A neo-Marxist and even Freudo-Marxist theoretician, Herbert Marcuse develops a critique of society similar to that of the Frankfurt School, but adds numerous personal viewpoints to it.
Neurosis and Society
In the past, he explains, human life was characterised by two dimensions: the social one and the individual one. By means of the former, man integrated into society; thanks to the latter, he retained his faculty to question this society. Today, this distinction has vanished. Culture, the mass media and leisure have reduced man to a single dimension.
This theory, a fundamental one with Marcuse, is judged to be at the very least simplistic by Jérôme Deshusses,334 who wrote the following in La gauche réactionnaire335 (Laffont, 1969):
One-Dimensional Man is, to a large extent, a conformism worthy of ignoration. The Marcusian way of seeing things is characterised by a wager against man which, at times, borders on naiveté. He does not grant man any power of dissuasion, setback distance or possibility to criticise.
It is nonetheless on such a basis that Marcuse targets symbols of authority, the ‘protagonists of domination’: family fathers, political leaders, employers and the state. Preaching a ‘fatherless society’, he adopts the argumentation used by the ‘Frankfurtists’ and the ‘Freudo-Marxists’ (Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm): there is no social liberation without a sexual one. It is no longer social injustice that is the focus of his resentment but constraint itself, meaning alienation — an alienation that has become the common law of all human beings.
Eros and Civilisation develops a line of thought founded upon one of Freud’s famous works: Civilisation and Its Discontents. Unlike orthodox Freudians, Marcuse states that Freud’s very essence is to be found in the following sentence: ‘The repression and inhibition of impulses is indispensable for the maintaining of civilisation and its institutions’. Indeed, according to Freud, there is a direct connection between social organisation and neurosis: man is allegedly the sole animal that ‘inhibits’ itself, creating civilisation so as to achieve better inhibition. The result is that every constructed society rests upon alienation:
‘The notion according to which a non-repressive civilisation is impossible is the very cornerstone of the Freudian theory’, Marcuse observes.
It is this Freudian pessimism that Marcuse adopts. He, too, asserts that, since they ‘repress’ our impulses, all societies are a source of constraint and all progress comprises — and, if the worst comes to the worst, actually represents — a regression. Yet he ventures even further when considering impracticable Freud’s proposal in which the latter strives to sublimate the instinct of death ‘so as to allow the self to satisfy its vital needs’. He writes:
The systematic sacrifice of the libido, i.e. its rigorously imposed rerouting through socially useful activities and manifestations, is the very definition of civilisation.
Simultaneously, however, Marcuse seems to reproach Freud for having enrooted every possible society in this law of ‘repression’; he declares that since the renouncement level demanded by society in the name of its implicit ideals has now become ‘unbearable’, man must abolish most of these demands in order to reclaim some possibilities of happiness.
What we are facing here is a bizarre contradiction, an analytical mistake that has not evaded Mr Jean-Marie Benoist’s336 attention:
While acknowledging the spectral, meaning fantastical, character of any non-repressive society, whose advent Freudian analysis tends to demonstrate as unattainable by confining it to the realm the imaginary, Marcuse suddenly shifts his reasoning and, within the same sentence, undertakes a revolutionary process affecting civilisation: the advent of a non-repressive society thus becomes a dogmatic stipulation. (Marx est mort,337 Gallimard, 1970)
Hence the following conclusion:
With Marcuse, the discourse presented in May 1968 did not, as was assumed, access the pathways of criticism but sank, in fact, into the metaphysical antithesis of unacknowledged dogmatism.
The Role of Fringe Groups
This discourse is combined with the argument of ‘repressive tolerance’. Generally speaking, tolerance arouses sympathy. Due to this very fact, says Marcuse, it alienates and ‘represses’. It is a paradoxical theory that leads to the following affirmation:
Civilisation has to defend itself against the spectre of a world that could be free. (Eros and Civilisation)
From this perspective, Soviet Marxism and Western capitalism are judged to be equally ‘repressive’. The two systems, for that matter, tend to converge through technology, thanks to the very rationality which Marcuse drowns in sarcasm in the name of pure reason.
The type of rationality that triumphs nowadays is that of Greece. It is the one that defines itself as a succession of power relations and views nature as an object to dominate. In a world where technological rationality is the only dimension, the happy consciousness harbours the belief that reality is rational. (Eros and Civilisation)
For Marcuse, what is real is not, in fact, rational. The ‘happy consciousness’ is a disaster, for it has defused the ‘proletarian bomb’.
This is because workers are the first to be ‘trapped’ by the illusions of ‘repressive tolerance’. When ‘slumlords’ are not taking advantage of their work, ‘holiday merchants’ are taking advantage of their free-time. Unlike what Marx had hoped for, the time of ‘freedom’ thus remains that of ‘necessity’. Yet it is rather a false freedom that we are dealing with, since the current definition of ‘leisure’ still belongs to the interstices of the yield principle. The truth is that the proletariat has been gently disarmed and its qualities not only neutralised, but ‘reversed for the benefit of the prevailing ideology’. By connecting the fulfilment of general interests to the realisation of one’s private interests, advanced capitalism has taken control of the revolutionary potential of the masses. The working class has become the ‘objective’ accomplice of the existing order:
Repression is interiorised. Modern society is capable of digesting class struggle.
Under these conditions, Marcuse recommends relying on ‘fringe groups’ — on those small groupings which neither society nor reformism have yet taken over because they are sheltered within the ‘contradictions of the established order’: immigrant workers, eternal rebels, those that have lost their social status, asylum residents, youths that have broken with socialisation (the Jugend-Proletariat which Thierry Maulnier338 spoke of), proletarian-like intellectuals, and so on.
A place of choice is reserved for students, who are ‘on the fringes’ and remain aware of their own condition. Marcuse perceives them as the sole potential revolutionaries. They are the ones, he says, who can bring the machine to a halt and the institutions to a standstill by organising a ‘long march’ through them. It is within them that the ‘Great Refusal’, the power of negation regarded as the necessary counterpoint to the ‘repression’ of the structures, is now concentrated in the form of a refusal to play along.
Mr Jean Baechler details this strategy:
One can neither bet on a frontal attack, nor on spontaneous decomposition or the proletariat. The bearers of revolution can thus only be embodied by elements that are outside the economic and social system. Due to the fact that these forces do not occupy any strategic position, they cannot hope to access power directly by controlling the shift levers. One therefore falls back on local actions whose purpose is to paralyse the system. Wherever the power relations are favourable, be it in universities, cultural centres, or factories that have been taken over, the revolutionaries will take the necessary steps to paralyse the institutions. Attacks will be perpetrated against key establishments or symbols so as to sabotage and alert the public opinion. There will come a point when the system finds itself blocked and the revolutionary forces can break through the defences. (Qu’est-ce que l’idéologie? Gallimard, 1976)
Unlike the more traditional representatives of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse does not hesitate to justify one’s r
ecourse to violence, declaring:
When slaves are unaware of their own enslavement, one must make use of violence and sensitise them to happiness against their will.
For the purpose of achieving this ‘sensitisation to happiness’, revolutionary minorities will thus resort to violence, reserving themselves the right to ‘eliminate both rivals and pernicious opinions’. At the same time, they shall eradicate freedom of expression, since the latter contributes to the ‘propagation of error’.
Strangely enough, Marcuse adopts some of Marx’s illusions. The author of Capital was convinced that the tensions he had been noticing within the apparatuses of production would worsen until reaching a maximal number of ‘contradictions’ from which the communist revolution would then arise. Marcuse declares:
My most serious doubt regarding the success of the great American affluent society rests upon its neofascistic character. Repression will get worse. Both the internal and international contradictions of American capitalism will be exacerbated. The opposition will have to mobilise all of its strength to avoid having the working class fall into the hands of fascism, etc. (Declarations made to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in C’est demain la veille.339 Seuil, 1973)
Jean Marabini340 remarks:
In the end, Marcuse realises Marx’s dream of having his revolution first establish itself in America.
Not everything is wrong with Marcuse’s latest criticism of the cost efficiency principle, which has become the absolute principle of modern societies. Far from it, actually. Unfortunately, his analysis is entirely spoilt by his systematism and utopian negativism. Marcuse believes that a return to the principle of quality goes hand in hand with the advent of a ‘liberated’ — and more egalitarian — society, whereas historical experience offers a contrary demonstration: it is because egalitarianism triumphs that the individual has ceased to be a person, becoming, instead, a pawn that has been robbed of his own autonomy by a soulless society; it is because ancient societies were inegalitarian and hierarchised and neither ‘morals’ nor abstract rationality represented their basic foundations that it was possible to maintain the prevalence of quality over yield. On this level, Marcuse has missed the mark completely.
His alienation theory is not any more convincing either. Not only is it obvious that every society is alienating, but the very same is true of any sort of existence and presence in the world. Life is but a series of constraints, and pleasure, i.e. the libido, is equally a source of alienation, since it embodies attachment, perhaps even submission, to a not-self. The (dreamlike) rejection of all alienation is therefore synonymous with the rejection of life itself.
Last but not least, the theory of ‘repressive tolerance’, combined with that of a utopian ‘happiness’ that should be imposed upon those that do not desire it using force if necessary, can, in actual fact, only lead to the most sombre of dictatorships.
‘There could never be such a thing as tolerant repression. Any and all repression is necessarily driven by intolerance’, says Mr Jean-François Revel.341
Alasdair MacIntyre342 has no difficulty in demonstrating that the Marcusian doctrine of ‘total liberation’ acts as the trigger of a novel sort of despotism:
People no longer have a say, and the choices are not between genuine democracy and the authority of an elite but, instead, between rival elites — the present’s repressive elite and the liberating elite of the Marcusian future.
In short, not only is Marcuse’s doctrine wrong, ‘but if it were widely followed, it would become an actual obstacle to all rational progress and all liberation’.
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Eros and Civilisation, an essay by Herbert Marcuse. Minuit, 236 pages (256 pages in Seuil’s second edition).
One-Dimensional Man, an essay by Herbert Marcuse. Minuit, 284 pages (320 pages in Seuil’s second edition).
Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, an essay by Herbert Marcuse. Minuit, 324 pages.
Marcuse, an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre. Seghers, 153 pages.
Sur Marcuse,343 an essay by Jean-Michel Palmier. UGE/10–18, 276 pages.
Marcuse & McLuhan et la nouvelle révolution mondiale,344 an essay by Jean Marabini. Mame, 132 pages.
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Louis Althusser
The ‘caiman’ teaches people how to read… No, this is not a secret message. Fifty-six-year-old Louis Althusser, a professor of philosophy and a member of the French Communist Party since 1948, is a ‘caiman’ (meaning a tutor or teacher entrusted with preparing candidates for the agrégation345 exam) at the École normale supérieure and someone whose chosen vocation is to help communists (re)read Marx’s writings.
In 1973, after four years of silence (and oblivion too, perhaps), his Réponse à John Lewis346 — a reaction to the views of an English communist where no deference is to be found — allowed the most dogmatic of all French neo-Marxist theoreticians to reclaim a trendy status.
In 1965, Mr Althusser had already published Pour Marx. This essay was followed by two further volumes: Lire ‘Le capital’347 (1965–66) and a book by P. Macherey348 entitled Pour une théorie de la production littéraire.349
What serves as a basis for the ‘Althusserian’ doctrine is the conviction that Marx’s philosophy has remained unfinished and that a ‘genuine Marxist philosophy must still be constructed’. Mr Althusser does not hesitate to write:
While alive, Marx did not possess, and could not enable himself to possess, an adequate concept that would allow him to think out what he produced, namely the concept of a structure’s efficacy in relation to its elements, which represents the invisible and present-absent keystone of his entire work. (Lire ‘Le capital’)
The essential part of Marx’s writings is said to be embodied by its ‘buried’ implicit aspect, whether in his books, his ‘silences’, his slips of the pen or his characteristic lacks.
Using Freud’s theories, which revealed to him the true meaning of concealment (and which he propagated at a time when, among communists, psychoanalysis was mainly perceived through ‘the ideological layer of its reactionary exploitation’, as stated in Freud et Lacan,350 published in La Nouvelle critique351 in December 1964–January 1965), Mr Althusser undertakes to track down what lies hidden between the lines and within ‘the blank spaces in the tightly-knit text’, as if he were the Pythia sitting on her tripod.
Reading his writings is not a usual experience, as it consists in seeking out the unexpressed in places where others have failed to see anything. There is thus allegedly ‘an innocent’ and naïve ‘sort of reading’, as well as a ‘knowing kind of reading’ — that of the initiates. Communist militants, who were all illiterate until Althusser’s advent, had better ‘learn to read’.
Detecting a Discontinuation in Karl Marx’s Writings
‘In actual fact’, remarks Mr Raymond Aron352 in his Marxismes imaginaires353 (Gallimard, 1970), ‘when making use of carefully chosen quotes, Althusser attributes to Marx what he himself wants to say, just as several generations of Marxists did before him. The method is that of the theologians’.
If Marxism is genuinely the Good News of our new age, it must be one of a kind. This, at least, is how Althusserians think. What is it then which, in this case, characterises Marx’s thinking and thus renders it specific?
What is unique about Marx, Mr Althusser responds, are the implications of his Capital’s ‘scientific philosophy’.
Differentiating between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’ in Marxism, Mr Althusser asserts that this distinction corresponds to two periods in Marx’s life. There is thus allegedly not one Marx, but two of them. On the one hand, there is the ‘young Marx’, the theoretician of an ideological historical philosophy still influenced by Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Feuerbach, and, on the other, the ‘true Marx’, i.e. the man who authored Capital (1867) and other mature works. There is a supposed ‘epistemological discontinuation’ between the two (a notion borrowed from Gaston Bachelard354 ), one that is said to have take
n place around the 1845–1850 period.
Finally, in 1857, Karl Marx purportedly reached complete ‘scientificity’. Following a ‘fertile loop’, his thoughts, which had been shaped by German ideology before flourishing in his Capital, allegedly allowed him to read into the ‘silences’ of his time, just like Althusser has done. He is said to have then discovered the rational nucleus (Kern) of Hegel’s philosophy, which he thereafter freed from its ‘mystical shell’ (mystische Hülle) by ‘putting it back on its own feet’. By replacing his ideological focus with an economic one, he supposedly transformed the very foundations of his own philosophy (dialectical materialism or the German Diamat), while simultaneously defining it in its specificity.
Mr Althusser says that this ‘second Marx’ is the one that opened up the ‘continent of history’ to scientific research (and created the ‘science of history’), relinquishing the old mechanistic conception of materialism to espouse a dialectical one. It is this Marx that dominated idealism in philosophy and reversed the relation of theoretical forces to the advantage of the working class.
Mr Althusser writes:
Marx established a novel kind of science, meaning that he elaborated a system of new scientific concepts where only an arrangement of ideological notions had previously reigned. He founded the science of history where only the philosophies of history had hitherto existed. (Lénine et la philosophie,355 Maspéro, 1968)
The upheaval he introduced into the Hegelian system is so great that even ‘the fundamental structures of the Hegelian dialectic enjoy a different construction through him (insofar as he adopts them, which is not always the case) when compared to what they are like with Hegel’ (Pour Marx).
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 14