity of full-time alienated labor for
the duration of one’s adult life.
Thus, it is in its growth that capitalism invalidates its

own production relations, that capitalism invalidates its own
way of life, its own existence. It is at the stage of
unprecedented social wealth and unprecedented growth
capacity that this contradiction threatens to explode.
In other words, it is not the threat of impoverishment, it

is not dire material privation and need, but on the contrary, it
is the reproduction and re-creation of increasing social wealth,
it is the high standard of living on an enlarged scale, which
ushers in the end of capitalism. This is the Twentieth Century
form of the Marxian concept according to which the law of
44 As discussed earlier in these presentations, this

desublimation process through diverting pleasures, entertainments,
and commercialized “freedoms” is at the same time one that
channels this less-inhibited behavior into commodified forms that
continue to replicate the established society. ―Eds.
capitalist development is at the same time the law of the decay

and eventual breakdown of capitalism.
If this is correct, it would mean that we have to become

aware of the real possibility of a revolution in the most
advanced industrial countries taking place not on a basis of
poverty and misery, but rather on the basis of wasted
abundance. And if this paradoxical concept is correct, it would
mean that we have to become aware of new motives for
revolution―new motives for revolution and new goals of
revolution that no longer focus on the possibility or necessity
of revolution born of misery and material privation, but a
revolution on the basis of increasing social wealth for
increasing strata of the population. And, therefore, we have to
look for what possible motives such a paradoxical revolution
can have. In any case, it seems inevitable, if we take account of
the facts, to envisage―let me put it carefully―the end of
capitalism at the stage of its greatest productivity and greatest
wealth.
Fortunately, we have one source which determines

precisely this situation in which the collapse of capitalism
begins, namely Marx himself. We are still used to operating
with only those Marxian concepts which directly or indirectly
derive radical change from impoverishment―it doesn’t
change much if we take the concept of relative
impoverishment, misery, and so on―and that we neglect the
tendencies in a very different direction which are clearly
indicated in Marx himself.
I will read you one passage from the first version of

Capital, 1857, published only much later under the title, Grund-
risse.45 Quote: “The great historical role of capital is the
45 The typescript leaves a blank where this title needs to be.

―Eds.
49
Herbert Marcuse
creation of surplus labor, labor which is superfluous from the

standpoint of mere use value, of mere subsistence. The historic
role of capital is fulfilled as soon as the level of needs has been
developed to the degree where surplus labor over and above
work for the necessities of life has itself become a universal
need generated by the individual needs themselves.”46 That is
to say, only if and when labor over and above that which is
necessary to re-create one’s own existence and subsistence on
the given cultural level, when surplus labor, labor for luxuries,
labor for enjoyments, labor for comforts and pleasures has
become a general need. And it is the capitalist system itself
which generates this need for surplus labor.47
In order to underline the importance of this passage I

shall read it now in French translation . . . .
In other words, capitalism itself creates the need for

this work over and above existence and subsistence needs, the
work for pleasure, comforts, luxuries, and so on.
46 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie

(Berlin: Dietz, 1953) p. 231. Marcuse’s translation. This citation is not
given in these Paris Lectures, but the same passage is discussed and
cited in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1972) pp. 17-18. ―Eds.
47 As Marx emphasized, capitalism’s system of commodified
and alienated labor allows capitalists to appropriate the surplus

labor and accumulate it for themselves. Marcuse adds that by
producing repressive forms of wasted wealth to maintain a
seemingly less oppressive and even affluent capitalist society within
the commodity form, we nonetheless learn of the capacity of labor
to produce for an abundant life. Socialism seeks to de-commodify
the labor process, and to de-commodify and restore the surplus
labor, surplus wealth, to the labor force itself as a group. This
surplus is to be utilized in a manner that refuses profitable
wastefulness and fully addresses human needs. ―Eds.
I would like to reformulate this development and this

possibility in order to make clear―and I think that is for
Marxian theory the main point―that this development is not
the deviation from capitalist development, that has been
brought to bear on capitalist development from the outside,
but that it is grounded in the capitalist mode of production
itself.
According to this concept, capitalism literally produces,

is compelled to produce, its own negation. It demonstrates at
this stage of surplus labor not only the obsolescence of full-
time alienated labor, but also produces on an enlarged
scale―and that is the decisive point. Capitalism at this stage
creates needs and satisfactions which come necessarily into
conflict with the necessity of full-time alienated labor and
threatens the creation of adequate surplus value.
It is precisely at the stage of abundance that capitalism

in its mode of production generates the individual need for
liberation from the repression imposed by this mode of
production.
I’ll try again to formulate how this development is

inherent in the capitalist mode of production at this stage. The
enlarged accumulation of capital requires [Eds.― the
expanded investment and valorization of this surplus wealth
and thus] the enlarged creation of needs for superfluous
goods and services; superfluous in the sense that they are
going beyond that necessary for the struggle for existence, for
the reproduction of subsistence itself. The enlarged
accumulation requires goods and production of goods beyond
the reproduction of labor power [i.e. commodified labor
―Eds.], beyond the necessities of life [i.e. the “cost” of labor as
a market commodity ―Eds.]. That is to say, production for a
realm of freedom and enjoyment.
51
Herbert Marcuse
But, satisfying these needs within the capitalist system

requires and presupposes that one continues working
throughout one’s life, presupposes not only the perpetuation
but the extension of the toil of alienated labor to other strata of
the population, presupposes the continuation of full-time
exploitation.
This is the Twentieth Century form of the

contradiction. On the one hand, the increasing production of
goods which could constitute a realm of freedom, joy, and
creative work. And on the other hand, the perpetuation of toil
and alienated labor in order to be able to purchase and sell
these goods to be enjoyed in a realm of freedom.
And I believe that it is this contradiction that is

spreading, the contradiction between the liberating
possibilities created by capitalism itself and their suppression
at the same time by the capitalist mode of production. This
contradiction is ever more difficult to obscure and to suppress.
There is evidence that ever more become aware of it, become
aware of it not only as a contradiction, but as a contradiction
that can be resolved. In other words, ever more become aware
of the obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production.
And this awareness―today still managed by the

capitalist system―this awareness now is undermining the
validity, undermining the obedience to capitalist values
among the people at large. In my view, this is one of the most
important points. There is evidence that more and more
people no longer believe in, and no longer act in accordance
with, what can be called the operational values on which the
continued existence of the capitalist system depends. If people
no longer adhere to the operational values which keep the
system going, then the decline has set in.
And that this decline of operational values has set in

can be shown, as far as the United States is concerned, in what
has been called―I have mentioned it several times before―the
decline in the work ethic. That is to say, the more and more
spreading rejection of any responsibility for the job one is
doing, for the quality of the work, for the responsibility to the
work, the simple but very clear feeling that all this is
unnecessary, that it has become obsolete.
And an alternative, although vaguely enough, emerges,

emerges by the creativity and productivity of capitalism itself,
namely, the image that Marx called the realm of freedom in
which alienated labor is reduced to the absolute minimum, in
which production can indeed be production for needs, but not
only for subsistence needs, because with an optimum of
automation this no longer presents a problem, but for the
needs and satisfactions, which would indeed be for the first
time in history, the needs and satisfactions of autonomous and
free human beings.
This is, so far, only the subjective side of the

development, the subjective side of the contradiction, namely,
the emergence in the individual of needs and satisfactions
which can no longer be fulfilled within the framework of the
capitalist system, although they were generated by the
capitalist system itself.
And I will subsequently try to show, or indicate,

whether objective conditions correspond to these subjective
conditions, to these subjective needs. And in this connection, I
will try to discuss briefly the unorthodox form which the
opposition in and to the system assumes in the United
States―and perhaps not only in the United States―the
opposition in the labor movements, the opposition among the
intelligentsia, and the opposition in the women’s liberation
movement. They all have one thing in common, namely, that
53
Herbert Marcuse
we can detect in them new motives for revolution, new needs

for revolution, and new goals for revolution.48
48 Here Marcuse concludes his sixth presentation. The

transcription appends an indication of a question from the audience
on the educational role of father and family, which, because of the
incomplete and fragmentary nature of the typescript, is not
replicated here. ―Eds.
Herbert Marcuse’s Seventh Presentation49
I have tried to formulate the contradiction within the

capitalist system as it shapes up under the conditions of
advanced monopoly capitalism, and I have pointed out that
this is historically a new form of contradiction, a new
expression of the inherent and explosive contradictions of
capitalism; an historically new form, although, as I have
shown you in giving you the quotation of Marx, a form
predicted and seen by Marx.
What is this new form of contradiction? On the one

hand the capitalist system at this point of its development is
compelled to create on an ever larger basis goods and services
beyond those needed for subsistence or for the re-creation of
labor power, even at the advanced cultural stage. In other
words, capitalism is compelled to produce more and more so-
called luxury goods and services, and in doing so capitalism
creates a need for doing away with all alienated labor. That
means doing away with all work in which the human being
cannot and does not develop its own faculties, its own
potentialities freely―the contrast between creative work and
alienated labor.
Now on the other hand, while producing all these

goods and services which suggest increasingly the
obsolescence of alienated labor, capitalism has to intensify
alienated labor in the factories, in the offices, wherever it may
be, in order to ensure adequate surplus value.
49 May 10, 1974.
55
Herbert Marcuse
So, this contradiction between the ever more obvious

obsolescence of full-time alienated labor suggested by the
capitalist mode of production itself and the ever greater need
for alienated labor because of the capitalist mode of
production―which equals exploitation―this contradiction is a
new form of the Marxian contradiction according to which
capitalism itself digs its own grave; that is to say, creates the
need as well as the forces for its own abolition.
But, again, the new historical element: This

contradiction threatens to explode; not through spreading
poverty and misery in the metropoles, but on the contrary,
through the potential conquest of material want and misery.
That is to say, the contradiction develops on a relatively high
level of living, standard of living, in the metropolitan
countries.
The result of the ever more explosive contradiction is

the gradual development of what we may call an anti-
capitalist consciousness; the development of an anti-capitalist
consciousness and of an anti-capitalist mental structure,
unconscious, among the population in the metropoles, a
consciousness still largely unorganized, spontaneous, without
definite goals,50 but, in any case, the consciousness and
instincts, drives, “compulsions,” which very definitely come
into conflict with the operational values required to sustain
the capitalist system. That is to say, the protest comes into
conflict with the so-called performance principle, which is the
reality principle governing capitalist society.
And against this performance principle, we see now the

gradual emergence of an opposition―and I repeat, an
50Sounds like a prescient description and foreshadowing of

the Occupy/Blockupy movement. ―Eds.
opposition still unorganized, still to a great extent

spontaneous―an opposition against toil as such, an opposition
against alienated labor as a full-time job, opposition against
the fact that life for the vast majority of the population, is to
cite the phrase from Marx, “life as a means to an end and not
as an end in itself,”51 namely life as a means to make a living,
as one says, as a means for daily reproducing one’s own
existence without ever, or only when it is too late, getting at
the joy of really enjoying life.
Now, these are the subjective tendencies which seem to

shape up under the conditions of advanced monopoly
capitalism. But, as we know, the subjective tendencies by
themselves are not enough. They play an important and
necessary part in the preparation of revolt and revolution.
They are an absolute pre-condition for revolt and revolution.
There is no revolt and there is no revolution without a
qualitative change in the consciousness, in the unconscious, in
the drives and goals of the people themselves. But the
consciousness and the unconscious, the drives, are not
sufficient. The objective conditions must be there under which
the subjective tendencies can mature and translate themselves
into organized and guided political practice.
Are there such objective conditions demonstrable in the

present situation? I have already mentioned that in my view
there are, and I can here only repeat―you know what is at
stake anyway―the main expressions of these explosive
conditions.
51 In the 1844 Paris Manuscripts Marx writes “The worker

puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to
him but to the object.” “Life itself appears only as a means to life.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm ―Eds.
57
Herbert Marcuse
There is obviously an increasing inequality between the

capitalist metropolitan countries and the ever more
intensively exploited countries of the Third World.52 There is
obviously increasing resistance in the Third World and the
rise of independence movements, which may one day pass the
present stage of neo-colonialism and lead to true
independence. There is in the metropolitan countries
themselves the activation of the oppressed racial and national
minorities; there again, still kept―as I pointed out―within the
framework of the capitalist system itself. There is continued
and enlarged inflation and unemployment. And there
is―perhaps the most important aspect today―the intensified
competition among the capitalist countries themselves, which
already threatens the overriding common interest of
capitalism, against whomever it may be and the overriding
interest in the maintenance and growth of the capitalist
system.
Now, what I would like to point out is that the degree

to which these developments are indeed new, to the degree to
which they do not seem to correspond to the traditional view
of the final stage of capitalism, the traditional view of the
transition to socialism, mainly because of the entirely different
level of development on which disintegration seems to begin.
Precisely because of this hierarchical novelty we find new and
so-called unorthodox forms of revolt; new and unorthodox
52 In the 1970s the “Third World” generally referred to the

developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the
1990s “globalization” became the key new analytical watchword
with ideological implications of a growing international prosperity.
In 2015 the scale of global inequality is staggering and intensifying.
Nearly 1 percent of the world’s population owns 50 percent of the
world’s wealth. See Patricia Cohen, “Study Finds Global Wealth Is
Flowing to the Richest,” The New York Times, January 19, 2015, B-6.
―Eds.
forms of revolt corresponding, I repeat, to the historical

novelty, namely the high stage of material and cultural
development, the new resources available to the system, the
possible conquest of material want, poverty, and privation,
and the tremendous concentration of power in the hands of
the ever smaller but ever more ruthless dominant class.
There is another reason why I think we can point to

new and unorthodox forms of revolt. This is the possibility, if
not necessity―as I pointed out before―that the Twentieth or
Twenty-first Century revolution, if it takes place at all, will be
more radical and more sweeping in scope than all preceding
historical revolutions. It would be a revolution not only in the
political and economic institutions, not only a revolution in
class structure, but also a total transformation and subversion
of values in all spheres and dimensions of the material and
intellectual cultures.
There is―and I wish we had time to discuss it more

extensively―a noticeable continuity between capitalism and
many of the traditional images and concepts of socialism
which continue to introduce into the image and concept of
socialist society norms and values that would still link the
socialist society to the highest stage of capitalist development.
I mean especially the concept of the ever more efficient

development of the productive forces which, by the way, only
now is beginning to be questioned even among socialists
themselves. What is required to bring out the full, entire, and
qualitative difference between socialism and capitalism is not
so much the continued ever more efficient development of the
productive forces, but the total redirection of the productive
forces altogether towards new goals and toward a new quality
of life. Now, in view of this fact, there must be not only the
political and economic revolution, not only new institutions
and basic social relationships, but also the reversal and
59
Herbert Marcuse
subversion of the entire system of values that kept at least

Western civilization going, going on the ever more repressive
and destructive aspects, until this very day.
It is in this context of the enlarged depth and scope of

the revolution, of the new goals and possibilities of the
revolution, that the movement for the liberation of women
finds, or at least could find, its proper political place. And I’ve
said in my view it is a highly political movement, and its
potential is a highly political and subversive potential.
I’ve said new and unorthodox forms of revolt. What is

new, historically new―as I tried to point it out before and as I
hope we will still see―are not the historical agents of change;
that is to say, not another class as subject of the revolution; not
another class. No specific group can substitute, can replace,
the working class as the subject and agent of radical social
change. New are simply, or rather not so simply, the
expressions of the revolt, the forms of the revolt. New is also,
as I’ve already indicated, the working class itself; not as an
entirely new class, but in its composition. Certainly new if
contrasted with the working class of the Nineteenth Century
and the early Twentieth Century.
I would like now very briefly to say how I see this new
and unorthodox form of the opposition among the working
class itself. As an indication of the situation of the American
working class, let me just tell you that the union
membership―that is, the number of workers organized in the
unions―it was 22.9% of the labor force in 1947; it was in 1970
only 22.6% of the labor force. In other words, a slight decline
in unionization. And in addition, union membership was
declining in in non-industrial establishments and increasing
among government workers.
Now, the American trade unions have always, with the

exception of short periods where the opposition was violently
suppressed, always pursued what is called a reformist
strategy; that is to say, the economic class struggle rather than
the political. A few examples show to what degree. Although I
have been in the United States since 1934, I cannot remember a
single political strike, what you would call a political strike,
nor can I remember any effective opposition on the part of the
unions against the war in Indochina [Vietnam ―Eds.]. On the
contrary.
However, we have to be careful with the concept,

“reformist.” Some of you pointed out to me that it would
certainly be nonsense to assume that the working class would
always be in a revolutionary mood. Normally the working
class is not revolutionary and expresses its own view of the
class struggle in non-political strikes and so on, on an
economistic basis.
Then, however, we have to ask what did Marx mean

when he said―and he repeated the statement―”The working
class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”53 He repeated this
statement twice and not at the early stages of his
development; I think in the 1860s shortly before the
appearance of the first volume of Capital.
What does it mean to say, “The working class is

revolutionary or it is nothing”? Marx himself at this place does
not explain. I would suggest―and I think this is borne out in
his work―I would suggest the following interpretation: The
working class is revolutionary, [objectively, but not
subjectively ―Eds.] in normal times, before and unless this
53 Karl Marx, “Letter to Frederick Engels, 18 February 1865,”

retrieved May 11, 2015 from
https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_02_18.htm ―Eds.
61
Herbert Marcuse
revolutionary attitude expresses itself in radical political

action. The working class is revolutionary inasmuch as the
needs and aspirations of the working class are irreconcilable
and incompatible with the capitalist system, the very needs
and aspirations in conflict with those which can be satisfied
within the framework of capitalism itself. That is the objective
basis for the term “revolutionary class.” It certainly does not
mean that this class is constantly in an uproar and upheaval,
preparing or engaging in revolution.54
Now, it seems to me that this conflict between the

needs and the aspirations of the working class and the
possibilities of the capitalist system is bound to explode in the
long run. I have to repeat my doubts about the term “long
run,” since nobody seems to know how long the run is
(laughter). The fact is, in my view, . . . and here I have to
repeat what I said before: I am talking about the United States.
I realize fully well that the situation in France and in other
European countries may well be entirely different. In the
United States still today I think you cannot say with good
conscience that the needs and aspirations of the majority of
the working class are in irreconcilable conflict with the needs
and aspirations that can be gradually, very gradually and
progressively, fulfilled by the capitalist system and within the
capitalist system itself.
In this specific sense we can say that the American

working class today is not a revolutionary class in the sense
outlined by Marx. If this is the case, then we will not be
surprised to see that a potentially revolutionary attitude
54 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts make clear: When the working

class is not revolutionary, it is the negation of its best self, i.e.
alienated from the product of its labor, from control of the process
of production, from other laboring sisters and brothers, and from its
fullest political potential, its species-being. ―Eds.
expresses itself outside and against the trade union

bureaucracy―outside and against the trade union
bureaucracy. This is a phenomenon which is certainly not
confined to the United States.
I have pointed out some of these unorthodox forms of

the opposition. The facts are well known: An unheard of
degree of absenteeism, simply staying away from work. A
degree and extent of―to a large extent if not entirely―of
unorganized and spontaneous sabotage in the factories.55
Then the total lack of the slightest responsibility for the job to
be done. The disgust with the job―total, one might even say
existential―disgust with the job. Not only with the specific
working conditions (though these are an additional decisive
factor), but beyond these, disgust simply with the work, with
the job itself; simply with the fact that eight hours a day, plus
the hours you have to spend in transportation and so on, plus
the inhuman character of the job itself, that this is still
imposed upon the worker in spite of the ever more obvious
obsolescence of these conditions.
Now this attitude―which, again, I repeat is to a high

degree spontaneous and unorganized―is spreading mainly
among the young workers, and to a lesser degree, among the
black population. The situation with the Chicanos is slightly
55 In 1972, a period of worker unrest and wildcat strikes,

even the U.S. Senate held hearings on “worker alienation,”
documenting the absenteeism, sabotage, drug addiction,
alcoholism, and low productivity in U.S. auto plants and other
manufacturing facilities. See, Worker Alienation, 1972: Hearings Before
the Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972) and
Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1973). ―Eds.
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Herbert Marcuse
different because they haven’t got a job yet against which they
could in this way protest [i.e. they are predominately
employed in agriculture rather than industry ―Eds.]. In any
case, it is also expressing itself in wildcat strikes, and the
increasing number of wildcat strikes, and this, in my view, is
more than a passing form of revolt. And it is spreading in the
sense that even the union bureaucracy is under apparently
increased pressure to go beyond wage demands and beyond
demands for changing working conditions.
What is expressing itself in this opposition is the revolt

against the entire hierarchy in the factory itself. It is the
rejection of any involvement in the job one has, which comes
out very clearly, by the way, in the very noticeable
deterioration of the quality of the merchandise to be turned
out.
I don’t know whether this trend is operative in France,

too. In the United States it is so obvious that one doesn’t even
have to discuss it any more. I don’t know how large the
number of automobile workers is that wouldn’t think of
buying an American car, for example, because they know
better than anyone else what is wrong with the American
automobile. And another deterioration of quality you find in
practically all fields . . . . One that just comes to my mind: If
you compare the quality of artificial fibers, for example,
twenty years ago and today, you can observe the same
deterioration of quality. And in my view this is of a far larger
significance than a transitory development. Namely, it
indicates the decline of the performance principle, the decline
of the performance principle, or if you want, of the so-called
work ethic as the way by which capitalism reproduces itself in
the individual, the protest against the weakening of the work
ethic as the way by which capitalism reproduces itself in the
individuals themselves.
I have here with you pointed out again and again how
much emphasis I would like to place on this aspect, namely,
the degree to which the capitalist system reproduces itself not
only by the brute fact that it is imposed on the majority of the
population as iron necessity―necessity, of course, only in
terms of the system itself―but also to the degree and the
manner in which the individuals themselves in their needs, in
their attitudes, reproduce the system which exploits and
enslaves them, accepting the operational values expressed by
the system.
You know the term “status symbol.” The fact, for

example, that without terror and external force, the
individuals constantly feel the need for buying whatever new
gadgets or luxuries are being turned out, because by the
system itself they are practically made a necessity. 56 This
indicates to what degree this reproduction of the system by
the individuals themselves is an absolutely necessary
mechanism for preserving and enlarging the capitalist system
itself.
It is only relatively lately that Marxist theory has

recognized this entire dimension, which in the earlier forms of
Marxian theory was simply pushed aside as a mere
ideological or psychological dimension which does not belong
to the infrastructure of society. Well, I think we have learned
and we have seen that with the increasing management of the
mind and the indoctrination, this allegedly only ideological
process expresses itself very materially and very practically in
the behavior of the people at work and at leisure.
56 All this way before the era of smart phones and smart
watches! ―Eds.
65
Herbert Marcuse
Now, it is against this reproduction of the system by

the individuals themselves, it is against the whole value
system of capitalist society, against the very continuation of
alienated labor, that the opposition, the radical opposition
among the working class outside the trade unions, proceeds
and seems to make progress. I repeat, what is at stake is not
simply some discontent with working conditions, with some
aspects of the job, although this discontent is a self-evident
part of it. What is at stake is not only the organization of work
in the factories and offices, what is at stake is not only the
social division of labor, which allocates to one exploited class
the production of the necessities of life, the material
production. What is at stake even more is not only the
hierarchy of the factories, but also―and in this I see the
decisive difference―also the very concept of work itself and its
realization. The very concept of work itself, the very concept
and the very realization of productivity are being challenged.
That is to say, the whole way of life under capitalism is now
being challenged, and being challenged among the intellectual
part of the working class as well as among the blue collar and
white collar workers in the production process itself.57
I would not like you to take this as meaning that the

disintegration of American capitalism is around the corner. I
cannot point out often enough that we have to do with the
small minority among the working class, a small minority
57 This paragraph is an echo of Marx’s famous revolutionary

avowal of the need for the formation of “a class which is the
dissolution of all classes, which has a universal character because its
sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular
redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular
wrong but wrong in general.” Karl Marx, “The Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right,” in T.B. Bottomore (Ed.), Karl Marx Early
Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) p. 58. ―Eds.
even among so-called educated labor. But, this small minority

may very well be the beginning of a process which may well
threaten the system as a whole.
This raises the question: Can the system absorb this

revolt and how long can it absorb this revolt? As in many
cases, it seems to me that the dominant class has a better
insight into the threats to the system than those who
themselves threaten the system. And we can see a rather
important reorganization of capitalism to meet this future
challenge.
This response to a future challenge takes up mainly two

forms. In the first place, and this is a very traditional response,
the attempt of the part of capital to intensify and enlarge the
division within the working class itself―to enlarge the
division within the working class itself.
In the United States there has always been, to put it

mildly, a competition and an antagonism between white labor
and black labor. This is still skillfully exploited, sometimes
even in the unions themselves.
There are other ways of increasing the division of labor.

The fragmentation of the work process, for example, is one of
them. And, secondly, perhaps for the future the most
important one: the efforts on the part of management itself to
give what is called more responsibility to the worker for the
job. That is very interesting and apparently paradoxical. While
intensifying the fragmentation of the work process and
thereby strengthening the hierarchy in the factory itself, at the
same time attempts are being made to counteract this
fragmentation by giving the individual worker or a small
group of workers more responsibility, more personal
involvement, even pride in the job they have to do. For
example, instead of giving them only infinitesimal parts of
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Herbert Marcuse
merchandise to be manufactured, larger production units are

being formed so that an ever larger part of the final product is
actually executed by one or a small group of workers
themselves.
This has been done mainly, as far as I know, in the

electronics industry and around [the auto industry of ―Eds.]
Detroit. And the result was in most cases an increase in the
productivity of labor. An increase in the productivity of labor,
which, of course, was to the benefit of the capitalist enterprise
itself.
The question is: can this tendency be contained within

the framework of the system? I think you can say that for a
long time to come capitalism will be able, especially if neo-
imperialism and neo-colonialism continue to work, to absorb
wage increases.58 That is to say, it will be able to balance
inflation and higher prices on the one side and higher wages
on the other, although, of course, with the traditional gap
between real wages and higher prices.
It is possible that under present conditions, especially if

any explosion within the capitalist orbit and the Third World
is avoided, that these labor demands can still be absorbed. It is
different with the stage at which the demands for a complete
reorganization of the job in the factories themselves begins to
58 Nonetheless, a “race to the bottom” was begun during the

1980s which continues to the present day―decades of war against
labor’s wage and the general payroll of the nation. With the
dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, neo-imperialism and neo-
colonialism developed into the form of globalization with which we
are today all too familiar which has intensified inequalities―within
the U.S.―and between the U.S. and other countries around the
globe. ―Eds.
challenge the hierarchy in the factories themselves, which is

still to a great extent hidden behind the technological veil.
That is to say, the hierarchical structure of work is presented
as a technical necessity, as technically necessary, whereas in
reality it is at least highly questionable whether this is a
technical necessity, or technological necessity, or whether it is
not simply the use of technological terms in order to conceal a
definitely political hierarchy.
But, as I’ve said, even if the hierarchy itself is

challenged, the main problem remains. Is this opposition in
any demonstrable way really tending towards a revolution
which would not only do away with capitalism but also bring
about, perhaps, a new form of socialism, namely socialism as
in any and every respect qualitatively different and a break
with capitalism, again the radical transformation of values of
which I spoke? And it seems to me that only a decisive
redirection of production itself would in this sense be a
revolutionary development. A total redirection of production,
first of all, of course, towards the abolition of poverty and
scarcity wherever it exists in the world today. Secondly, a total
reconstruction of the environment and the creation of space
and time for creative work; space and time for creative work
instead of alienated labor as a full-time occupation.
One only has to formulate these goals in this way in

order to see what is involved here, namely, such a revolution,
which would truly replace the capitalist system with a true
socialist system, may well, and perhaps with necessity, mean a
lower standard of living for the privileged population in the
metropolitan countries. The abolition of waste, luxury,
planned obsolescence, unnecessary services and commodities
of all kind may well mean a lower standard of living, which
may not be a price too high to pay for the possible advent of a
free socialist society.
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Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man & Political Economy
Detlev Claussen
Conversation with Peter-Erwin Jansen

Frankfurt, 23 December 2014
Translated by Charles Reitz
Peter-Erwin Jansen: The original edition of One-Dimensional

Man (ODM) appeared in the United States in 1964. Three years
later Alfred Schmidt’s German translation was published by
the Luchterhand Press. Herbert Marcuse could never have
foreseen how influential this philosophical book would
become for the world-wide social uprisings of 1968. Yet his
friend Leo Löwenthal predicted in a written comment to the
chair of the philosophy department at UC San Diego as early
as March 1964 that the volume would attain wide acclaim in
the scholarly community.1 Just how much of an impact did
One-Dimensional Man have upon those of you who were
activists in the League of Socialist German Students (SDS) at
that time? What made ODM so important back then?
Detlev Claussen: In 1968 One-Dimensional Man became a best-

seller quite unexpectedly and almost overnight, especially in
France and Italy. In Germany as I see it fewer people may
have read the book, yet perhaps they made up for it by
reading it more closely. People did want to know what was
behind the student-worker revolts that were spreading
around the globe: Paris, Berkeley, Berlin, Frankfurt, Mexico
1Letter from Leo Löwenthal to Richard H. Popkin of 31

March 1964, Löwenthal Archive, University Library, Frankfurt.
―PEJ.
71
Detlev Claussen
City, Prague, Rome, etc. They quickly realized that this was
not the knowledge that ODM delivered.2 In this sense ODM
was a very American book which the traditionalists of the
Left, like the class-struggle radicals in Germany, did not find
appealing. In the Federal Republic of Germany Marcuse
enjoyed a relatively short time in the sun in spite of the
massive publicity given to him, and this was in 1967. His
shorter works were usually more widely read. Small groups in
our SDS did read and discuss One-Dimensional Man; the
debates about the role of marginal groups were particularly
heated, as were also his criticisms of the proletarian pathos of
the orthodox communist sectarian groupings. Marcuse tied
the American experience, which he had in common with
Horkheimer and Adorno, to an active intervention into
current conditions. On account of this he came to Berlin in the
summer of 1967,3 later he would go to Frankfurt time and
again. In the activist circles revolving around Rudi Dutschke
and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Marcuse was to find attentive
listeners and discussants. The friendship with Dutschke
endured right up to Marcuse’s death in July, 1979.4
PEJ: How do you see Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional

society today?
DC: When I visited Angela Davis in Oakland in 1978, we both

concluded with some astonishment that One-Dimensional Man
2 Marcuse’s subsequent works, An Essay on Liberation (1969),

Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), and the Paris Lectures (1974)
published here did treat this problematic. ―Eds.
3 See especially, Herbert Marcuse, “The End of Utopia,” in
Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). ―PEJ.

4 See the exchange of letters between Dutschke and Marcuse
in Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia; Collected

Papers, Vol. 6, Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, editors (London
and New York: Routledge, 2014) pp. 334-338. ―PEJ.
had actually come to be more relevant. When we met again in

2013 in Frankfurt, we both had the impression that it had even
greater bearing and currency. In 1967 Marcuse declared (in
opposition to the super-revolutionaries and fanatics) that
there was nothing any longer “outside of capitalism”―and he
did this in Berlin, not far from the newly-built supposedly
socialist Berlin Wall.
Today the Wall is gone, and it is evident to all that

capitalism dominates all. We are again confronted with the
Sisyphean task of creating a supra-individual critical
subjectivity. Neoliberalism is generating a world-wide
sensitivity to social inequality. It is far easier to see that
manual labor in Germany and China are interconnected, that
the intellectual labor of India and the United States are
interlinked, in spite of the competition among these countries.
People doing manual labor experience a sense of
powerlessness; knowledge workers sitting at computer
screens, a false sense of autonomy. Just as socialism was a
chimera during the last third of the “short century” (1914-
1991),5 so too is liberal capitalism today; nothing is left of it
given the cannibalism of neoliberalism. The great
contradictory extremes characteristic of the “long century”
(1789-1914)―socialism and liberalism―no longer exist. They
have been excluded by the short century. There is only one
dimension. This was the conditio sine qua non of Marcuse’s
thinking and the impetus to search for the new.
The new, if it is to be more than the detritus of the old,

will be difficult to attain given a world that has been almost
totally in the grip of the culture industry. One-Dimensional
Man takes up this concept from The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
5 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth

Century (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). ―Eds.
73
Detlev Claussen
It highlights the totalitarian tendency in a society without

opposition, a society that has enjoyed seeing itself as anti-
totalitarian, pragmatic, and non-ideological.
PEJ: I find it noteworthy that only a few of the major activists

in the German struggles of the Sixties have made an explicit,
written evaluation of the work of Marcuse. One of the few was
Hans-Jürgen Krahl, who in the summer of 1969 replied to Rolf
Hochhuth’s misguided attacks on Marcuse.6 Krahl’s “Five
Theses on Herbert Marcuse as Critical Theorist of
Emancipation”7 staunchly defended a Marcusean concept of
emancipation. Krahl wrote: “Emancipation is not the
liberation of the technological apparatus, but rather the
liberation of social humanity.”8 Still, Krahl was critical of the
fact that Marcuse’s concept of revolution led some to think it
rejected all compromise; this Krahl saw as ignoring the tactical
role of concessions in a “revolutionary Realpolitik.” Hardly
anyone knows about Krahl’s appreciation of Marcuse. How
do you understand Krahl’s position here in connection with
an assessment of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man?
DC: The movements of the Sixties had stumbled into a blind

alley, and this was made clear in Krahl’s 1969 appreciation of
Marcuse. Global uprisings were occurring for a wide variety
6 Translator’s note: Hochhuth apparently saw Marcuse as

both overly optimistic about human potential and as a Marxist who
was too mechanical and doctrinaire. See Walter Hinderer, Arbeit an
der Gegenwart: zur deutschen Literatur nach 1945 [Work on the Present:
German Literature after 1945] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
1994) pp. 271-74. Marcuse had lionized Hochhuth’s play The
Deputy in One-Dimensional Man as an aesthetic expression of
historical truth.
7 Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf: Schriften
und Reden (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1985) pp. 122-135. ―Eds.
8 http://www.infopartisan.net/archive/1967/266771.html ―Eds.
of reasons; people misinterpreted this as a pre-revolutionary

situation, which it certainly was not. Krahl was aware, as
Marcuse was, that marginalized groups could nonetheless
affect the core of the system. But a new society cannot be
constructed by those who have been completely devastated by
the old system. In 1969 we began to see the upshot of those
forces seeking social change through destruction. Terrorism
arose from a fetish with revolution and violence in a non-
revolutionary time; both Krahl and Marcuse rejected this
decisively. It was also impossible to return to the customary
politics of class struggle. When Krahl said that critical theory
was “deeply afflicted” by insufficient “revolutionary
Realpolitik,” and criticized this in Marcuse as well, he rather
overstated his case: none of the student movements in the
West were measurably moving toward the promises they
made about the transformation of class society; they were
always just guessing what to do next. The best estimate was
“the long march through the institutions,” which Krahl
couldn’t take up himself because of his untimely death in
1970. Only the bare outlines of the new theoretical challenges
were visible at that time. Capitalism was in a crisis mode, but
this was nowhere as tangibly understood as the crisis of
finance capital in 2009. Back then we were witnessing the last
convulsions of a colonial system, and at the same time we saw
the advent of a world without remembrance. No one had the
slightest idea that new pasts could be invented (Hobsbawm
and Ranger9 were to call this the “invention of tradition”) by
means of an all-encompassing culture industry. The key term
in this process had already been found in “integration,” and
the pressures toward assimilation have considerably
multiplied since then. The reality of a totally administered
society connected One-Dimensional Man to the Dialectic of the
Enlightenment; and these were theoretical anticipations fifty
9 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.) The Invention of

Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). ―Eds.
75
Detlev Claussen
years ago of conditions that we have yet to contend with

today.10
PEJ: Closely connected to this is also the critique of a one-

sided conception of reason. Marcuse’s philosophy was
grounded in the Enlightenment epoch that maintained the
critical edge of a more robust concept of rationality. The
single-dimensional outlook of “instrumental reason” emerged
at the forefront of the economy of capitalism. In his Foreword
to the Critique of Instrumental Reason, Max Horkheimer writes:
“The progress of the technical apparatus is accompanied by a
process of dehumanization.”11 This resonates with the first
sentence of Marcuse’s ODM: “A comfortable, smooth,
reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced
industrial society, a token of technical progress.” Both authors
argue that the crisis of reason is also a crisis of the individual.
Horkheimer writes: “At one time the individual conceived of
reason exclusively as an aspect of the self.” But “at the
moment of its ostensible excellence, reason has become
irrational and stupid.”12 The recently discovered ODM
manuscript found at Brandeis University in 2014 possesses
some discrepancies vis à vis the published ODM volume.
Most of these are simply corrections or single word
substitutions. Uniquely, it is in the rationality of art―as a
universal concept encompassing utopian potential―that there
10 As Marcuse explains on pages 21-25 above, the concept of

integration in this sense connotes a contemporary form of
conformity to a nation’s prevailing culture, engendered through
multiple social control mechanisms; not to be confused with the
dismantling of racial segregation the way U.S. readers might first
expect. ―Eds.
11 Max Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentalen Vernunft
[The Critique of Instrumental Reason] (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1985)

p. 7. ―PEJ.
12 Ibid., p. 124. ―PEJ.
are important differences. It seems to me that precisely here,

in the critique of politicized aesthetic concepts and the critique
of mass culture, that there are astonishing resemblances to
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. How
might you see this? Do you think there are overarching
similarities linking ODM to Dialectic of Enlightenment?
DC: As you have already indicated, from 1944 to 1964

Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse were all in agreement in
this regard. The only disparities were in their reactions to the
protest movement, as is quite well known. These were
certainly a consequence of the differences in the German and
American movements, as well as differences of temperament.
Germany was still dealing with the residue of the National
Socialist past and the immediate realities of the Cold War. The
U.S. was involved in a hot war in Vietnam and had to look
racism, long evaded, in the eye. Both social systems were
intoxicated with the power of technological rationality; both
possessed blind spots when it came to understanding their
own histories. Traditional philosophy could help illumine
these with the emancipatory power of reason. The need for a
critique of instrumental reason is something we can feel today
at the very core of our being: the Internet, that could be a
community-building agency of communication, has changed
into an instrument of control, surveillance, and domination.
PEJ: Since you are familiar13 with the contents of Herbert

Marcuse’s studies of National Socialism that have recently
13 See Detlev Claussen, “Kopf der Leidenschaft: Herbert

Marcuse’s Deutschlandanalysen,” in Herbert Marcuse,
Feindanalysen: Űber die Deutschen, Peter-Erwin Jansen (ed.)
(Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1998) pp. 11-20. See also Herbert Marcuse,
Technology, War, and Fascism, The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse
Volume 1, Douglas Kellner (ed) (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 84,
248, 249. ―PEJ.
77
Detlev Claussen
been published, can you see an overlap between concepts

treated there and his later critique of the one-dimensional
society? Marcuse’s OSS studies, for example, refer to the
Nazi’s policy of Gleichschaltung.14
DC: The critical theorists, as has been indicated above,

recognized the monstrosities of their times, National Socialism
and Stalinism, as tendencies within modern social systems
that knew no national boundaries. Totalitarian forms of
domination could be extended everywhere given the potential
held by the instrumantalization of reason. Still, the specific
distinctions make all the difference. Not all systems are the
same. But today there is nothing that exists outside the
system.
PEJ: As I see it, Marcuse’s original concerns with the political

and cultural qualities of the one-dimensional society, were
subsequently directed toward a critique of economic one-
dimensionality. Nearly every sector of the social order is
today suffused by an “economizing” imperative resulting in
the greatest possible subordination to the really existing
conditions of the market place. Globalization long ago
displaced all territorial borders. The world had entered into a
new stage of one-dimensionality.
DC: One critical perspective on the world of the short

century―and its horrors―hinges on its comparison to the long
century’s old bourgeois society. Since 1989 we have entered a
new epoch characterized by the superimposition of neoliberal
economic developments everywhere. Hence a renewed critique
14A shifting toward political sameness and compliance

through the total administration of society in which all opposition
and negation are suppressed. ―Eds.
of political economy is called for. The immensity of the challenge

however is indicated by the extent to which economists have
lost touch with reality. Critical political economy must
carefully depict the functioning of the real economy, after
which its crisis tendencies may be analyzed. Certainly there
are excellent attempts being made in this regard, for example,
the work of David Harvey. This sort of analysis furnishes a
material foundation for subsequent critiques of the political
and aesthetic realms. Everything depends on these
fundamental relationships―the changed correlations of
mental and manual labor, spatiality and temporality, use
value and exchange value, the nature of the commodity form
itself, the structures of reality and fiction, body and mind. We
cannot count on the old concepts; we have got to come up
with new insights. This is the intellectual heritage of One-
Dimensional Man.
PEJ: Detlev, very many thanks for this retrospective on One-

Dimensional Man, the German SDS, and the need for a
renewed emphasis on critical political economy today.
79
Detlev Claussen
One-Dimensional Man, Yesterday and Today
Peter-Erwin Jansen
“What? You Haven’t Read One-Dimensional Man!”

Apocalypse or Politics?
Translated by Charles Reitz
Younger students entering the Frankfurt Institute for

Social Research for the first time during the Sixties and
Seventies frequently encountered older activists in League of
Socialist German Students (SDS) who would often challenge
their as-yet-undeveloped theoretical perspectives with the
shocked exclamation “What? You Haven’t Read One
Dimensional Man!”
The immense impact of One-Dimensional Man on the

revolutionary student movement around the world when it
was first published in 1964 [1967 in Germany] came as a huge
surprise, even to its author.
Herbert Marcuse, then sixty-six, had been teaching

political science at Brandeis for the past ten years, and had
become involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war
movements. In 1963 the Brandeis administration did not
consent to continue his employment there, despite mass
campus support for his teaching.
Richard H. Popkin, chair of the philosophy department

at the University of California, San Diego, asked the esteemed
UC Berkeley sociologist, Leo Löwenthal, for an assessment of
Marcuse’s qualifications. Löwenthal found this request
somewhat awkward because he had been friends for many
81
Peter-Erwin Jansen
years with “Old Herbert.” Löwenthal wrote: “I consider Mr.

Marcuse one of the outstanding scholars and intellectuals of
our time and definitely one of the leading figures among his
generation.”1 Little did Löwenthal know that Marcuse’s work
would soon help articulate the critical consciousness of a
whole new age group.
Marcuse had arrived in the United States some thirty

years earlier (in 1933) at Columbia University after the rise of
the German Nazis forced him into exile along with the other
members of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung. During
the 1940s, he worked in Washington, D.C. with Franz
Neumann for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services interpreting
the frame of mind of the fascist German enemy.2 Then he
spent two years (1952-54) at Harvard University’s Russian
Research Center analyzing the Soviet communist system.
Marcuse’s 1958 study Soviet Marxism: A Critical

Analysis3 developed his critique of orthodox Marxism and
really-existing-socialism, thus earning the enmity of Moscow-
oriented Marxists. But Soviet Marxism included many strident
criticisms of Western European culture and that of the U.S. so
it broke free from both Cold War camps. While differing in
significant ways, both systems exemplified political forms of
domination. They shared the negative impacts of a
1 Letter from Leo Löwenthal to Richard H. Popkin of 31

March 1964, Löwenthal Archive, University Library, Frankfurt.
2 Herbert Marcuse, Feindanalysen. Űber die Deutschen.
Nachgelassene Schriften Bd. 5, with a Foreword by Peter-Erwin

Jansen and Introduction by Detlev Claussen (Springe: zu Klampen,
2007). See also Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism,
Collected Papers, Volume 1, edited by Douglas Kellner (London:
Routledge, 1998).
3 Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958).

technological rationality that in both cases had already

developed its own antihuman logic with regard to the
particular social contexts. In the U.S.S.R. this meant a system
of repression and authoritarian governance supposedly
consistent with the necessities of historical progress according
to communist doctrine, but actually in accordance with the
repressive needs of the Soviet state. In the consumer societies
of the West there was the illusion of having institutions that
could guarantee human freedoms, yet these gave rise instead
to unbounded capitalist production for profit rather than
human needs, and thus intensified alienation.
Marcuse can thus be seen in both Soviet Marxism and

One-Dimensional Man as a critical theorist of the technological
rationality of advance industrial societies. New forms of social
control emerged in capitalist societies, which served to
perpetuate the established social order without the direct use
of force. Among these were the manipulation of felt needs into
the fetish of over-consumption, the reduction of artistic
appreciation to the level of the culture-industry, the
evisceration of meaning from language, and the prevalence of
positivism in philosophy. But, above all, Marcuse indicted the
technological rationality. Here Marcuse echoed his earlier
writings: “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”
and “The New German Mentality” from 1941 and 1942, but he
devoted considerable attention to this topic in ODM.
Marcuse demonstrated in ODM that large

revolutionary classes or groups no longer function as a
guarantor of resistance and political transformation as the
older Marxist dogma and its logic of class consciousness
(Lukács) predicted. People (not just the rich, but working men
and women) in the wealthier northern countries cling tightly
to their prosperity, which in no small measure derives from
the exploitation of poorer regions. Hence ODM’s opening
epigram, “The Paralysis of Criticism: Society Without
83
Peter-Erwin Jansen
Opposition” (ODM, ix), was an apt description of the situation

in the global North. But Marcuse’s “Introduction” to ODM is
emphatic about its dialectical method, and his analysis
continually swings between two hypotheses that contradict
each other: “(1) that advanced industrial society is capable of
containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2)
that forces and tendencies exist which break this containment
and explode the society” (ODM, xv).
One of these forces that came to occupy a more and

more central position within Marcuse’s critical theory of
society4 was that of art and the aesthetic dimension. The year
that the German translation of ODM appeared, Marcuse held
a lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (8
March 1967). It was titled “Art in the One Dimensional
Society,”5 and can be interpreted as an emancipatory
extension of the third chapter of ODM. In his estimation,
despite all the conformity to be found in a single-dimensional
culture of mass-media marketing, “if the development of
consciousness and of the unconscious leads to making us see
the things which we do not see or are not allowed to see . . . ,
then art would, with all its affirmation, work as part of the
liberating power of the negative and would help to free the
mutilated unconscious and the mutilated consciousness which
solidify the repressive establishment.”6
4 Even before ODM Marcuse investigated themes in

aesthetics. See for example his Eros and Civilization chapter 9 “The
Aesthetic Dimension” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); also his 1937
essay “On the Affirmative Character of Art,” republished in Herbert
Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
5 Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” in
Herbert Marcuse, Art and Liberation, Collected Papers Volume 4,

edited by Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2007).
6 Ibid., p. 122.
We can detect key modifications of Marcuse’s critical

analysis of the tendencies of advanced industrial society in the
post WW II period not only with regard to aesthetics, but in
other areas as well. With the rise of the anti-Vietnam war
protest movement during the later 1960s, Marcuse worked out
several new sociological, philosophical, and psychological
concepts that would challenge the subtle methods of
domination that prevailed, as he had shown in ODM, in
nearly every sector of society. In this regard, his 1969 Essay on
Liberation as well as the 1972 publication, Counterrevolution and
Revolt, contain the arguments and evidence for Marcuse’s
evolving perspective.
In ODM Marcuse, as is well known, identifies the

subjects of radical social change as the outcasts, marginal
groups, and people in peripheral nations. His 1965 essay
“Repressive Tolerance” spells out even more clearly how the
brutal impacts of U.S. political culture were central to
Marcuse’s thinking during the period immediately after the
publication of ODM as its military involvement in Vietnam
escalated dramatically.
The toleration of the systematic moronization of children

and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of
destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and
training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance
toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned
obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the
essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means of
perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the
alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology
are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are
less vociferous against the proud presentation in word and deed
and pictures of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs―the
mature delinquency of a whole civilization.7
7 Ibid., p. 83.
85
Peter-Erwin Jansen
“Repressive Tolerance” noted the originally pro-

gressive character of tolerance, yet it condemned the liberal
use of the doctrine of “pure tolerance” for the protection of
racist speech and the brutal realities of the white supremacist
movement. This liberal use adversely affected minorities in
the U.S., excluding them from the political participation
process and opening the way for much worse.
Repressive Tolerance of Racist Police Brutality?
Given the new awareness of the regularity of police

killings of unarmed black men in the U.S. after incidents such
as Ferguson and Baltimore, Marcuse’s insights in “Repressive
Tolerance” are extraordinarily prescient. Marcuse condemns
the violence that actually prevails in the ostensibly peaceful
centers of civilization: “it is practiced by the police, in the
prisons and the mental institutions, in the fight against racial
minorities . . . . This violence indeed breeds violence.”8 But “in
terms of its historical function, there is a difference between
revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence
practiced by the oppressed and (violence practiced) by the
oppressors.”9 In “Repressive Tolerance” Marcuse also
commented that “to refrain from violence in the face of vastly
superior force is one thing, to renounce [it] apriori . . . is
another.”10 This statement gets twisted by Marcuse’s
opponents into a supposed justification for terroristic violence.
In this cynical manner Marcuse’s critics serve the cause of
racist police brutality and other forms of state-sanctioned
8 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of

Pure Tolerance edited by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and
Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) p. 102.
9 Ibid., p. 103.
10 Ibid., p. 102.
violence by weakening the protest against it.11 Marcuse is

clear: “at present no power, no authority, no government on
earth exists which would translate liberating tolerance into
practice,” so it becomes “the task and duty of the intellectual
to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to
have become utopian possibilities―that it is his task to break
the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental
space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and
does.”12
These criticisms are as relevant in 2015 as they were in

1969, if not more so. World-wide political repression is
continuing and intensifying as a consequence of, and in spite
of, the global crisis of finance capitalism. Despite the
promotion of over-consumption in the wealthy global North,
governments utilize the newest techniques of information
gathering and monitoring to impede the radical social
movements fighting for human emancipation and dignity
around the globe.
The version of One-Dimensional Man published in 1964

can also be compared with a manuscript version newly
discovered in the Brandeis archives. This manuscript of ODM
offers us some new insights about the evolution of Marcuse’s
thoughts. Some particular chapters were shifted around, there
are occasional deletions, some hand-written additions, mostly
single words, rarely an entire sentence. Three pages of
“preliminary definitions” were not included. The place where
the most conspicuous and significant differences occur is in
the conclusion. In the original the last sentences containing a
pessimistic analysis of the totally administered world of
advanced industrial society are rounded out with a quotation
from Walter Benjamin: “It is only for the sake of those without
11 Ibid., p. 103.
12 Ibid., pp. 81-82.
87
Peter-Erwin Jansen
hope that hope is given to us” (ODM, 257).
The manuscript version just discovered is substantially

more optimistic13 with regard to the political possibilities of
the “Great Refusal” and the transformation of society toward
a “concrete utopia”14 through the “second-dimension” of art.
It seems in this version of the conclusion that Marcuse wants
to go back and point to certain tendencies for emancipation
that emerge in chapter three of the book, propensities released
through “the aesthetic dimension.” “Whether ritualized or
not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced
positions, art is the Great Refusal―the protest against that
which is” (ODM, 63).15 The second-dimensionality of art is
seldom given due consideration by most commentators on
ODM; Marcuse’s emphasis on it in the revised version
indicates its importance to him.
ODM’s critical sociological perspective on the

dynamics of social change, its philosophical approach and its
dialectical method and analysis of technology are central to its
13 Substantiation for art’s claim of transcendence (and that it

offers a promise that the future world can be a better one), may be
found in Herbert Marcuse, Kunst und Befreiung, Nachgelassene
Schriften Bd, 2 published with a foreword by Peter-Erwin Jansen,
Introduction by Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (Lüneburg: zu
Klampen!, 2000). See also Herbert Marcuse, Art and Liberation,
Collected Papers Volume 4, edited by Douglas Kellner (London:
Routledge, 2007).
14 These critical concepts from ODM are not idle turns of
phrase; they are developed in detail in Marcuse’s publications

between 1966 and 1977.
15 Marcuse’s critical evaluation of mass culture, which is seen
as eliminating the tension between the real and the possible, as

disempowering the “subversive potential” of art and its power of
negation, can only be made given the thesis of the liberating power
of art inherent in its two-dimensionality.
critique of rationality and dominant use of technology. These

elements are also key to the critical analysis of our social order
today and its prospects for transformation.
Several areas of social life that once appeared relatively

stable in terms of politics and economics are losing their
legitimation. The social unrest and rebellions at the end of the
1960s, the anti-colonial struggles and the world-wide crisis of
capitalism in the 1970s, testify to this. The activists in these
global uprisings did not “instigate” these crises, rather the
waves of protest were themselves reactions to the various
causes of all these political crises. The activists and protesters
should instead be seen as results of the one-dimensional
society.
But what did these, largely socialist, students see in

Marcuse’s book? The German sociologist, Detlev Claussen,16
who taught at the University of Hannover, was one of
Adorno’s students and a close friend of Hans-Jürgen
Krahl―one of the main figures of the Frankfurt SDS who died
at 27 years of age in 1970 in a car accident―compared Marcuse
favorably to Adorno in an interview with me: “Certainly his
ODM, published in Germany in 1967, containing his analysis
of the tendential development of late-capitalist society,
possessed an equally great influence. I would say that the
book was key and therefore attracted so much derision―from
all sides. It remained significant for the Left into the early ’80s
as well.” In contrast to Claussen’s statement, Daniel Cohn
Bendit―called “Danny the Red” not only because of his
reddish hair―noted: “None of us had read this thing.”
16 Detlev Claussen published an Adorno biography 2005,

translated 2008: One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).
89
Peter-Erwin Jansen
It remains unclear until today who among the activists

really read Marcuse’s analysis of the internal logic in the
development of modern capitalism, and who understood why
Marcuse defined one important structural element in the new
system of government as the fusion of technological and
political rationality. The orthodox communist groups like the
German Communist Party (DKP) and the party intellectuals
within the former DDR and Soviet Union read Marcuse’s book
as a kind of political apocalypse: the capitalist system
dominates everything, including the optimistic subject of the
revolution: the proletariat.
When Francis Ford Coppola’s 1977 movie “Apocalypse

Now” depicted the brutality of U.S. military action during the
Vietnam war, a new era of destruction had become reality: the
possibility of a nuclear war between the East and the West.
But: Apocalypse Now? Some activists would exclaim years
later when they got their well-paid academic or political
positions in the system of the so-called alternative subculture:
Hurrah We're Still Alive.17 Some of them did not survive when
in the Seventies mistakenly fought a “war” against the
established political system in Germany, organizing in the
Red Army Fraction murdering so-called representatives of the
system in a non-revolutionary situation.
On the other hand, the police murder of Benno

Ohnesorg in June, 1967, the resurgent right-wing movement,
the German peoples’ “unmastered past” with regard to the
Nazi System, the media dominance of the right-wing tabloid
Bild-Zeitung, the great coalition (Große Koalition), the so-
called emergency laws (Notstandsgesetze), the political and
social situation seemed to be at an inescapable dead end. All
17 See the novel „Hurrah wir leben noch“ by the Austrian

novelist Johannes Mario Simmel. He describes the situation of the
Germans after WW2.
of this confirmed Marcuse’s view that this political system

would not give up any power and would react with ongoing
authoritarianism.
One-Dimensional Man has become a classic: a key

resource discussing an historical phase in the development of
the capitalist socio-economic order when the “culture of
excess” emerged. In the late Sixties Marcuse’s book was a
bestseller. In France 80,000 copies were sold by May 1968. In
Germany 150,000 by 1971. By 1980 the book had appeared in
its 15th edition.
A fresh interpretation of ODM as an explanation of the

origins of the current crisis (2008 to present) would not be
without merit. After all, the fundamental structures and
tendencies persist within today’s socio-economic and political
developments. Angela Siebold, a scholar in Heidelberg
University’s Department of History, presented the study of
ODM as an assignment to her summer semester 2014 class of
about twenty students, and we collaborated closely. The
students offered their own comments and interpretations and
opened up new perspectives given the contemporary
conditions. I met with Prof. Siebold and her students at the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt this past July to
discuss their perspectives. I gave a talk about ODM and we
had a roundtable discussion about the book’s new edition.
The students presented a collectively written account of their
impressions and appraisals in a summary statement:
Reading ODM today is a challenge. Marcuse confronts

us with concepts that are today no longer immediately
accessible. We get a sense that they are as arcane as smoke-
filled seminar rooms and are best read through horn-rimmed
glasses. There is clearly a chasm separating the historical
context of 1964 and the social-political situation today: We no
longer have the sense of a rivalry between [the Soviet and
91
Peter-Erwin Jansen
Western] systems, nor do we feel the direct threat of atomic

destruction. Industrial societies have been transformed into
service-based societies or even information-based societies.
But our world is even more single-dimensional because
technology has seeped into every niche of everyday life, and
shackles us.
Ever more incessant needs are created and

immediately fulfilled, for example your Nearby Friends
available through a Facebook-function, your Smartwatch with
internet connectivity built-in, all the new smart apps that let
you forget that your disappearing privacy means also that
freedom and individuality are lost. We are the virtuosos of
virtuality―masters of obliviousness. A voluntary conformism
arises, with no option to be in opposition to it. Those who
must endure the privation of having no cell phone are also
deprived of the very possibility of immediate communication
and involvement in socially relevant debates and cat videos.
Conformism also finds expression in language.

“Transparency, free choice, and security” are central concepts
from Google’s well-advertised privacy philosophy. Marcuse
detected how concepts like these get flattened-out into single-
dimensional language. Freedom is robbed of its larger
dimension and is reduced to a variety of market choices that
are all the same. The multiplicity of goods on the market and
the imperative of consumerism carry with them an
evangelistic message: We have no grounds for complaint; we
have it good; alternatives are utopian. Examining Marcuse’s
writing today opens up a series of questions: How can
technology today liberate us from our shackles, relieve
humanity from its single-dimensional work and leisure? How
might our genuine needs and desires be supported during
leisure time? Is there any opposition outside of the first-
dimension? Where is this outside? And how do I get there?18
18 This excerpt is a summary of a ten-plus page report

produced by a group of students in the seminar.
The scientific and technological dominance the

students describe is today more powerful and more
dominant than ever. As Marcuse writes in the preface to
ODM:
The union of growing productivity and growing

destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender
of thought, hope, fear to the decisions of the powers that be;
the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented
wealth constitute the most impartial indictment―even if they
are not the raison d’étre of this society but only its by-product:
its sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth,
is itself irrational. (ODM, xiii)
The new information technologies, the centralization

of the media, the collection of data by intelligence agencies,
called euphemistically harmless “metadata”―all of these
are new forms of social control. Today we can deeply
appreciate the ongoing currency of Marcuse’s fore-
warnings of the Sixties. Even more, we see the second-
dimensional intellectual artistry of his emancipatory
insights and conclusions.
Acknowledgement: I am much obliged to Dr. Angela

Siebold and her students in the Department of History of
Heidelberg University for their engagement with One-
Dimensional Man and their intensive debates with regard to
Marcuse’s work which have enriched this essay.
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Peter-Erwin Jansen
Critical Education and Political Economy
Charles Reitz
Critical Education and Political Economy:

Decommodification of Labor, Leadership & Learning
Herbert Marcuse’s recently discovered Paris lectures of

1974 retain an immense relevance. Today more than ever,
given the current crisis of global finance capital, higher
education must encourage students and faculty alike to
examine the conditions that serve to perpetuate the
increasingly stressed and volatile realities of political,
economic, and cultural life in the U.S. and the militarized
processes of U.S.-led global polarization. Marcuse’s analysis
discloses how the very development of “capitalism invalidates
its own production relations, that capitalism invalidates its
own way of life, its own existence.” Furthermore, he shows
that there are attainable and realistic alternatives―including
those that have dimensions once derided as utopian.
Corporate globalization has intensified social inequality

and cultural polarization worldwide. Increasing globalization
correlates directly with growing inequality both within and
between nations (Sernau, 2006). This global polarization and
growing immiseration have brought to an end what Herbert
Marcuse (1964) theorized in One Dimensional Man as the
totally integrated and completely administered political
universe of the liberal welfare/warfare state. Neoliberalism
has replaced this “comfortable, smooth, democratic
unfreedom” (Marcuse, 1964, 1) with something more openly
vicious. Peter McLaren (1997, 2) calls it predatory culture.
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Charles Reitz
Nonetheless, it was Marcuse who, forty years ago, first

warned of the global economic and cultural developments
that are now much more obvious given capitalism’s crescendo
of economic failures since 2008. Political and philosophical
tendencies that are often referred to as “neoliberalism” and/or
“neo-conservatism” in much analytical work today, Marcuse
clearly understood back then as organized counterrevolution
(Marcuse 1972). He saw this political development as a
preemptive strike undertaken by an increasingly predatory
capitalism against liberal democratic change, not to mention
the radical opposition ([1974] 1987, 172). “The Western world
has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of
the capitalist system requires the organization of
counterrevolution at home and abroad. . . . Torture has
become a normal instrument of ‘interrogation’ around the
world. . . . even Liberals are not safe if they appear as too
liberal . . . .” (Marcuse 1972, 1). Yet Herbert Marcuse
emphasized in another recently discovered essay: “The very
achievements of capitalism have brought about its
obsolescence and the possibility of the alternative!”1 Awareness
of this possibility can be strengthened through economically
informed, action-oriented, critical teaching and learning.
Accounting for Inequality
An in-depth examination of the social dynamics of

economic inequality is a vital part of radical pedagogy. How
well equipped is the teacher corps to direct dialogue
regarding the complex underlying structures of economic
oppression? The realities of exploitation, though entrenched,
are too often overlooked (and actively suppressed) by
analysts, policy makers, commentators, and educators when
1 Herbert Marcuse, “Why Talk on Socialism?” in Charles

Reitz, Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2015) p. 309.
examining both the causes and the impacts of imperial

corporate globalization. My purpose is here is to provide key
materials that can become an element in various lesson plans
to help faculty and students to understand, question, and
challenge the deeply-rooted origins of economic inequality. I
want to do this through a discussion of observed patterns of
wealth and income distribution and other specific exhibits that
can be theoretically and politically powerful tools for teachers
in several interrelated disciplines―sociology, economics,
history, and ethics, as well as logic and critical thinking. My
thesis is that inequality is not simply a matter of distance
between rich and poor, but of the structural relationships in the
economic arena of propertied and non-propertied segments of
populations.
The objective of this piece is, thus, a fundamental

empowerment: not only to develop, through fact-based
observations drawn from the national income accounts and
critical social analysis, a fuller awareness of objective
conditions, but also to generate a “new sensibility” (Marcuse,
1969a) with regard to the prospects for radical social change. I
share Marcuse’s critical understanding that:
To create the subjective conditions for a free society [it is]

no longer sufficient to educate individuals to perform
more or less happily the functions they are supposed to
perform in this society or extend ‘vocational’ education to
the ‘masses.’ Rather . . [we must] . . . educate men and
women who are incapable of tolerating what is going on,
who have really learned what is going on, has always
been going on, and why, and who are educated to resist
and to fight for a new way of life (Marcuse, [1968] 2009a,
35).
My aim is to aid an emancipatory form of critical

education theory and practice―to mobilize students and
faculty to challenge the conditions, educational and otherwise,
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Charles Reitz
that serve to perpetuate increasingly alienating, unequal, and

undemocratic realities in the global economy and in the
political and cultural life of the U.S.A.
Modeling Income Flows and the Capital/Labor Split
The analytical innovations presented here can be

regarded as a contribution to critical social theory insofar as
they “project potentiality in the objective conditions”
(Marcuse, this volume, 18) and embody a newer form of
concrete critical social science inquiry that examines the
structures and dynamics of capital formation and the problematic
patterns of workforce remuneration in the U.S. while also
projecting the possibilities derived from this analysis for
radical social change in the conditions of labor.
The observations which I will make on the origins and

outcomes of income inequality in the nation’s manufacturing
sector offer several principles that can be applied more
generally to the production and sale of products in other
sectors of the U.S. and global economies, such as the financial
system and information-based services. This approach draws
out implications latent in standard economic data, and arrives
at certain significant findings and conclusions that have been
avoided in standard economics and business textbooks. It also
fills-in some of the key and notable economic deficits of
contemporary forms of cultural critique stemming from
postmodern literary and aesthetic theory.
To explain the mechanism generating inequality a

model is required that can depict and clarify income flows in
terms of differential returns to labor and capital as the two basic
factors in the production process itself. I offer such a model in
Figure 1. Usually concealed, the structure and dynamics of the
value production process will be made visible here in their
material form.
Students―and faculty―typically have little awareness

of the nature of wealth or the pattern of its distribution in
society. They also lack insight into the connection of income
flows to relations of property ownership. Of all households:
85% of the total wealth is held by the richest fifth

11% by the second wealthiest fifth
4% by the middle fifth
1% by the second lowest fifth
-1% by the poorest fifth of all households2
The concentration of wealth has enormous implications

for the distribution of income. Those households with the
greatest wealth also receive the greatest incomes, inasmuch as their
incomes derive from their vast property holdings.
If the facts of increasing economic inequality are largely

undisputed, the same may not be said of their social
significance. The prevailing views among economists and
business utopians, represented in the writings of George
Gilder (1993) for example, hold that these inequalities are
natural and normal, a positive social good.
Despite all the hype given to Thomas Piketty with

regard to capital and inequality in the 21st century, his analysis
(and most commentary upon it) offers no radical challenge to
corporate liberalism (Andrews, 2015; Reitz, 2015a,
forthcoming). Yet, the profoundly negative impacts of this
vastly unequal wealth distribution on life chances must be
addressed. “Life chances” is of course the technical term used
to indicate the relative access a household has to the society’s
economic resources: decent housing, health care, education,
employment, etc. The greater the wealth in one’s household,
2John J. Macionis, Social Problems, Census Edition (Boston:

Prentice-Hall, 2012) p.31.
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Charles Reitz
the greater one’s life chances. The less the wealth in one's
household, the fewer the life chances.
The question of where wealth comes from was

classically posed and settled by early social philosophers, John
Locke and Adam Smith, though this is seldom discussed with
students. Precursors to Marx, they held that a person’s labor is
the real source of all property that one might have the right to
call one’s own. In advocating that labor has the right to retain
the full value of the wealth it creates Marx was simply
carrying the labor theory of value through to its logical
conclusion.
Marx and Marcuse encompassed the theories of Locke

and Smith within a larger philosophy of labor. Where Locke
and Smith saw individual labor as the source of private
property, in an atomistic (Robinsonian) manner, Marx
recognized that all humans are born into a social context.
Humanity’s earliest customs, i.e. communal production, shared
ownership, and solidarity assured that the needs of all were met, by
right not by charity, i.e. including those not directly involved in
production like children, the disabled, and the elderly. This right to
a commonwealth economy, humanity’s earliest ethic of
holding property in common, derives only secondarily from
any individual’s factual individual contributions to
production; it is rooted primarily in our essentially
cooperative and empathic species nature as humans. Marx
and Marcuse stressed that labor is a social process; that the
value created through labor is most genuinely measured by
socially necessary labor time; and its product rightfully belongs
to the labor force as a body, not to individuals as such, i.e.
grounding a theory of common ownership and justice, i.e., the
rights of CommonWealth (Reitz 2015b).
The labor theory of value, even in Locke and Smith, is

rejected by most conventional economists who contend that
labor is merely a cost of doing business, and that profit

accrues from entrepreneurial skill, technological innovation,
and risk-taking. These factors may increase profit in the short
run in a sub-division of any given industry, where fractions of
capital compete, yet in the long run the innovative production
processes and reduced costs and payrolls become the new
social average. What has meaning for an individual
entrepreneur does not explain the aggregate picture. National
income accounts, on the other hand, reveal the structural
fundamentals of the value production process. Very
importantly, these national income accounts―unlike the
prevailing business utopian models―do not include the “cost” of
labor among the input costs in the conception of the production
process they utilize. Instead, they treat workforce remuneration as do
Locke, Smith, and Marx above―as an income flow stemming from
the value production process itself. These accounts are insightful
and useful in Marxist terms in that they presuppose that labor
in each firm (and by extension each branch of production) is
paid for through payroll outlays from the total value that is added
through the firm’s value production process.
The model I have developed will illustrate the

dynamics of wealth acquisition and accumulation and the
generative mechanisms that are the origins of inequality
(Figure 1). This will illustrate my thesis that inequality is not
simply a matter of the gap between rich and poor, but of the
structural relationships in the economic arena between
propertied and non-propertied segments of populations (the
capital-labor split). My goal is to present in theoretical form
the inner necessity of exploitative class relations within
capitalism. This model may serve as a small but necessary
contribution to the advancement of a more economically
informed critical theory of society and indicate how and why
property relations must be addressed in order to root out
recurring crises. Figure 1 outlines the structure and the
dynamics of the value production process―in manufacturing―
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Charles Reitz
and depicts the essential working of the substantive economy.3
Central to the model is an understanding of the process

of adding value to economic inputs by working them up by
the end of the process into finished products. The amount of
new wealth created through production is calculated by
subtracting the dollar costs of the inputs (supplies, raw
materials, tools, fuel, electricity, etc.) from the dollar value of
the outputs. The difference equals the value added, and the
value added is distributed as income to the two major factors
in production, labor and capital. Every dollar of the value
added is distributed into one of the two basic income
categories: 1) returns to the workforce (in terms of the
payroll―wages and salaries), or 2) returns to owners and
investors (in terms of profit, rent, dividends, interest).
Subtracting the payroll from the value added discloses the
income flow returning to capital, which accumulates as
wealth. Thus, this model actually represents the three
inextricably interconnected activities of production,
distribution, and capital accumulation. The model discloses
the fundamental distributive structures of the contemporary
business economy: capital acquisition/accumulation and
workforce remuneration. If labor creates all wealth, as John
Locke and Adam Smith maintained, then labor creates all the
value that is distributed as income to the labor force (wages
and salaries) and to capital (rent, interest, dividends, and
profit). I emphasize that incomes returned to capital and labor
are structurally determined, i.e. conditioned primarily by
3 The value-added approach emphasizes the importance of

production as the key factor in the generation of substantive growth
in national wealth and in the assessment of national income in
terms of substantive, value-added outputs. A highly financialized
economy, in which capital seeks valorization without employment,
leads to the delusional (inflated, unreal) claims on wealth that are
not sustainable.
societal, rather than individual, factors. A major portion of the

value employees add to the economy is seized by employers
as a return to capital. This is the meaning of exploitation and
wasted abundance.
Figure 2 presents data from the Statistical Abstract of the

United States 2011 measuring the wealth created in every
manufacturing sector of the economy. This substantive, real-
world data can be plugged into the model outlined above to
gain a concrete understanding of how the economy functions,
especially the dynamics of capital accumulation, which results
from the differential incomes distributed to labor and to
capital. Every dollar of the value added in U.S. manu-
facturing―for example in 2008, $2,274,367 million (the most
recent available figure)―was distributed into one of the two
basic reproduction categories: 1) as income to the workforce
―as payroll (wages and salaries)―$607,447 million; and 2) as
income to owners and investors―as profit, rent, dividends, and
interest―$1,666,920 million. Something very like this dispropor-
tionate division of the added value between labor (26.7 percent) and
capital (73.3 percent) is structured by unequal property relations
into the dynamics of reproduction in nearly every sector of the
economy and into the division of the Gross Domestic Product
overall.
A critical philosophical perspective demonstrates that

labor has a reality and a capacity beyond its theoretical and practical
confinement within its commodified form (i.e. a wage or salary).
The fuller potential and power of labor, as recognized also by
Locke and Smith, challenges the presumption that capital
produces value, the view that profit unilaterally accrues as a
reward for the contribution of the investor/employer. Labor
provides the total value added in the production process.
Profit is a subtraction from the value produced. The workforce is
a resource with programmatic power. It is the creative force in the
economy. Everything depends on labor. Labor occurs in social
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Charles Reitz
relationships; it is a communal project of social beings to meet

human needs and promote human flourishing. Because social
labor is the source of social wealth, only the labor force, as a
group, has a legitimate right to the ownership of this wealth.
Private ownership of capital is clearly not socially

necessary for value (i.e. wealth) production. The necessary
component is labor. A critical appreciation of work turns right
side round the empiricist assertion that “job creators” are
paying their employees, and demonstrates that employees are
paying their employers. This exposes the Jobs Shell Game: the
theory that businesses can reduce inequality by “creating
jobs” is politically deceptive and pathetic for labor, given that
each quantity q of income flow to such a job (as wage) is
generally accompanied (in the private manufacturing sector)
by an income flow of 3q to capital.
In any society the labor force must produce a surplus of

value/wealth to maintain infrastructure and provide for social
goods such as health care, education, etc., over and above
incomes to individuals. Marx’s point is that only the labor force
as a social body has a legitimate right to manage this surplus.
When it does, the first condition for a humanist commonwealth
has been met.
Consider Peter McLaren’s (2015) views in “Revolu-

tionary Critical Pedagogy for a Socialist Society, A
Manifesto”―
We are faced with two choices about how to live our

humanity―the liberal model of pleading with corporations to
temper their cruelty and greed, and the reactionary model that has
declared war on social and economic equality. And on the evidence
that each of these models is fiercely and hopelessly entangled in
each other’s conflictual embrace, we can accept neither.
As advocates of revolutionary critical pedagogy . . . . we

participate in an analysis of the objective social totality . . . we
simultaneously struggle for a social universe outside the commodity form
of labor. If we are to educate at all, we must educate for this!
It is precisely the socialist partisanship of critical
pedagogy―not to the point of dogmatism or inflexibility―that
reveals its power of critique. We need to reclaim the power of
critique as the sword arm of social justice and not relinquish it. For
in doing so we reclaim our humanity and the world.
Marcuse in 1972 made a similar and a striking

statement linking socialism in its most radical form to the
authentically aesthetic form of a free society. The radical
opposition thus had “a strange unorthodox character . . . .
[T]his opposition is directed against the totality of a well-
functioning, prosperous society―a protest against its Form
―the commodity form of men and things . . . .” (1972, 49, 51).
No non-socialist theory of society or education has any

profound quarrel with wage labor or the general system of
commodity dependency. Marx admonishes workers:
“…instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair
day’s work!’ they should inscribe on their banner the
revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages-system!’” (Marx
[1865] 1965, emphasis in original). Marx clarified capitalist
society’s obsession with production for profit rather than
human need. This is its structurally generated fetish /
addiction to production for commodity exchange rather than
for use-values. Production for use rather than exchange would
optimize living conditions within the social formation as a
whole. Capitalist productive relations are driving global labor
to its knees. Only the abolition of wage labor and commodity
fetishism in the economy can restore satisfaction and dignity
to an uncommodified labor process.
Commodified existence is not natural; it is contrived.

Significant portions of commodified social life need to be
rethought and reconstructed. Realigning the social order to
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Charles Reitz
conform with the highest potentials of our economy,

technology, and human nature requires the decom-
modification of certain economic4 minimums: health care,
child care, education, food, transportation, housing―and
work, through a guaranteed income. These are pre-
revolutionary, transitional goals. Revolutionary goals envisage a
more encompassing view of human flourishing: the passage
from wages and salaries to voluntary public work in the public
interest―voluntary public work for a commonwealth of freedom.
[W]e have to become aware of the real possibility of a

revolution in the most advanced industrial countries taking
place not on a basis of poverty and misery, but rather on the
basis of wasted abundance. And if this paradoxical concept is
correct, it would mean that we have to become aware of new
motives for revolution―new motives for revolution and new
goals of revolution that no longer focus on the possibility or
necessity of revolution born of misery and material privation,
but a revolution on the basis of increasing social wealth for
increasing strata of the population. (Marcuse, this volume, 49).
Without a world economic system based on equality

and democracy, there will be no peace and no survival.
McLaren (2000, 1997) has long called for a pedagogy of
revolution and revolutionary multiculturalism―that is,
teaching the truth about ending class exploitation, racism,
gender inequality, empire, and war.
The abolition of the wages-system (labor’s

decommodification) is not absolutely sufficient to secure the
4 Also the decommodification of the electoral process and

political leadership. Recall Marcuse’s statement in the Paris lectures,
page 5 above, that “If it is impossible to become a candidate in the
elections without disposing of a fortune of around a million dollars,
this is in any case a strange form of democracy.”
conditions for each of us to become all that we are capable of

being. Yet, the alienation and exploitation of labor is the
enabling material core that permits, if not to say requires,
society to legitimate a variety of other forms of social
oppression. We have learned from the movements against
racism and sexism that class relations do not wholly
demarcate structures of dominator power. Racism, patriarchy,
anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other forms of
discrimination, disrespect, and inequality sorely inhibit our
powers of actualization. To theorize scientifically the cultural
transformation of each of these negations and to be engaged
politically and culturally with the labor force to end them
must be the essential logic and manifesto of all future critical
teaching. At the conclusion of Marcuse’s Paris Lectures he calls
for:
a new form of socialism, namely socialism as in any and every

respect qualitatively different and a break with capitalism . . .
and it seems to me that only a decisive redirection of
production itself would in this sense be a revolutionary
development. A total redirection of production, first of all, of
course, towards the abolition of poverty and scarcity
wherever it exists in the world today. Secondly, a total
reconstruction of the environment and the creation of space
and time for creative work; space and time for creative work
instead of alienated labor as a full-time occupation. (This
volume, 69)
Marcuse’s emphasis on creative work leads him from

the minimal goals of socialism to the aesthetic ethos of
socialism―to socialism as the aesthetic form of free human
society. Our practice of critical pedagogy must connect to this
politics of real cultural revolution.
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Charles Reitz
Figure 1
Income Flows under Capitalism: The Capital/Labor Split
VALUE ADDED
through L A B O R ,
P R O D U C T I O N
P R O C E S S
►----------------------------------►
START Total END

Value of New Value
Produced in 2008 Value of
Production
Inputs through labor Production
in manufacturing: Outputs
Total costs $2,274,367 million.
of supplies, This total was distributed as
fuel, raw income
materials, to Labor and to Capital
electricity,
tools, etc.
↓ ↓
Income Income
returned returned
to to
Labor = Capital =
Payroll: Rent, Interest,

Wages and Dividends, Profit
Salaries
$1,666,920 mil.
$607,447 mil.
Figure 2 Income Returned to Capital =

Value Added by Manufactures minus Total Payroll
109
Charles Reitz
Recommended Reading
Andrews, Charles. 2015. “Book Review: Capital in the Twenty First

Century,” Review of Radical Political Economics
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/early/recent Retrieved April 26, 2015.
Freire, Paulo. [1970] 1993. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York:

Continuum.
Kellner, Douglas, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce. 2008. On Marcuse: Critique,

Liberation, and Reschooling in the Radical Pedagogy of Herbert Marcuse.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Kellner, Douglas. 2003. From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush
Legacy. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
__________. 1995. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics

Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York:
Routledge.
Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2015a. Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974.

Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz (Eds). Frankfurt am M. and
Kansas City: Jansen and Reitz.
__________. [1975] 2015b. “Why Talk on Socialism?” in Appendix to

Charles Reitz (ed.) Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx,
McLaren. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
__________. [1958] 2012. “Preface,” in Kevin B. Anderson and Russell

Rockwell, (eds.). The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence,
1954-1978. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
__________. [1968] 2009a. “Lecture on Education, Brooklyn College, 1968”

in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, K. Daniel Cho.
Marcuse’s Challenge to Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
__________. [1975] 2009b. “Lecture on Higher Education and Politics,

Berkeley, 1975” in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce,
K. Daniel Cho. 2009. Marcuse’s Challenge to Education. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
__________. [1933] 1998. “33 Theses” in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse:

Technology, War, and Fascism Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse,
Volume 1. London and New York: Routledge.
__________. [1974] 1987. Zeit-Messungen. In Herbert Marcuse Schriften 9.

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
__________. 1979. “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Canadian Journal of

Political and Social Theory / Revue canadienne de théorie politique et
sociale, Vol 3, No 1 (Winter/Hiver).
__________. 1978. The Aesthetic Dimension. Boston: Beacon Press.
__________. [1930] 1976. “On the Problem of the Dialectic,” Telos, No. 27,
Spring 1976.
__________. [1933] 1973a. “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept

of Labor in Economics,” Telos, No. 16, Summer 1973.
__________. [1932] 1973b. “The Foundation of Historical Materialism,” in

his Studies in Critical Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.
__________. 1972. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press.
__________. 1970. “The End of Utopia,” in his Five Lectures. Boston: Beacon
Press.
__________. 1969a. An Essay On Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.
__________. 1969b. “The Relevance of Reality” Proceedings of the American

Philosophical Association. 1968-69.
__________. 1969c. “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff,

Barington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (eds.) A Critique of Pure
Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press.
_________. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Macionis, John. J. 2004. Society: the Basics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
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McLaren, Peter and Nathalia Jaramillo. 2010. “The Arts, Aesthetics, and
Critical Pedagogy,” Keynote address, 3rd International Congress
on Art and Visual Education, University of Malaga, Spain.
Published in 2010. Actas 3er Congreso Internacional de Educación
Artística y Visual, Facultad de Ciencias Educación, Universidad de
Málaga.
_________. 2007. Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New
Humanism. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. 2005. Teaching Against Global

Capitalism and the New Imperialism. Lanham, Boulder, New York,
and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
McLaren, Peter. 2015. “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy for a Socialist

Society,” in Charles Reitz (ed.) Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse,
Marx, McLaren. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
_________. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution.
Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers.
_________. 1997. Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the

New Millennium. Boulder: Westview Press, a Division of
HarperCollins.
_________. 1995. Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture. London and New
York: Routledge.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Reitz, Charles. 2015a. “Accounting for Inequality: Questioning Piketty on

National Income Accounts and the Capital-Labor Split,” Review of
Radical Political Economics, forthcoming.
_________. (ed.) 2015b. Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
_________. 2009a. “Herbert Marcuse and the Humanities: Emancipatory

Education and Predatory Culture,” in Douglas Kellner, Tyson
Lewis, Clayton Pierce, K. Daniel Cho, Marcuse’s Challenge to
Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
_________. 2009b. “Herbert Marcuse and the New Culture Wars,” in

Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, K. Daniel Cho,
Marcuse’s Challenge to Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
_________. 2009c. “Marcuse in America: Exile as Educator” Fast Capitalism

5.2 www.fastcapitalism.org
_________. 2002. “Elements of EduAction: Critical Pedagogy and the

Community College,” in Judith Slater et. al. (eds.) The Freirean
Legacy: Educating for Social Justice. New York, Bern, Frankfurt: Peter
Lang.
_________. 2000. Art, Alienation, and the Humanities. A Critical Engagement

with Herbert Marcuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Sernau, Scott. 2006. Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a New Century.

Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi: Pine Forge Press.
U.S. Department of Commerce. 2011. Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
113
Charles Reitz
Afterword to Marcuse’s 1974 Paris Lectures
Douglas Kellner, UCLA
Afterword to Herbert Marcuse’s Paris Lectures
Herbert Marcuse’s Paris lectures at Vincennes

University provide vivid examples of Marcuse’s power as a
lecturer, radical intellectual, and revolutionary as he entered
into the final decade of his life and work. Marcuse’s language
is crisp and forceful as he articulates his critique of what he
called “developed capitalist societies.” Throughout, he
contextualizes his analysis in terms of the vicissitudes of
contemporary capitalism and the forces of opposition and
revolt. It is indeed striking to note the extent to which
Marcuse’s analysis of the conditions of the mid-1970s was
structured in terms of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the
concepts of class and radical opposition.
The lectures were divided into seven presentations in

which Marcuse updates his analysis of contemporary
capitalism, the political situation in the United States, and the
prospects of the radical opposition and possibilities of
revolutionary social transformation.
Marcuse opens his First Presentation by addressing

“American society today” as an exemple of “the most
advanced stage of monopoly capitalism,” which he explicates
in Marxian terms and within his own focus on how
contemporary capitalist societies on a global scale were
developing advanced forms of scientific and technological
rationality, an amalgamation of political, economic, and
military power, and new forms of social control and
domination. As with much of Marcuse’s writing in the 1960s
and 1970s, he was concerned in the Paris lectures to provide
115
Douglas Kellner
descriptions of the contemporary configurations of power and

forms of domination and social control in advanced capitalist
countries, especially the United States where he was living
and working, and which is the focus of these lectures.
The Paris lectures present Marcuse’s key ideas of the

period in the context of 1970s political struggles, and indicate
both continuities and shifts from his writings of the 1960s at
which time he emerged as a radical critic and major advocate
of revolutionary social and political change. The lecture
format offers sharp presentation of many of his key theses,
cogent arguments, concrete political examples, and a constant
effort to relate his ideas to movements for radical social
change. Yet the lectures also illustrate the Marcusean dialectic
of analysing both forces of domination and liberation,
indicating both hopes for radical social change and factors that
illuminate the powers of a repressive social system.
The First Presentation immediately focuses on class and

the class domination of the bourgeoisie which he interestingly
associates with the Mafia on pages 2 and 25-26, pointing to
criminal tendencies and scandals within the capitalist class
and within the political class, as emboded in the Nixon
administration which would lead to Richard Nixon abdicating
the presidency during the Watergate scandal, the first forced
resignation of a U.S. presidency in history. Interestingly,
Marcuse talks of the “self-abdication of Congress in favor of
the Excecutive Branch” pointing to the initial failure of
Congress to confront Nixon on the emergence of the
Watergate scandal and other disgraces of the day, or over the
illegal and unpopular Vietnam war. The war, certainly, had
been criticized for years by Marcuse and the radical
opposition, and in the end Nixon did, of course, resign.
Yet at the same time, Marcuse stresses forces of

integration and stabilization within contemporary U.S.
society, marked in Marcuse’s view by the integration of the

working class into consumer capitalism. Marcuse also points
to the global reorganization of capitalism with new forms of
imperialism and colonialism and apparent detente with the
Soviet Union and China, which indicate Marcuse’s tendency
to carry out a neo-Marxian analysis in the context of the
current configurations of what we now call globalization. This
global problematic was embedded in Marcuse’s work from
the beginning of his emigration to the U.S. and work for the
U.S. government and then universities, where he rose to
renown as a world-famous intellectual and radical who
frequently travelled the world and developed a global and
cosmopolitian radical vision.
Marcuse was always alert to the most utopian

possibilities for radical social change, even in the midst of
situations of social repression, stability, and conformity, as
well as the possibilities of societal crisis and collapse, a
dialectic signaled in the Paris Lectures as he addressed
“tendencies of disintegration and weakening,” and forces of
radical opposition. Along with other writings of the late 1960s
and early 1970s that discussed the vicissudes of the New Left,
counterculture, and new forces of opposition in the women’s
movement, the black and brown radical movements, and the
gay and lesbian movement, Marcuse addresses the
unorthodox nature of the forces of radical opposition in
comparison with the Marxian theory that valorized the
industrial working class as the matrix of social change and
upheaval.
The Paris lectures demonstrated how Marcuse had

become a major figure in contemporary social theory and
radical politics through his concern with concrete socio-
political analysis and the prospects for radical politics in the
contemporary moment. The lectures demonstrate how
Marcuse was constantly updating his dialectical and critical
117
Douglas Kellner
social theory by presenting current statistics on the

composition of the labor force, inequalities in wealth, and
striking realities of poverty and unemployment in the so-
called society of abundance (see especially Marcuse’s Fourth
Presentation and Charles Reitz’s article that illustrates income
flows and inequality in the contemporary moment [pp. 99ff]).
In the Second Presentation, Marcuse provides one of

his most detailed and striking critical assessments of the
concept of “the post-industrial society.” Marcuse convincingly
argues that this ideological conception obscures the continued
and intensified domination of contemporary society by the
ruling class and covers over the ways that new forms of
technology are developing new forms of social control and
domination. He also argues that the functional rationality
extolled by advocates of the post-industrial society occlude
critical rationality, art, and the aesthetic-erotic dimension of
human experience that Marcuse sees as essential to individual
and social liberation.
While the Paris lectures contain key elements of

Marcuse’s 1970s critical theory and radical politics, it is
striking how many concrete examples Marcuse deploys, how
close the lectures are to current debates and issues, and how
relevant the text is to our contemporary situation. The lectures
were delivered during a moment just following the 1968
global upheavals characterized by the emergence of the New
Left, the counterculture, the women’s movement, ecology
movement, gay and liberation movement, and other wide-
spread, organized efforts of the day. These movements were
of course resisted, and were under attack during the 1970s, yet
they would continue to be militant forces for radical change to
this day. The period was a violent one, and in the lectures
Marcuse stresses how contemporary capitalism and
imperialism unleash aggression and violence on a global scale,
an explosion of destructive forces that continues in the
decades of wars that have followed. Within the U.S. this is

also evident in exploding gun violence and rampage killings
that are a fundamental feature of our day.1
The lectures continue the utopian hope generated by

the global upheavals of 1968. In our contemporary world the
realization of the possibility of radical social change requires
similar upheavals. Here, I would argue, the global tumult of
2011 shows the continuing relevance of Marcuse’s most
radical ideas in the contemporary moment. In 2011, the Arab
uprisings, the Libyan revolution, the U.K. riots, insurrections
in Italy, Spain, Greece, and other European countries
squeezed by neoliberalism, the Occupy movements and other
political insurrections cascaded through the global media,
seizing people’s attention and emotions, and generating
complex and multiple effects that may make 2011 as
memorable a year in the history of social upheaval as 1968 and
perhaps one as significant.
In 2011, once more, as in 1968, multiple insurrections

generated discourses of revolution. Intransigent and growing
economic crises put global capitalism and its free market
ideology in question, and multiple political uprisings against
authoritarian and neoliberal rule made the year 2011
memorable and perhaps a turning point in history, in which
popular insurrections become a constant factor in local,
national, and global politics. In my book Media Spectacle as
Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy
Everywhere,2 I discussed how in 2011 political insurrections
1See Douglas Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic

Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the
Virginia Tech Massacre (Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Press, 2008).
2 Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle as Insurrection, 2011: From
the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere! (London and New York:

Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012).
119
Douglas Kellner
emerged as media spectacles, and analyzed some of the

political insurrections of the time from the Arab Uprising to
the Occupy movements to indicate how political insurrection
as media spectacle has played out in the United States and
other Western and non-Western societies.
I suggest that global economic crisis and a new era of

political insurrection mean that once more Marxian discourse
is relevant to contemporary political struggles and that
theorists like Debord, Marcuse, Hardt and Negri, Žižek and
other neo-Marxian theorists can be used to describe the
insurrections of the contemporary moment. In my book, I
discuss how some neo-Marxian discourses can be used to
describe the insurrections of 2011. I indicate that Herbert
Marcuse’s theory of revolution and revolutionary subjectivity
is relevant to these deliberations.
Consequently, I would want to argue that Marcuse’s

thought is relevant to analyze the conservative
counterrevolutions of the past decades, the military
interventions, the rise of neoliberal capitalism and
globalization in the 1990s, and various forces of domination
that have emerged since Marcuse’s death. Yet I also want to
argue that his concept of “the great refusal” and even
revolution is still relevant.
By “revolution” I mean Herbert Marcuse’s concept of

revolution as a totality of upheaval and overthrow of the
previous social order that develops new forms of economy,
politics, culture and social relations, involving a decisive
rupture with the previous regime and an entirely different
society with non-oppressive social relations and a new
economy, polity, social institutions, culture, and
subjectivities.3 This concept of revolution is relevant to the

insurrections of 2011―just as his concept of counter-revolution
is also pertinent here as developments in Egypt, Syria, and
elsewhere will attest.
Marcuse’s perspective on revolution is useful in

assessing the insurrections of the contemporary era as it
provides normative visions of a goal of total social
transformation aiming at social justice and emancipation. In
the past days, there have been discussions of Marcuse and the
Occupy movements and how they provide anticipations of a
new revolutionary political discourse and practice, that is
compatible with Marcuse’s analysis of non-hierarchical and
emancipatory social relations, direct democracy, and his
mistrust of parties, hierarchies, and authoritarianism of any
sort.
Hence, I want to evoke in conclusion the dialectic of

liberation and domination as key to Marcuse’s thought and
his continuing relevance―and to One-Dimensional Man where
it first finds mature articulation. I have suggested in the above
discussions how Marcuse’s ideas describe both tendencies
toward domination and oppression and revolt and liberation,
and that this dialectic is central to his thought.
3On Marcuse’s concept of revolution, see Douglas Kellner,

Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley and London:
University of California Press [U.S.A] and Macmillan Press
[England], 1984) and Herbert Marcuse, Marxism and Revolution,
Volume 6 of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by
Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York:
Routledge, 2012).
121
Douglas Kellner
The insurrections of 2011 suggest that the legacy of the

1960s, of which Marcuse was a vital part, lives on and the
Great Refusal is still practiced by oppositional groups and
individuals who refuse to conform to existing oppression and
domination. Yet there continue to proliferate forces of
domination, oppression and counterrevolution of the sort that
Marcuse criticized and opposed throughout his life. Marcuse
should be widely read and studied again to help nourish a
renewal of critical thinking and radical politics. For
domination continues to be a block to human freedom and
happiness and liberation continues to be a hope for those who
refuse the existing celebration of militarism, the forces of
conservatism, and unrestrained capitalism. For, quoting
Walter Benjamin at the end of One-Dimensional Man, “It is only
for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
About the Contributors
Detlev Claussen is emeritus professor from the Leibnitz

University in Hannover, Germany, where he has taught social
and cultural theory since 1994. He has also taught at the
universities of Hannover, Göttingen, Duisburg, und Marburg.
He was born in 1948 in Hamburg. From 1966 to 1971 he
studied philosophy, sociology, German literature, and
political science with Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer in Frankfurt. He was a student activist in the
League of Socialist German Students (SDS) and was a friend
of fellow activist and critical theorist, Hans-Jürgen Krahl. His
numerous publications include works on critical theory, anti-
Semitism, the student movement, and critical studies of
society and culture. His most recent publications include
Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, translated by Rodney
Livingstone (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Grenzen der
Aufklärung: Die gesellschaftliche Genese des modernen Anti-
semitismus (The Enlightenment’s Limitations: The Social
Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2005).
Peter-Erwin Jansen, philosopher and sociologist, studied with

Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth in Frankfurt. He
currently teaches philosophy, social science, history of social
movements, social justice, and ethics in the Department of
Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences in Koblenz,
Germany. He is the German-language editor of the archival
manuscripts of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. Six
volumes of the Marcuse papers and two volumes of the
Löwenthal documents are already in print―from the Marcuse
Archive, Feindanalysen―Über die Deutschen (An Analysis of the
Enemy―The Germans and German Society, 2004) and Ökologie
und Gesellschaftskritik (Ecology and Critical Social Theory,
2009)―from the Löwenthal Archive, In steter Freundschaft―Leo
123
Löwenthal & Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel (Best Friends
Forever: An Exchange of Letters between Leo Löwenthal and
Siegfried Kracauer, 2003)―all by the German publishing
house, zu Klampen! Peter-Erwin Jansen also recently published
an essay on human rights for a social work journal and an
essay, “World Revolution is Just Around the Corner,” on Leo
Löwenthal’s life and times in Heidelberg for an edited
collection (Heidelberg: Edition Schöbel, 2014). Contact email:
[email protected]
Douglas Kellner is the “Dean” of Herbert Marcuse studies.

He has critically edited and published six teeming volumes of
Marcuse’s archival manuscripts on philosophy, politics,
psychology, social theory, aesthetics, and the radical student
movement―The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London:
Routledge). His 1984 study of Marcuse’s social and political
philosophy, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984) is
immensely influential among Marcuse scholars. With Tyson
Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho as co-editors,
Douglas Kellner underscored Marcuse’s particular relevance
to education policy studies with Marcuse’s Challenge to
Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Douglas Kellner is
Distinguished Professor, and George F. Kneller Chair in the
Philosophy of Education at UCLA.
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1978), the internationally renowned

philosopher, political theorist, and social critic, whose
intellectual insights have become a key component of critical
cultural studies in universities around the world today. As an
academic refugee from the German Third Reich, he was in
1934 the first member of the Frankfurt Institute of Social
Research to arrive in New York City to represent it in exile at
Columbia University. During the war, Marcuse was employed
by U.S. military intelligence in the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), where he did assiduous intellectual work against
124
fascism. Following the war, he did research on the Soviet
Union with the U.S. State Department. Secure in his anti-
fascist and anti-Soviet credentials, Marcuse did not back away
from profound criticisms of U.S. culture in his 1958 book on
Soviet Marxism that might clearly have led him to be branded
as “anti-American.” This was a major departure from the
much more cautious politics of the Horkheimer inner circle as
well as from the conventional wisdom in the U.S. academic
sphere. Marcuse was to develop the most advanced social
theory of the Frankfurt School. This occurred in a series of
books constituting a blistering critique of American society
starting with One-Dimensional Man (1964), and extending
through An Essay on Liberation (1969), Counterrevolution and
Revolt (1972), and The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). During the
tumultuous events of May 1968 in Paris, Marcuse spoke to a
UNESCO conference there, and lent qualified support to the
student-worker uprisings underway. He was subsequently
invited by students to speak again in Paris at Vincennes
University in 1974. Marcuse was a scholarly advocate of
activist politics against U.S. war-making, and became the most
prominent intellectual leader of the student movement in the
U.S.A.
Charles Reitz is the author of several publications on the

educational and political philosophy of Herbert Marcuse: Art,
Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with
Herbert Marcuse (SUNY Press, 2000); “Herbert Marcuse and
the Humanities: Emancipatory Education and Predatory
Culture,” and “Herbert Marcuse and the New Culture Wars,”
in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, K. Daniel
Cho, Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Rowman & Littlefield,
2009). He is also the author of “Accounting for Inequality,” a
critical appraisal of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st
Century, in the Review of Radical Political Economics,
forthcoming. He is editor of a collection of radical
philosophical essays, Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx,
125
McLaren (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013); first
paperback edition in 2015. He has co-edited a Special Edition
of the Radical Philosophy Review on Herbert Marcuse (with
Andrew Lamas, Arnold L. Farr, and Douglas Kellner, 2013).
Reitz retired in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Social
Science at Kansas City Kansas Community College, where he
also served as Director of Intercultural Education and
President of the Faculty Association (KNEA). Contact email:
[email protected]
Sarah Surak is an assistant professor in the Departments of

Political Science and Environmental Studies at Salisbury
University and serves as the Co-Director of Salisbury
University’s Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement
(PACE). At the institute she facilitates campus efforts to
incorporate civic engagement within the undergraduate
curriculum. Receiving her Ph.D. in Planning, Governance and
Globalization from Virginia Tech (2012) her work combines
critical social theory with prior professional experience
coordinating waste management and sustainability programs.
Her areas of research include environmental political theory,
public policy, public administration and modern social theory;
with publications in journals such as Administrative Theory and
Praxis and Social Development Issues. Her book, Governing
Waste: Politics, Process, and Public Administration (Routledge
2016), assesses the practices of sustainability and waste
management by municipal authorities. Dr. Surak is co-
coordinating the 2015 biannual conference of the International
Herbert Marcuse Society at Salisbury University.
126

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Paris Lectures

at Vincennes University, 1974

Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition

Limited Edition Publication presented at

Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition

Published with permission of Peter Marcuse, executor of Herbert

Cover Art by Antje Wichtrey, Granada, Spain

Sarah Surak, Introduction vii

Herbert Marcuse, First Presentation 1

Herbert Marcuse, Second Presentation 13

Herbert Marcuse, Third Presentation 21

Herbert Marcuse, Fourth Presentation 31

Herbert Marcuse, Fifth Presentation 37

Herbert Marcuse, Sixth Presentation 45

Herbert Marcuse, Seventh Presentation 55

Detlev Claussen, One-Dimensional Man, the ’60s German

Peter-Erwin Jansen, One-Dimensional Man, Yesterday

Charles Reitz, Critical Education and Political Economy 95

In 1974, Herbert Marcuse delivered a series of lectures

The French paper, Les Gens,1 reported Marcuse’s arrival with

1 Les Gens, no date on clipping, presumably April 11, 1974.

the following headline:

Peter-Erwin Jansen corresponded recently with Ulf

Responding to the tenth anniversary of the publication

Forty years later, a flurry of activities commemorated

This limited-edition publication is prepared in

The Paris Lectures:

Marcuse’s series of seven lectures expand upon the

Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz, editors of this

Marcuse’s analysis provides solid ground for

Greek debt crisis. The text and accompanying material are

In the seven presentations, Marcuse describes newly

Despite the concrete impacts on the lives of citizens

economic and political systems (though not necessarily the

The implications could seem grim. Marcuse, however,

the horizon, but not guaranteed. It requires action. Marcuse’s

The final four chapters of this volume draw upon

Peter-Erwin Jansen’s chapter provides a concise

University highlight the continued relevance of Marcuse’s

Charles Reitz argues that institutions of higher

Finally, Douglas Kellner argues that Marcuse‘s lectures

There are multiple pedagogical possibilities with

I will provide supplemental readings illustrating the

In addition to reading this text, An Essay on Liberation,

As the course is taught in conjunction with the

participate in conference activities. Students will have options

Herbert Marcuse’s First Presentation1

I want to start by giving you the features which I

I think that American society today presents the most

1 April 10, 1974.

framework, although reduced framework, of American

At the same time I think we can observe in the United

3 Marcuse’s observation here is all the more true today. See

I think we should keep in mind that this bourgeoisie is

Now undoubtedly the bourgeoisie is still developing

But with all these negative features, U.S. society

There has been a Marxist tradition in the United States.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination is of course

encompassed in this frame. ―Eds.

This integration of the majority of the population also explains