Herbert Marcuse was so far in advance of his time that in many ways the world-left has yet to catch up with his legacy. He glimpsed the implications of women’s rights, environmentalism, and sexual liberation for a new kind of socialism at a time in which these concerns were largely downplayed and ignored by the socialist movement. In an era that valorized productivity and economic growth, Marcuse criticized the imperative for endlessly increasing production and demanded that progress be measured by more qualitative goals. Approaching the 40^thanniversary of his death we contemplate a world in which the legitimacy of the neoliberal consensus is crumbling, an environmental crisis threatening civilization and human survival looms, and an increasing number of younger people are becoming socialists. An auspicious time for Nick Thorkelson to publish Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia, a Graphic Biography.

Thorkelson begins his biography of Marcuse at the anti-war demonstration in Oakland in the spring of 1965. The philosopher and his friends had joined the demonstration. Thorkelson comments that at the time “Marcuse could have passed through the crowd virtually unnoticed.” Three years later he had become world famous. When he arrived in Paris in May 1968 for a UNESCO conference he was recognized and invited to address students who were occupying their university. For a time, Marcuse was as famous to the 1960’s counterculture as a rock star!

The author gives us a glimpse of Marcuse’s background and upbringing. Born in Germany in 1898 of Jewish parentage, He grew up in a neighborhood of highly assimilated German Jews. So assimilated in fact that in later life he recalled a mother calling to her children, “Siegfried! Brunhilde! Its time to come in for Shabbat!” Living a privileged life his major interest was the reading of literature and philosophy.

World War One changed that. Drafted into the army he found himself increasingly sympathetic to socialist ideas. In 1919, after the war’s end, he took part in the revolution in Berlin where he became a soldier’s council delegate and was sent to the barricades to participate in the armed defense of the uprising against right wing militias. 

The treachery of the German Social-Democratic party, which had hired the right-wing Freikorps to murder Rosa Luxemburg, led the young Marcuse to quit the party in disillusionment. While he was sympathetic to the Spartacists, who had renamed themselves communists, the fact they seemed mainly concerned with defending the Soviet Union alienated him. He resumed his studies of literature and philosophy, becoming influenced by the Western Marxist philosopher George Lukacs, and his seminal work History and Class Consciousness. This led to a deeper engagement with the works of Hegel and Marx. Particularly influential to Marcuse was Lukacs’ concept of reification, whereby oppression is rationalized by confusing human social relations for actual things with a supposedly independent existence. The neoliberal celebration of the ‘free market’ is one contemporary example of reification. Markets are depicted as things with a life of their own, rather than the products of human social relations. He would also fall under the spell of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, becoming his student in 1928.

A major turning point for Marcuse was his discovery of Karl Marx’s newly published Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.This work had been unknown to Marxists until the 1920’s, and Marcuse was one of the first to review it. Particularly important for him was the concept of alienated labor (Thorkelson uses the term ‘estranged labor’). This is “the reduction of all the world’s possibilities to narrow categories of potential gain,” creating “an alien world that confronts us as a hostile power.” Human beings become reduced to being mere tools of capitalism, servants of the economic system and its’ continued functioning, wage-slaves for the accumulation of profit.

By 1932 Marcuse had become employed by the Frankfurt School for Social Research, joining with luminaries of Marxist thought such as Theodor Adorno, Paul Baran, Erich Fromm and Max Horkhiemer. Then Hitler came to power in Germany.  Marcuse and his wife Sophie were forced to flee to Switzerland, where the other members of the Frankfurt School joined them. Here Marcuse was shaken by the news that his former mentor, Heidegger, had joined the Nazi party. 

Eventually the Frankfurt School ended up in the United States, where Marcuse would write what some consider his most important book Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Marcuse wrote Reason and Revolutionin order to counter the claim being made by many thinkers at that time that Hegel was a forerunner of the Nazi’s.Marcuse instead shows him instead to be a forerunner of socialism. In Marcuse’s view of Hegel’s philosophy reason, in recognizing a world of oppression that was not living up to its potentials for freedom, necessarily leads to revolution. This idea of society repressing its own potentials for eliminating suffering and violence would become for him a point of reference for critical analysis.

When the US entered World War Two, Marcuse joined the OSS as a way to contribute to the defeat of Fascism. After the war Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany to re-establish the Frankfurt School. By this time their work had become highly pessimistic as a result of their experiences of exile. Marcuse however stayed in the US, moving from the OSS to the State department. After the death of his first wife, Sophie, he returned to academia. He would later remarry, his second wife being Inge Neumann, who had recently divorced Franz Neumann, a fellow Frankfurt School colleague. It is at this time that he published a book that would later lead to him becoming one of the intellectual ‘superstars’ of the 1960’s Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.

In Eros and CivilizationMarcuse’s explored Freud’s insight that in conditions of scarcity the repression of instincts is necessary in order to ensure the survival of civilization. The problem being that “we don’t just repress our anti-social instincts, we repress everything that makes us human. We repress Eros.” Technological development however, has led to the possibility of a radical reduction of working hours. Capitalist rationality decrees instead that these potentials, which could lead to a society of greater leisure and sensuous enjoyment, be used instead for the endless growth of productivity for profit. Marcuse concluded that a prerequisite for liberation was the reduction of working hours. 

Eros and Civilizationwas followed, in 1958, by his study Soviet Marxism: a Critical Analysis. According to Thorkelson this book “managed to piss off cold war partisans east and west.” In Soviet MarxismMarcuse critiques the Soviet system “for allowing development to push aside socialism’s liberatory promise.” While guardedly optimistic about the possibility for the Soviet system’s reform, he also recognized the degree to which cold war hostilities were used to justify continued repression.

By the 1960’s, while teaching at Brandeis, Marcuse became a mentor to many up and coming young radicals, including Angela Davis, who wrote the foreword to this book. In 1965 he published One-Dimensional Man: a Study in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Whereas Eros and Civilizationhad taken a more optimistic and utopian view of the potentials of modern society, One-Dimensional Man was its dialectical opposite, concentrating on the totalitarian features of capitalist society and the ways in which it repressed its potentials for liberation. “We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, of the perfection of waste,” Marcuse charged. Here he took aim at the way in which consumerism functioned to keep society submissive to capitalism. “The most effective form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of false needs that perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.” The one-dimensional man of Marcuse’s title had sold out the possibility of greater freedom for the chance to own more and more things. In doing so he had voluntarily chosen to submit himself to a political-economic system that reduced him to a mere instrument of productivity.

Forced out from his teaching position at Brandeis because of his radical views he took a new job at the University of California, San Diego. It was then, as Thorkelson puts it, that Marcuse became ‘the reluctant guru’ of the New Left, becoming more involved with political activism. His experiences in France in May 1968 led to the publication of An Essay in Liberation, in which he restated the utopian optimism of his earlier works.

In the 1970’s a period of reaction to the utopian dreams of the ‘60’s had set in. This was reflected in books such as Counterrevolution and Revolt. While he criticized the 60’s counterculture for its “failure of nerve” he also recognized hopeful developments such as the women’s movement, managing to reject both illusion and despair. Marcuse’s second wife Inge died in 1973. Afterwards he married Erica Sherover, a former student. His final book, The Aesthetic Dimension, critically analyzed art as “the unassailable refuge of freedom.” Here Marcuse drew attention to how art, even non-political art, displayed potentials for a liberated society. 

Two years later, he died on a trip to Germany in 1979.

Herbert Marcuse Philosopher of Utopia: a Graphic Biographyis a delightful, easy-to-read introduction to the ideas of one of the most revolutionary thinkers of the 20^thcentury. Somehow Thorkelson manages to present Marcuse’s ideas for the uninitiated without oversimplifying them. The book was co-edited by Paul Buhle, who over the last few years has engaged in editing and writing a series of graphic guides as a means of introducing socialist ideas to a wider audience. Perhaps if we are lucky we will also see a graphic guide to the Situationist International, or a graphic biography of Guy Debord soon. Hopefully this book will stimulate further interest in, and study of the writings of Herbert Marcuse. It is long past time for the world-left to catch up with him!

Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia, A Graphic Biography

By Nick Thorkelson, edited by Paul Buhle and Andrew T. Lamas, foreword by Angela Davis.

ISBN 9780872867857

City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2019

120 pages

$15.95

Richard Burke is an activist, artist, writer, and retired teacher living in St. Louis.

An essay on a classic of Marxist philosophy. Unfortunately much of the World-Left has neglected to learn its' lessons.

One current of 20^th century Marxism that remains highly relevant today is the Frankfurt School. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse all made profound contributions to a critical theory which provides us with insights into monopoly capitalism and its cultural effects. Many of the issues that they explored in their works remain crucial, especially in an era in which someone like Donald Trump can occupy the White House. In Grand Hotel Abyss; The Lives of the Frankfurt School Stuart Jeffries provides us with a broad overview of the writers and thinkers of this provocative group of 20^th century German Marxists.

The Frankfurt School for Social Research attempted to wrestle with a thorny problem. Marx’s vision of a triumphant proletariat overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism had not yet happened. The German Revolution at the end of World War One, on which many hopes had been placed, was suppressed. The U.S.S.R. was ruled by a party claiming the mantle of socialism, but in practice a totalitarian distortion of Marxism. With the failure of revolution in Germany the path was paved for the rise of fascism. Why had this happened? Where had the promise of progress gone wrong? Why was an age that so proudly proclaimed its adherence of the aims of the Enlightenment been so productive of barbarism? The virtue of the Frankfurt School is that, unattached to any political party, they attempted to remain faithful to the ideals of Marxism while confronting the ugly realities of the actual world around them.

The Frankfurt School Intellectuals were for the most part the sons of privileged German-Jewish families who would come to revolt against their bourgeois upbringing. Nonetheless their approach to Marxism was largely colored by the advantages that their upbringing allowed them. Exposed to art, literature, music and philosophy from their earliest days cultural concerns played a major role in their thinking. Jeffries explores how Walter Benjamin, as he grew older, became aware that his comfortable station in life was “premised on a ruthless airbrushing of the unpalatable and the unfortunate, and how its bourgeois security involved a monstrous, more or less intentional, act of forgetting of what lay beyond the lowered blinds of the family’s apartments.” This was a discovery that the other members of the Frankfurt School made for themselves, and it inevitably led to conflicts with the authority of their parents. Ironically one of these rebellious sons, Theodor Adorno, would later help his parents escape from Nazi Germany to the U.S.

Housed in a modernist building in the city of Frankfurt, the members of the Institute for Social Research began to grapple with the thorny problem of why the proletariat had not risen up to overthrow capitalism. This would lead them to begin investigating the role of culture and psychology in influencing social attitudes. When Hitler came to power in the early 30’s the Frankfurt School immigrated to the United States. These experiences of the failure of the revolution, the rise of fascism, and their observations of the American cultural and political scene soon forced them to come to some harsh conclusions. In many ways the crucial work of the institute is found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1947 classic The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this book they set out to ask how it was that a civilization that claimed to embody the ideals of the Enlightenment, reason and science, could produce the barbarism of fascism. Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that the barbarism was there from the very beginning. With the development of capitalism, reason and science placed themselves at the service of the established order, and became increasingly devoted to a purely instrumentalist approach to the world. This was concerned more with orienting means to ends rather than critically examining the ends themselves, a concern which could be dispensed with as a value judgment. Thus the entire world, human beings included, became merely an object of administration and manipulation. The founding myth of the Enlightenment they found in Homer’s Odyssey, particularly in the story of the outwitting of the Sirens. Plugging up the ears of the crew with wax so that they could not hear the singing, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast so that he could hear but not respond. Adorno and Horkheimer see this as a symbol of the cultural condition of monopoly capitalism; the workers, like the crew, can only see the task at hand and are focused on their work lives which dull and stupefy them, while the ruling class, able to hear the sirens’ song like Odysseus, have rendered themselves incapable of responding due to their material interests. As a result both workers and capitalists undergo a regression, which manifests as fascist barbarism.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s work, while brilliant in its critique of capitalist society, was primarily negative in that they could offer no way out of the situation they described. After the war they returned to Germany to re-establish the Institute. Two members of the Frankfurt School however, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, stayed in the U.S. While they largely agreed with the critique of their colleagues, their writings contained an optimistic, even utopian counterpoint. Fromm’s writing “argued for the kind of socialist humanism his former colleagues denied was possible.” As a psychoanalyst, Fromm came to question much of Freudian orthodoxy, advocating for a “concept of a social character” that “involved external social structures shaping the inner self.” He “argued that there are limited potentialities for self-transformation under capitalism that could eventually realize what he called a socialist humanism.” Jeffries points out that “In Marx’s Concept of Man, Fromm argued that Hegel, Marx, Goethe and Zen Buddhism all have this vision of man overcoming self-alienation by relating to the objective world.” Fromm’s books would achieve a surprising amount of popular success in the 1950’s and 60’s.

It was Herbert Marcuse however who would become most closely associated with the New Left of the 1960’s. His 1955 book Eros and Civilization; a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud would take Freud’s most pessimistic book, Civilization and its’ Discontents, and find a hidden dialectic there that revealed utopian potentials. Freud had argued that there was a struggle between the life affirming instincts of Eros and the death instinct, Thanatos.  The death instinct manifested itself in outward aggression, destruction, and war. Civilization required the repression of the erotic instincts, thus their ability to restrain the manifestations of Thanatos was weakened. As a result of technological progress, Freud feared that war would eventually lead to the extinction of the human race. Marcuse however, applying a Marxist insight, argued that class society demanded a “surplus repression” which was not necessary to the maintenance of civilization, but existed solely to perpetuate the established order. The development of technology also allowed the possibility of meeting basic needs with progressively less labor time. As a result surplus repression could be abolished, and the erotic instincts liberated.

While his 1965 book One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society struck a more pessimistic note by examining the ways in which capitalist society manifested totalitarian tendencies, even here an optimistic note intruded. Marcuse called attention to the passages in Marx’s Grundrisse, his posthumously published outline for Capital, where he foresees the development of automation. As a result of the need for the labor movement to respond to the challenges of automation, Marcuse speculated that the proletariat might once again recover its revolutionary potential. Encouraged by the student movement of the 1960’s, and especially by the May 1968 uprising in France, Marcuse wrote what was arguably his most utopian work, An Essay in Liberation. In this book, Jeffries comments, “Marcuse dared to imagine a new type of man who rejected the values of established societies. This new man was not aggressive, was incapable of fighting wars or creating suffering, and worked happily both collectively and individually for a better world rather than to further his own interests.”

Jeffries states that after the end of the cold war, and as a result of capitalist triumphalism, interest in the Frankfurt School waned. Since the financial crisis of 2008, something seems to have changed though. New left wing movements, such as Occupy and Podemos have emerged. Jeffries claims that a new interest in the Critical Theory the Frankfurt School championed has become evident. The issues that they dealt with remain relevant.

Grand Hotel Abyss: the Lives of the Frankfurt School is a comprehensive investigation of this compelling group of thinkers. Stuart Jeffries manages to examine the substance of their ideas, while providing us with biographical information about the lives of the people behind the critique. While he is largely sympathetic to their work, he retains just enough critical distance from his subject to allow him to criticize some of the more questionable aspects of their ideas. In discussing Adorno’s dislike for Jazz, for example, he is able to inform us that Adorno actually had a quite superficial knowledge of the subject. His opinion was formed by what he heard in Germany rather than through exposure to African-American Jazz. While there is much validity to Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry, Jeffries points out that he also overlooks the ways in which individuals and communities appropriate its products for their own needs in often quite subversive ways. Though he had an incisive critique of capitalism, Adorno’s tastes were informed by bourgeois concepts of high culture.

For anyone interested in the work of the Frankfurt School, especially those with little knowledge of the subject but who would like to know more, Stuart Jeffries Grand Hotel Abyss: the Lives of the Frankfurt School is indispensible.

Grand Hotel Abyss; the Lives of the Frankfurt School

By Stuart Jeffries, Verso Books

ISBN-13: 9-781-78478-568-0

London, 2016

440 pages, $26.95