Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted…
— Marcuse
While Marcuse wrote of the ‘great refusal’ towards the ‘Establishment’ among the young and the intelligentsia, particularly in regard to the Vietnam War, to what extent can such sentiments be regarded as a genuine ‘refusal’ against the oligarchy? The assumption, in this instance, that the Vietnam War was propelled by the war-profiteers of the Establishment, against which the New Left was resisting, is a myth. The war was causing major dislocations in the U.S. economy. Writing on the economic consequences of the war for the USA, a report in The New York Times describes the deficit reaching $23 billion in 1968. ‘… But, more than that, the war tended to sour the climate of international monetary negotiation, and it certainly did not help financial psychology. …’622 On 16 October 1969, brokers and executives joined with the New Left to march through Wall Street demanding the end of the war.623
Marcuse stated that the primary elements in this youth mobilisation were two polarities, the ghetto underprivileged and the privileged, who, through their education and resources, can analyse the situation better than any White proletarian. This elite have a high state of consciousness that can escape ‘social control’, whereas the White proletariat and middle class did not have revolutionary potential. Tom Hayden had said the same in 1962 in the founding manifesto of the New Left:
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the ‘human relations’ consultants to the modern corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of ‘participation’ or ‘belonging’, while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.624
Hayden understood the role of the social sciences as a ‘manipulative tool’ of the oligarchy. Hayden imagined that ‘men of power’ rely on universities’, without mentioning the reliance of the institutions on the endowments by these ‘men of power’, and the ways by which even ‘radicals’ such as the Critical Theorists were utilised by the oligarchy as the ‘new levers for change’, according to the courses steered by oligarchical funding. It is precisely because academia is ‘a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes’, and has ‘a permanent position of social influence’, as Hayden put it, that the oligarchy has ensured their compliance.
In 1968, the year of the worldwide New Left student riots, in which the SDS took a pivotal role, the Rockefeller Foundation gave its outlook on universities in the same terms as Hayden:
A university must not be an end in itself; it must be an institution responsive to the needs of society, a powerful force in social and economic development, engaging in the kinds of teaching and research required for the transition from traditional to modern ways of life.625
‘Transition from traditional to modern ways of life’ for the purposes of ‘social and economic development’ is the raison d’etre for the oligarchic endowments to academia and the social sciences. This is where the changes to subvert tradition start. It is here that we might discern the convergence between the oligarchy and the Left. The method is ‘transition’, Fabian-style, gradual, and presented as a moderate and even as a ‘conservative’ alternative to the riotous behaviour of the burgeoning Black Power movement and the New Left.
The year of student revolt saw the Rockefeller Foundation overtly utilising the same rhetoric of the New Left in regard to ‘participatory democracy’ and the ‘politicisation’ of the arts as a means of social change:
The new viewpoint looks at ‘culture’ not as a commodity but as a condition, that is, a situation where changing needs indicate social and artistic changes. In this sense, participatory democracy is related to participatory theatre and visual art; technology influences art forms; interculturization affects arts and philosophy; and the civil rights movement leads to new political, economic, and artistic positions. The politicization of the arts represents a conviction of more and more people that the arts play a vital role in the establishment and debate of the most essential values of our society.626
On the pretext of repudiating the commodification of the arts, the oligarchy was supporting the transition of the arts into a means of social engineering and social control, candidly referring to ‘politicization’, which is stated to include:
• Technification of art-forms, which in detaching the arts from tradition has ensured its commodification;
• Participatory democracy in the arts, which in practical terms has meant detachment from tradition, and commodification by catering to the mass denominator, hence creating and enlarging fluid markets;
• Interculturization as a means of creating a nebulous cosmopolitan international art, again more apt for mass worldwide commercialisation.
The educated class cited by Hayden and Marcuse is most susceptible to indoctrination by the Establishment’s education system. In 1954, when grant-making by the tax-exempt foundations came under congressional scrutiny, the research director of the Reece Committee, Norman Dodd, reported that the Foundations since the 1930s had brought a revolution to the education system:
… [G]rants had been made by Foundations (chiefly by Carnegie and Rockefeller) which were used to further this purpose by:
Directing education in the United States toward an international viewpoint and discrediting the traditions to which it [formerly] had been dedicated.
Training individuals and servicing agencies to render advice to the Executive branch of the Federal Government.
Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition.
Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.
Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature.627
Hayden stated that the new vanguard role of the revolution would be assumed by students, Blacks, and Third World peoples. This was the precursor of today’s identity politics, which Marcuse had ideologically formulated as the revolt of outsiders who would replace the proletariat as the agents of revolution.
In the United States the underprivileged are constituted in particular by national and racial minorities, which of course are mainly unorganized politically and often antagonistic among themselves (for example there are considerable conflicts in the large cities between Blacks and Puerto Ricans). They are mostly groups that do not occupy a decisive place in the productive process and for this reason cannot be considered potentially revolutionary forces from the viewpoint of Marxian theory — at least not without allies.628
Let us deconstruct Marcuse’s statement:
The oligarchy had even by the late 1960s long been funding Black and ethnic minorities. It is exactly because they did not ‘occupy a decisive place in the productive process’ that the oligarchs sought their full integration — as with women — into what is today called an ‘inclusive economy’. As a representative example, in 1967, the year that Marcuse made this statement, the Rockefeller Foundation records that its focus was on integrating the Blacks into the economic process, with ‘grants for the development of Negro leadership in public service and business; for the easier and more effective transition of the Negro into the world outside the ghetto; and for legal and educational assistance to the underprivileged, particularly in the South’.629 Such funding co-opted and channelled Black discontent and bought-off Black leaders, directing them away from separatism and self-help, towards the integrated economy. Among the primary organisations utilised by the oligarchy for these purposes has long been the National Urban League. The Rockefeller Foundation reported its work with the organisation in 1967 aimed at creating a leadership that could organise the Black community according to the requirements of corporate capital:
An attempt both to increase the number of leaders and improve the quality of leadership in the ghettos was reflected in a three-year grant renewal for the National Urban League’s Leadership Development Program. The change in the Program’s direction was significant. Whereas the intent of the original Program had been to draw on upper- and middle-class Negroes, the effort is now aimed increasingly at development of neighborhood leaders and local civic leaders.630
What the Rockefeller Foundation is implying is clear: upper and middle-class Blacks had been co-opted into the economic system, and it was now time to proceed with the rest, who could be channelled by the use of ‘civil rights’ rhetoric.
In its first 18 months of operation, some 950 Negroes participated in programs organized by the Urban League in ten cities. Of this number, 200 persons are now listed as members of community boards, welfare councils, and other public and private agencies. The Foundation underscores the importance of this program, which seeks out grass-roots leaders whose responsibility to the community welfare will be reflected upwards, while they reflect their guidance down.631
The Rockefeller Foundation was scouting for potential trouble-makers who could be bought off with positions on boards, councils and agencies, assuring that change would be in the direction of their sponsors. Their ‘responsibility to the community welfare will be reflected upwards, while they reflect their guidance down’, so that the changes that take place within the Black communities would be determined from the top down, not at grass-roots levels, despite the rhetoric. The iconic ‘radical’ Saul Alinksy, with his Industrial Areas Foundation, helped this process by smashing European ethnic neighbourhoods, pushing non-white integration in the name of ‘human rights’. This guru of rebellion was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and eulogised as a hero.632 It is one of a multitude of examples of how the pseudo-revolt of the 1960s was funded and channelled by the oligarchy to scare the masses into ‘change’ for the sake of peace and order. It was the dialectic of creating the problem and offering the solution.
Addressing the issues of the Cold War, Marcuse advocated peaceful economic competition between the USA and the Soviet bloc, ‘on a global scale and through global institutions’. Marcuse explains:
This pacification would mean the emergence of a genuine world economy—the demise of the nation state, the national interest, national business together with their international alliances. And this is precisely the possibility against which the present world is mobilized.
The fateful interdependence of the only two ‘sovereign’ social systems in the contemporary world is expressive of the fact that the conflict between progress and politics, between man and his masters has become total. When capitalism meets the challenge of communism, it meets its own capabilities: spectacular development of all productive forces after the subordination of the private interests in profitability which arrest such development. When communism meets the challenge of capitalism, it too meets its own capabilities: spectacular comforts, liberties, and alleviation of the burden of life. Both systems have these capabilities distorted beyond recognition and, in both cases, the reason is in the last analysis the same — the struggle against a form of life which would dissolve the basis for domination.633
While Marcuse seems to be critiquing ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’, what he is calling for is a synthesis leading to a ‘genuine world economy’ ‘through global institutions’. It should not be misunderstood that Marcuse’s call for the ‘demise of national business’ is antithetical to the aims of those who sponsored him. What he is proposing is the agenda of global capitalism. What the globalist oligarchy requires are fundamental changes in capitalism, and they have long backed ‘radicals’ for this objective. They are not involved in ‘national business’ but in globalisation, and have funded the ‘global institutions’ referred to by Marcuse to facilitate a world social, political and economic order. Like Marcuse, their aim is a ‘genuine world economy’. This can only be achieved by breaking down the same ‘primary ties’ that the Left condemns: a confluence of aims.
After stating much that is laudable about the dehumanising impact of technology, betraying vestiges of his old teacher Heidegger, it transpires that it is not the overthrow — the ‘Great Refusal’ as he calls his ‘rebellion’ — of techno-industrial domination that Marcuse urges. Rather, the new order ‘depends on the continued existence of the technical base itself’.
I have stressed that this does not mean the revival of ‘values,’ spiritual or other, which are to supplement the scientific and technological transformation of man and nature. On the contrary, the historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks — the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization. Moreover, the new ends might assert themselves even in the construction of scientific hypotheses — in pure scientific theory. From the quantification of secondary qualities, science would proceed to the quantification of values.634
Hence, for all the rhetoric and sophistry about the dehumanising impact of technology, the ultimate aim is not a transcendence of technocratic-industrial-late-capitalism, but its global ascendance, until it defines universal values.
In Marcuse’s call for the ‘materialization of values and quantification of values’, we have the crux of the whole struggle between the forces of Matter whether capitalist or socialist, and the rear-guard of Tradition; what truly defines the dichotomy of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, beyond the muddled terminology of journalists and academics.
To emphasise the soulless character of his doctrine, Marcuse cites a footnote assuring readers that such questions remain solely technical and cannot be considered as ‘ethical and sometimes religious’.635 It transpires to be the hubristic mastery over Nature, the transformation of ‘values into needs’ and of ‘final causes into technical possibilities’. The earthly paradise is finally reached: ‘the free development of needs on the basis of satisfaction’; the ultimate condition of Man being a ‘pacified existence’.636 Yet Marcuse warns against making a ‘fetish’ of technology, but relies on a ‘collective effort’ of ‘free individuals’. Should these contradictions seem to lack coherence, they can be rationalised through dialectically.637
It has been heard from Marxist theorists: the withering away of the state and the unfolding of ‘true Communism’ after the transition phase of socialism, where the laws of social production will usher in a utopia of total freedom. Marcuse’s utopia of ‘pacified existence’, however, has its own transitional phase that, like the path to Communism via socialism, requires repression. Pol Pot tried to rush the process. Marcuse is explicit in his 1965 essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’. He condemns the toleration of ideas that are contrary to his ideology:
The active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity. I call this non-partisan tolerance ‘abstract’ or ‘pure’ inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides — but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination….
…However, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.638
By demonising others, Marcuse enables the Left to declare in the interests of ‘peace and humanity’ that the repression of opposition is necessary. It is heard in the histrionics of antifa et al.: ‘No free speech for fascists’, including scholars, whose leftist colleagues are just as avid in seeing such heretics purged from academia.
Hence, when today we see liberals and leftists committing acts of violence against dissidents in the name of ‘peace and freedom’, they are being consistent according to their dialectic. One can more than suspect that what Marcuse is proposing is a dictatorship of technocrats, who eliminate any threats to ‘freedom and happiness’ in the manner by which Robespierre and his committee upheld ‘public safety’ in the name of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen’. In his 1968 addendum, Marcuse elaborates on how this technocratic ‘elite’ would operate, citing John Stuart Mill that, ‘In any case, John Stuart Mill, not exactly an enemy of liberal and representative government, was not so allergic to the political leadership of the intelligentsia as the contemporary guardians of semi-democracy are. Mill believed that “individual mental superiority” justifies “reckoning one person’s opinion as equivalent to more than one”’.639 But then Marcuse assures readers that this would not be necessary if his version of ‘democracy’ is established through revolution.
What would be unavoidable is the establishment of what Orwell called in 1984 the ‘Ministry of Truth’, with censors and enforcers maintaining Marcuse’s formulae for ‘freedom’:
• Certain things cannot be said,
• Certain ideas cannot be expressed,
• Certain policies cannot be proposed,
• Certain behaviour cannot be permitted.
Again, turning to Orwell’s’ dystopia, Marcuse uses doublespeak. The term ‘Repressive Tolerance’ is itself outlandishly one of doublespeak; almost a spoof of itself, ‘like peaceful violence’.
This revolution would be made by ‘minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant’ against the ‘majority’, for the latter’s true happiness.640 Here we see the stirrings of today’s identity politics.
Marcuse claimed that an objective criterion can be established to determine what should be tolerated and what should be repressed:
…Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to ‘the people’ for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.641
Marcuse betrays himself as a bigot and a fanatic. The Left has followed in those footsteps from the days of the Jacobins’ guillotine. Once a body of guardians — technocrats and social scientists — defines ‘what is right and wrong, good and bad’, on the basis of ‘science’, and disregarding outmoded traditions and morality, only then would ‘the people’ be asked for their ‘democratic deliberation’, without the encumbrance of contrary opinions. Dissent would be suppressed by a bureaucracy of censors on the grounds that such opinions are ‘stupid’. Should anyone dissent from the ‘democratic’ consensus, they would at the most charitable be classed as in need of therapy. The process of finding ‘truth’ on the presumption of dogma and upholding it through repression is a reformulation of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ that inspired Jacobinism and its ‘Reign of Terror’ in the name of ‘human rights’, and later the ‘Red Terror’.
Marcuse updated his essay in 1968, at the time of the riots, stating that extremism is justified in the most tolerant democracies, because the opinions of the majority are not legitimately formed. Hence only the New Left is the custodian of what is right: ‘this means that the majority is no longer justified in claiming the democratic title of the best guardian of the common interest’.642 At the time Marcuse was writing, the ‘best guardian of the common interest’ was represented by the rampaging, screaming, bomb-throwing lunatics of the Weather Underground and the Yippies. Marcuse continued that the repression would be against the ‘Right’.
… Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressor. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled.643
Marcuse’s definition of the ‘Right’ is a straw-man. The Critical Theorists had defined anyone maintaining what were still normal views on family and morality as scoring high on a ‘F’ascist Scale and in need of therapy.
When Julius Evola’s book Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) was republished in 1969 and received notice amidst the ‘student revolt’, he was at times called the ‘Marcuse of the Right’. Evola pointed out that, unlike the Left, his was a ‘truly radical “no”’ to the ‘system’, as he examined the roots of modern existence in ways that the Left could not. ‘Neither Marcuse nor any of the “protestors” have done the same: for they have neither the ability nor courage to do so’. ‘In particular, I think that the “sociology” of Marcuse should be completely rejected: it only tends towards a sort of gross form of Freudianism… likewise, the ideal society Marcuse envisages once all this “dissent” has led to the end of the so-called “system” is as squalid and insipid as can be’.644