Human Liberation and Revolt
by Antifascist
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
-Replicant Android, Roy Batty, in the movie, Blade Runner.
This series of essays began with a critique of Capitalism and its unholy
alliance with fundamentalist Christianity in America(The
Spirit of Capitalism and The Religion of Dehumanization). Then
another essay followed describing the repressive character of modern
American Corporatism on the private life and space
of the
individual (PanCorporatism:
Culture of Repression and Deprivatization). Lastly, I wrote an essay
about the intellectually subversive nature of capitalism and how
self-awareness and critical thought is short-circuited by an
authoritarian epistemology that discourages questioning the status quo
(Take the Matrix Blue Pill or Red Pill?).
The Antifascist: Herbert Marcuse (1898 to 1979)
These themes and ideas where developed by philosopher
Herbert Marcuse who was popularized in the 1960s as the father of
the New Left. But Marcuse’s intellectual legacy goes much further back
to Germany by being a participant in the socialist Spartacist uprising
in Berlin during 1918. Hundreds of the Spartacists where executed and
their bodies dumped in a river. He was the a member of the original “Red
Rose” dissidents (my term for the Spartacus group because its founder,
Rosa Luxemburg, was nicknamed "Red Rosa") that were ultimately
ultimately crushed by the nationalist German army and a right-wing
paramilitary group called the Freikorps.
Marcuse earned his Ph.D. at the University of Freiburg in 1922, and then
studied under Martin Heidegger in 1929. During 1933 he joined the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research because the Nazis would not
allow him is complete his studies under Heidegger who, unfortunately,
was a Nazi himself. Marcuse had to flee the Nazis again in 1933 and
emigrated from Germany to the United States and became a naturalized
citizen in 1940. While working with the Frankfurt Institute for Social
Research in Germany and then in America he wrote critiques of Nazi
fascism-- this is while Nazi fascism was greatly popular in the U.S.
among many American businessmen like Henry Ford, William Randolph
Hearst, and Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA).
During World War II Marcuse worked for the US Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) from 1942 to 1951. The OSS later became the CIA in 1947.
In the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), created by Roosevelt
in 1941, Marcuse worked in the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). In
1942 Marcuse worked in the Bureau of Intelligence of the Office of War
Information (OWI) analyzing every speech of Hitler and Goebbles and
monitored the political situation in the Reich. He identified Nazi and
Anti-Nazi groups in Germany. He also prepared an extensive “De-Nazification
Guide” in which he attempted to discourage our government from
cooperating former Nazi officials in the post-war reconstruction of
Germany. Unfortunately, the US government was impressed and greatly
admired former Nazi intelligence officers and government officials.
Marcuse also handled the coordination of investigation of surviving Nazi
groups and German Nationalist underground groups.
In 1945 the R&A Branch was transferred to the Department of State,
Secret Intelligence (SI), and Counter-espionage (X-2) and became the
“Strategic Services Unit of the War Department. “ In 1947 he worked with
the American Denazification programme and assessed evidence against the
Nazis. In 1947 Marcuse actually visited Heidegger in Germany, but
Heidegger remained an unrepentant fascist Nazi. Marcuse never contacted
Heidegger again after sending him a care package.
From 1948 to 1951 (during the time Joseph McCarthy was persecuting
incident Americans for being communists), Marcuse—a real Marxist—was
promoted in the Intelligence Research of the State Department as Acting
Chief of the Central European Branch. Marcuse wrote a 532-page analysis
in 1949 of the Soviet Union for the Division of International and
Functional Intelligence entitled “The Potentials of World Communism”
(declassified in May 1978). Marcuse called the Soviet Union
“bureaucratic communism” and a corrupt third-rate welfare state that
would collapse in 40 years. Actually, his critique is more complex, but
his critique of Soviet Marxism was similar as his critique of American
Capitalism. The US government, eager to profit from the Cold War, wanted
to hear something else about the threat of a communist state --that the
Soviet Union was a massive leviathan that threatened world
domination--and ignored the report.
In 1952 he started teaching at Columbia University and Harvard, then
taught at Brandeis University from 1958 until leaving in 1965 after a
dispute with the university president Abram Sacher. And lastly, he
taught at the University of California in San Diego where he was
regularly attacked by California newspapers and finally was forced to
stop teaching by the California Board of Regents in 1969, but they
allowed Marcuse to continue to hold informal seminars. Marcuse regularly
received death threats in America as a professor of philosophy. Marcuse
was a nemesis of fascists in both Germany and America during his entire
life.
The Great Refusal: Revolt by Nausea
"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states."Marcuse struggled throughout this entire intellectual history with the question of how revolutionary change will come about. His attitude changes back and forth from pessimism to optimism. Marcuse is a neo-Marxist (Hegelian-Marxist) and abandoned the classic Marxist doctrine of a revolutionary “working class” or “proletariat” because of the power of modern bureaucratic capitalism to alter individual consciousness with new forms of control as described in his work “One-Dimensional Man” (1964) But, later in an essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) Marcuse developed an idea of the revolutionary subject that was touched upon in “One-Dimensional Man,” as engaging in “total refusal” and methodical disengagement from capitalist values. This concept was borrowed from a term coined by Andre’ Breton as “The Great Refusal” in which the defiant individual acts in absolute and total rejection of the institutions, values, and way of life in a repressive capitalist society in order “to undo the mutilation of our faculties” and tap into “the unlimited capacity for refusal.” The individualist consciously becomes extremely intolerant of the dominant social policies, attitudes, opinions, institutions, culture, lifestyle, values, norms, imposed by an authoritarian and repressive tyranny over human life and freedom so as to negate those sustaining distorted societal values with different goals, values, and aspirations that undermine this system of domination. This is revolt by nausea of the widespread inhumanity, dehumanization, and massive waste of mass consumption in society. The ideological rationalization the are internalized as personal beliefs and constantly reinforce repression of human aspirations begin to decay and collapse.
-Mahatma Gandhi
The person of absolute refusal is one having New Sensibilities that brings about a total break with repressive-conformist society and its misanthropic values achieving a “transvaluation” of values, "for the abolition of a society which condemns the vast majority of its members to live their lives as a means for earning a living rather than as an end in itself." Ideological norms of a fundamentally repressive production society become de-legitimized. This transvaluation discards the "Performance Principle" which according to this principle "everyone has to earn his living in alienating but socially necessary performances, and one's reward, one's status in society will be determined by this performance (the work-income relation)." The ideology of repressive self-sacrifice, and the domination of technical-administrative rationality to legitimize the productive process are superseded by universal Human needs and desires. This new consciousness is intolerant of previously tolerated repression. Such a new human being is one
“...who rejects the performance principles governing the established societies; a type of man who has rid himself of the aggressiveness and brutality that are inherent in the organization of established society, and in their hypocritical, puritan morality; a type of man who is biologically incapable of fighting wars and creating suffering; a type of man who has a good conscience of joy and pleasure, and who works collectively and individually for a social and natural environment in which such an existence becomes possible.”This is an anthropological transformed human being with New Sensibilities unlike the excessively aggressive, authoritarian, militaristic, sociopathic personality types that our educational system, churches, and culture produce en mass and value today (BTK)(Psychopaths and the American Dream). Psychiatrists report that 4% of the American population is actually sociopathic ( Study finds Children Routinely Torture Barbie Dolls). CEOs are presented as models of success and heroic in society, but these same persons often exhibit the behavioral profile of a psychopath (Beware the Corporate Pyscho). Robert D. Hare, Ph.D. wrote in his book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. (1993), "Yet psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures (Babiak)." Marcuse believed that there could be no real social change until there is a new human sensibility. We have to liberate ourselves from ourselves before we can liberate ourselves from repressive administrative institutions.
Liberation from the Affluent Society, p. 197.
Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during the 1930s that studied the rise of fascism in Germany in order to understand its causes and origin. The Frankfurt Institute understood fascism as the expression of capitalist society values, institutions, and economic system. The fascist state is the fascist society. One famous study focused on authoritarianism in German society as fascism gained power. Theodor Adorno authored, “The Authoritarian Personality” that showed authoritarian tendencies in an individual's personality make them more receptive to fascist ideology. Here is a profile of an authoritarian personality (On "Moral Values" Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian Tendencies in Americans):
1. Desire for a strong leader.
2. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle class attitudes.
3. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in group.
4. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
5. Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tenderminded.
6. Superstitions and Stereotypical: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
7. Power and ‘Toughness’: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
8. Destruction and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
9. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
10. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on.’
(Authoritarian Personality Characteristics)
What are the values and policies of today that can be seen as deviant to the New Sensibilities of this new human being of total refusal?
1. Dehumanization of the individual by a security state
2. Militarism and the Draft
3. Racism
4. Imperialism
5. Repression presented as education
6. Torture
7. Invasion of human privacy by corporate tyrannies
8. Threats to civil liberties.
9. Meaningless work
10. Consumerism and manipulation of needs
11. Fraudulent democracy
12. Aggression presented as competitiveness
13. Human slavery
14. Child labor
15. Financial exploitation
16. Denial of Health Care and protection from disease
17. Environmental destruction
18. Violence against women
19. Police brutality
20. Massive waste
21. Hatred of servitude in the guise of technology
22. Hatred of spiritual deprivation in the guise of the “good life.”
23. Hostility to established authoritarian institutions
Anti-war, anti-draft activities, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, militant confrontation politics, and political rebellion are the legitimate reactions of total intolerance to the new fascism with the purpose of undermining its power like termites undermining a wooden structure. Conformity is obedience, and obedience is humiliation! Indifference and tolerance of the values of capitalism sustains this system of tyranny, domination, and repression:
“Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. 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 for 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.” Repressive Tolerance
Marcuse viewed the student and counterculture movements of the 1960s as agents of change and an example of the Great Refusal, but is not itself sufficient to bring about revolutionary change from corporate capitalism. He cannot imagine revolutionary change without working class radicalism. Marcuse never claimed that student, counterculture, and the black liberation movements where going to bring about revolutionary change, but where instead symptoms of a pre-revolutionary situation and a period of enlightenment, and education that result in radical actions of demonstrations and confrontation. They are more catalysts of change in society according to Marcuse’s thought. Over time Marcuse slowly returned to the classical Marxist idea of forces “within” capitalism that bring about social transformation. What is important in Marcuse’s advanced concept of liberation is that political rebellion is based on universal Human needs that have the potential of being the antecedent of universal rebellion.
Dialectical Contradiction within and Negation of Totalitarianism
Marcuse returns to the classical Hegelian-Marxist idea of “determinate negation” to find a force for change and agent for the transformation of society. Hegel, a philosopher and Christian theologian, viewed historical movement as following a universal law (Logic) of dialectical movement between opposing thesis, antithesis, and resulting in a higher synthesis. There is a process of conflict and negation before a synthesis can be reached, but the synthesis is only possible because of the original conflict between to opposing poles. So in a sense the negation is retained in the new form of a synthesis.
“Hegel, … views the process, not as one of mere negation, but as one of determinate negation; one which "holds fast the positive in the negative," includes its content within itself, and passes by means of the negative into a higher synthesis in which is preserved the truth of the mediated factors.”Marx applied this Hegelian idea to the historical development of Capitalism. Take for an example of this principle Marx’s understanding of Capitalism’s evolution as increasingly becoming monopolistic through market competition until competition is abolished and the monopolistic economy collapses because all capital is concentrated in the control of a few owners. Capitalism starts out as competitive, but with the contradictory purpose of abolishing competition. Marx believed this monopolistic crisis would lead to a new higher organization of society. This is a principle working in all aspects of history and even in thought itself.
http://www.gwfhegel.org/Books/TR3.html
Marcuse's work “Counterrevolution And Revolt” (1972) is an effort to show these internal disintegrating contradictions developing within corporate capitalism and the possibility of societal transformation. The first contradiction is the monopolist tendency capitalism that brings more and more control of all labor under capital for total control of the labor process and life as a whole. Society becomes divided between capital and a mass working class under corporate capitalism’s authoritarian rule and domination.
Secondly, capitalist wealth itself sets up the conditions of disintegration because the rising standard of living and consumer expectation cannot be maintained and fulfilled which leads to crisis and social instability. These needs and expectations are material and normative. The material needs and expectations are “consumer needs” of homes, cars, jobs, vacations, household goods, and luxury items. Once advanced capitalism has a series of crises, society becomes unstable, frustration builds, and a reservoir of dissatisfaction emerges undermining corporate capitalism. These crises appear as dissatisfaction with work environment, unnecessary work, blatant obsolescence, decline in wages, permanent inflation, unnecessary high unemployment and underemployment, unstable monetary system, liquidity crisis, ecology crisis, energy shortages, and mounting war costs to retain neocolonial assets draining resources from social support programs. All these grievances produce widespread awareness of the failures of capitalism and a new consciousness forms within the working class that enable individuals to see that they are trapped in a “rigged game.” The other normative needs and expectations are leisure time, happiness, security, freedom and individual dignity that are promised by capitalism, but fails to deliver them. These unrealized values enable one to see through the false ideological norms of capitalism so that once again frustration and disappointment threaten capitalism. These failures are not predicted, but documented daily by some media and political critiques even during 1972.
Marcuse warns that corporate capitalism will in its advance stage reorganize to defend itself against revolt resulting from its failures. In order to protect itself capitalism’s counterrevolution “practices the horrors of the Nazi regime” such as torture, genocide, supporting military dictatorships (The Indonesian Massacres and the CIA), creating police states, and acting as the world police superpower. Advanced Capitalism will prevent even the most modest social progress at home and become a new form of fascism. Note that the following quote by Marcuse was written in 1971:
“We are far from a fascist form of government, but some of the possible preconditions are emerging. They are well known and I will just give you a list: the courts, used more and more as political tribunals; the reduction of education and welfare in the richest country in the world; anti-democratic legislation, such as preventive detention and the no-knock laws; economic sanctions if you are politically and otherwise suspect; the intimidation and self censorship of the mass media. These are very frightening signs. You cannot say history repeats itself; it never repeats itself in the same form. The fact that we cannot point to any charismatic leader, the fact that we cannot point to any SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this country. If necessary, other organizations can perform the job, possibly even more efficiently. I do not have to tell you which organizations I have in mind.”What is the counterforce?
“The Movement in a New Era of Repression: An Assessment,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. XVI (1971-2) p. 8.
“The only counterforce is the development of an effectively organized radical Left, assuming the vast task of political education, dispelling the false and mutilated consciousness of the people so that they themselves experience their condition and its abolition, as vital need, and apprehend the ways and means of their liberation.”Marcuse again warns the Left to avoid “ritualization” of leftist concepts and “reified” Marxian concepts-- like the mythological concept of the “Marxian proletariat”; the “Myth of October” where society is changed overnight; the concept of “class” and “wage laborer as proletariat.” One cannot a priori assign a group as revolutionary by virtue of their position, or role in society. “Oppression” is the key factor and not wage-labor as the mark of a revolutionary force. Instead of reified concepts, the Left has to be engaged in constant ideological reconstruction and reevaluation of the political situation.
“Counterrevolution And Revolt” (1972) p. 28.