Abstract
Roughly 50 years ago, in 1964, German-American critical theory philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, published what might be regarded as the single most famous book ever published by the Frankfurt School of critical theory: One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). To reflect on the 50 years since, 14 authors (13 men and 1 woman!) from seven countries contributed to a special issue of the ‘Radical Philosophy Review’ (vol. 19, no. 1) with Andrew T. Lamas as guest editor. A second special issue is planned for 2017 under the heading ‘refusing one-dimensionality’, as Marcuse’s ‘great refusal’ ‘is arguably Marcuse’s most potent concept [designed] for all those who choose to resist oppression, injustice, and humiliation’ (p. 3).
Perhaps Marcuse’s entire project, including ‘one-dimensional man’, is best described as being concerned with ‘alienation, reification, revolution, and radical subjectivity, as well as his commitments to ‘non-hierarchical and emancipatory social relations, direct democracy, and his mistrust of parties, hierarchies, and authoritarianism of any sort’ (p. 7). But his radical-philosophical, as well as critical-sociological, projects also extend to ‘the negative, dehumanising effects of modern technology [while Marcuse also argues that] technology is social rather than technical’ (p. 13). But with capitalism and the rise of technology also came a ‘shift towards professionalisation, bureaucratization, and corporatisation [and this also brought workers and their] unions into a corporate structural system and the one-dimensional economic rationality of a wage system’ (p. 16). Externally to the wage system, ‘mass consumer demand is nurtured by [the] manufacturing [of artificial] needs’ (p. 18). This encircles people as a totality with next to no option to escape. As a consequence, ‘capital … not only dominates the worker in the workplace or job market, but [also] when that worker is at home or in the supermarket’ (p. 20).
With these introductory notes in mind, Douglas Kellner highlights a quite different historical aspect of Herbert Marcuse, namely, Marcuse’s work for the US-American ‘Office of Strategic Services (OSS)’ during World War II. Kellner argues that Marcuse’s work contributed to ‘the birth of psychological warfare [and] psychological super weapons’ (p. 27). Perhaps Marcuse was a sought-after commodity at the time because of his ‘status as a major critical analyst of Soviet Marxism’ (p. 29). But even after the liberation from Nazi-Germany, Marcuse – unlike Adorno and Horkheimer – did not return to Germany. He remained in the United States developing a version of critical theory that was less Eurocentric. While still remaining part of the Frankfurt School, his theoretical work led him to the conclusion that today’s ‘society’s prosperity and growth are based on waste and destruction, its progress is fuelled by exploitation and repression, while its freedom and democracy are based on manipulation’ (p. 34).
When the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower 1961) shifted attention from Nazism to Communism and starting the cold war – that was at times rather hot! – American government agencies also shifted interest under a well-crafted ideologically motivated anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism. On that, Charles Reitz noted that ‘as late as 1959, the FBI’s New York field office had only ten agents assigned to organized crime compared to over one hundred and forty agents pursuing a dwindling population of Communists’ (p. 49). But rampant anti-communism also helped establish a ‘totally integrated and completely administered political universe of the liberal welfare/warfare state’ (p. 59) showing off the petit-bourgeois success of western capitalism. But it also illustrated that the United States remained a place where ‘the murder of the Kennedys shows that even Liberals are not safe if they appear as too liberal’ (p. 59) and when you are deemed to be outside of the ‘acceptable’ political realm.
Interestingly, Raffaele Laudani notes that Marcuse called much of what he diagnosed as ‘the closing of the political universe’ (p. 66). Marcuse did so in 1964 – long before Bloom’s ‘Closing of the American Mind’ appeared in 1987, although both had something quite different in mind. Perhaps very early on in his career, Herbert Marcuse’s sharp critique on capitalism and his subsequent concept of one-dimensionality was shaped by a single event. His thinking was assisted by ‘the defeat of early twentieth-century worker revolutions, especially the German revolution of 1918–1919 in which he personally participated’ (p. 74; Klikauer 2015). Immediately after World War I, Marcuse witnessed the violent and murderous suppression of the German working class while after World War II Marcuse witnessed the slow ‘deproletarianization of the working class’ (p. 77) partly engineered by corporate mass media and an increasingly sophisticated ideological apparatus. The second win over the working class occurred – mostly – through non-violent means.
Andrew Feenberg correctly notes that ‘one-dimensionality was achieved not through coercion but through persuasion and consumerism’ (p. 86) – a fact that is all too often forgotten by critical sociologists focusing on the police state, Orwellian control, super-surveillance, secret agencies reading your emails and so on. In advanced capitalism, there simply is no need for that apart from the pacification of a few remaining oases of resistance. The majority of individuals are ideologically persuaded and kept anesthetised through the mass deception of the cultural or consciousness industry (Adorno & Horkheimer 1944; Enzensberger 1974). Through that, human beings have been made to take on the domineering ideologies of accepting their given place as chattels, subordinates, employees, human resources and even the reifying and dehumanising ‘thing-hood’ (p. 92). As a consequence, ‘the reified subject … limits its understanding and behaviour in social interaction to individual technical manipulation. Buyers on the market abstract from the human relation to sellers and simply seek their own advantage’ (p. 93). This might render Honneth’s (1995) theory of recognition – at least party – a mere hallucination existing in a world defined by ‘The Privatization of Everything’ (Mandell 2002) and ‘Everything for Sale’ (Sandel 2012). Shaped by these forces, it is no longer that human beings meet human beings but buyer meets seller. All this is furnished by a very powerful ideology creating media apparatus.
On that, Christian Fuchs argues that
wherever there is a commodity, there is labour producing this commodity and a class relation that organises the exploitation of labour. Therefore, corporate social media usage is a form of surplus-value creating – and exploited digital labour that yields – profits for social media capitalists. (p. 118)
Fuchs also argues that the so-called ‘social media’ create hyper-individualism and social isolation. He also notes that these ‘social’ media are rather ‘anti-social’. In reality, however, they are not much more than gigantic advertising corporations. Google, twitter, Facebook, and so on with millions of Justin Bieber followers (twitter) and roughly 1 billion Facebook members assist the engineering of mass deception (p. 130f.). In short, ideology and mass manipulation try to make ‘human consciousness and human behaviour function like an automatic machine that has only a limited set of available response behaviours’ (p. 124). This creates one-dimensionality. Set against that is Marcuse’s notion that ‘man can be more than a manipulable subject in the production process of class society’ (p. 139).
But for media capitalism that is what human beings are: a ‘manipulable subject’ or rather objects of commercial media, ideology and advertising power. Today, ideological manipulation and alienation has advanced to a stage suggesting the conclusion that ‘we live in an age where the very notion of alienation is itself alienated’ (p. 145), as Marcelo Vieta notes. Perhaps the success of the ideological media apparatus can be measured against the fact that ‘we now think and behave in ways that prop up the system of domination without the need for direct coercion from masters, bosses, or the state’ (p. 150). Perhaps it still is as Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) once said (p. 12): ‘immovably, they insist on the very ideology that enslaves them’. This inhibits social change. Hence Marcuse’s ‘Containment of Social Change [might indeed be the] key section in One Dimensional Man’ (p. 176) as Russell Rockwell argues. Similarly, Christiansen also acknowledges that containing social change ‘is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society’ (p. 201).
Meanwhile, the employment sphere is increasingly defined by the precariat (Standing 2016) as well as underemployment that is most hideously expressed in so-called
zero-hours contracts [that] do not, of course, even guarantee any specific number of hours per week, leaving the employee in a state of indefinite limbo, according to the whims of the employment agency and/or employer [these are the so-called] self-employed [defined as] having an eBay account or [working in] door-to-door catalogue selling. (p. 187)
Perhaps much of this also signifies what Craig R. Christiansen calls ‘the cultural hegemony of the ruling establishment’ (p. 198). For him, the ruling establishment contains labour relations that incorporate labour into the structure of capitalism. Under this system trade, unions experience ‘integration into the prevailing system’ (p. 203).
And, indeed, there seems to be ‘a logic of domination’ (p. 216) to which too many trade unions have succumbed. Meanwhile, Inara Luisa Marin argues that submission to domination might also be a sign of ‘surplus-repression [that is] the excess of restrictions that are imposed on the individual not for the preservation of the species but for the purpose of social domination’ (p. 231). It is thoroughly conceivable that many trade unions have become part the apparatus of domination out of surplus repression – not needed for the preservation of the union but for reasons of domination over, for example, their own union membership, as the Michelsian (1915) dilemma would have it (Maisano & Uetricht 2016). But Marin is not only uncompromising towards those succumbing to domination but also she is critical towards today’s version of critical theory when arguing that ‘the post-Marcusean Critical Theory – essentially that of Habermas and of Honneth – is [a] new set of Critical Theory [in which] psychoanalysis is no longer mobilised to understand the contradictions and tensions in the development of modern capitalist societies’ (p. 235).
Jon Bailes investigates ‘how improved material conditions render [many human] values, beliefs, and knowledge irrelevant’ (p. 241) and how ‘desublimation’ (p. 242) advances when ‘desublimation [occurs as] immediate … gratification in accordance with instincts … promoting social cohesion and contentment’ (p. 242). ‘The main risks of repressive desublimation, according to Marcuse, are that the superficial happiness it creates covers a deeper unhappiness, fear, and disgust, and that it unleashes aggressive instinct’ (p. 243). As noted, Marcuse argues that ‘mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual’ (p. 246). To camouflage the pathological totality of modern capitalism (Benson & Kirsch 2010), one might reach the conclusion that ‘advanced industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, inasmuch as today ideology is in the process of production itself’ (p. 258). And with that, the very opposite of ‘the end of ideology’ (p. 263) occurs as Graeme Reniers emphasises.
Not surprisingly, Marcuse was among those who clearly expressed ‘his refusal to politically accept the “end of ideology” thesis’ (p. 264). As a consequence, ideology remains part and parcel of capitalism (Althusser 1984; Klikauer 2013; Rehmann 2013; Therborn 1988). Ideology will be with us as long as the ‘the cycle between production and consumption [is] tightened’ (p. 270) and ‘capital [continues to] dominate the worker in the workplace, job market, at home, in the supermarket’ (p. 271) and wherever he or she goes. And this will remain so as long as our economic system continues to demand the ‘domination of man by man’ (p. 277). Until this is overcome, Marcuse’s ‘One-Dimensional Man’ continues to be relevant.