In the summer of 1967, an elderly philosopher named Herbert Marcuse took the stage at the Dialectics of Liberation conference in London and calmly called for total revolution against the West.1
Speaking in a thick, Weimar-era German accent, Marcuse excoriated “the syndrome of late capitalism” and “the subjugation of man to the apparatus.” The audience, which included pedigreed Marxist intellectuals, counterculture artists such as Allen Ginsberg, and black militants such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, sat in hushed silence.2 They had gathered at the conference in order to “create a genuine revolutionary consciousness” and devise strategies for “physical and cultural ‘guerrilla warfare’”—and the old man, who wore a formal suit and peppered his conversation with references to the great philosophers of the past, seemed to hold the key to unlocking it.3
Marcuse’s lecture, titled “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” praised the hippies and the counterculture for initiating a “sexual, moral and political rebellion”4 and argued that the Marxist revolution must begin with a “new sensibility” and “the emergence of a new type of man, with a vital, biological drive for liberation, and with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of the affluent society.”5 At the end of his speech, audience members circulated joints around the auditorium.6 Marcuse took a puff and called for the negation of the existing society and the realization of utopia: “the abolition of labor,” “the termination of the struggle for existence,” “the total reconstruction of our cities,” “the elimination [of] ugliness,” “the transition from capitalism to socialism.”7
His message reverberated around the world. Within months, the carefully mannered and meticulous scholar of Kant, Hegel, and Marx would become a beacon for left-wing radicals everywhere. Students in Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin carried banners with the slogan “Marx, Mao, Marcuse!” emblazoned in enormous block letters.8 The militants of the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang read dog-eared copies of Marcuse’s books as they plotted robberies, bombings, assassinations, and urban guerrilla warfare against the state. Although Marcuse shunned the title of “father” of the revolution that was roiling the West—the radicals “did not need a father figure, or grandfather figure, to lead them to protest,” he chided—his ideas became the guiding light for the youth revolts and the so-called New Left.9
In a sequence of three popular books—One-Dimensional Man, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, and An Essay on Liberation—Marcuse had sketched out the rationale and the methods for revolution in the West. He argued that modern capitalist society had created the perfect means of repression, anesthetizing the working class with material comforts, manufactured desires, and welfare programs, which stabilized the system and allowed for the creation of external scapegoats.
The only solution, he believed, was the Great Refusal: the complete disintegration of the existing society, beginning with a revolt in the universities and the ghettos, then dissolving “the system’s hypocritical morality and ‘values’” through the relentless application of his “critical theory of society,”10 a philosophy described by Marcuse scholar Douglas Kellner as “Western Marxism,” “neo-Marxism,” or “critical Marxism.”11
Meanwhile, as Marcuse’s call for revolution was being heralded by the young radicals, his rise to prominence sparked a furious backlash. In San Diego, members of the American Legion hung an effigy of “Marxist Marcuse” on the flagpole in front of City Hall, demanding that the University of California, San Diego, terminate his employment.12 California governor Ronald Reagan denounced the professor for his “communist” ideology that contributed toward the “climate of violence” on university campuses.13 Vice President Spiro Agnew demanded that UCSD fire Marcuse for “poisoning a lot of young minds.”14 Pope Paul VI, delivering a homily at St. Peter’s Basilica, criticized Marcuse’s revolutionary theory for opening the way to “license cloaked as liberty” and spreading “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations.”15
The professor’s domestic enemies sent him threats in the mail, cut his phone lines, and fired gunshots at his home.16 “You are a very dirty Communist dog,” read one letter. “We give you seventy-two hours to [leave the] United States. Seventy-two hours more, Marcuse, and we kill you.”17
Today, America is living inside Marcuse’s revolution. During the fever pitch of the late 1960s, Marcuse posited four key strategies for the radical Left: the revolt of the affluent white intelligentsia, the radicalization of the black “ghetto population,” the capture of public institutions, and the cultural repression of the opposition.18
All of these objectives have been realized to some degree—and have begun the “transvaluation of all prevailing values” that Marcuse had envisioned.19 Marcuse’s “critical theory,” which he wryly called “the power of negative thinking,”20 has steadily devoured America’s institutions, becoming the dominant mode of thought for the new elite. The young radicals who were ready to wage war against the state simply brought their revolution inside, bringing the critical theories to power by a long march through the universities, media, corporations, and central government.
This revolution is still hurtling forward. The modern Left is aggressively pursuing Marcuse’s prophecy that, once society had been liberated from capitalist repression, their “rebellion would then [take] root in the very nature, the ‘biology’ of the individual” and unleash a pure freedom beyond necessity, exploitation, and violence.21 They believe that Marcuse’s negative dialectic, developed over a century of theory and practice, might finally dissolve the oppressive foundations of the West and lead to a “rupture of history, the radical break, the leap into the realm of freedom,” even if it means the subversion of democracy and the cataclysm of political violence.22
Marcuse was willing to pursue his vision into the apocalypse—the chaos was the cost of change; the violence was the catalyst of progress. Along this path, thousands of young and alienated radicals were willing to follow.
* * *
Carl and Gertrud Marcuse of Berlin welcomed their first child, Herbert, into the world in the summer of 1898. Carl, a successful businessman, and Gertrud, the daughter of a prosperous industrialist, had established a life of bourgeois comfort that their son would spend his entire adulthood railing against.
During Marcuse’s childhood, the family lived in a luxurious ten-room apartment in Berlin, then a suburban mansion with “five reception rooms, an elegant English fireplace, and accommodation for a household staff of two housemaids, a cook, a pair of laundry maids, and the driver of the family Packard.”23 Carl and Gertrud sent Herbert to the elite Mommsen Gymnasium, favored by the imperial ruling class,24 and the Kaiserin-Augusta Gymnasium, which had been attended by the famed sociologist Max Weber.25
The family was Jewish, but not devout. Marcuse would later explain that his childhood was typical for an affluent, assimilated German family and that his religious heritage never caused a sense of alienation during his childhood.26 Marcuse was a sensitive student who suffered from poor eyesight and completed his primary education without any thought to politics.
That changed with the outbreak of the First World War. Following his graduation from the gymnasium, Marcuse was swept into the military draft. Administrators exempted Marcuse from combat on account of his eyesight and assigned him to work the horse stables in Berlin. During this period, the capital city was awash in unrest: Marcuse witnessed protests, riots, strikes, profiteering, and political upheaval. The country was fighting a war abroad and a war within, as Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to suppress an internal democratic revolt.27
By 1917, Marcuse had joined the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and flirted with Rosa Luxemburg’s radical Spartacus faction, which sought to overthrow global capitalism and advance the international Marxist revolution. The following year, Germany was on the verge of collapse: the Allied Powers had routed the German army, the kaiser had abdicated, and revolution had broken out from Kiel to Hamburg to Berlin. Citizens organized “workers’ and soldiers’ councils,” modeled on the Russian soviets, to assume authority and provide security for the new political factions.
Marcuse, following the radical line, supported the revolution for social democracy and, in order to prevent counter-revolutionaries from reestablishing imperial rule, joined the left-wing “civilian security force” in Berlin.28
During the November Revolution, which would establish the ill-fated Weimar Republic, the twenty-year-old Marcuse found himself armed with a rifle, standing guard in Alexanderplatz, under orders to shoot any counter-revolutionary snipers on the spot. This moment—one can imagine the young intellectual dressed in a military overcoat, smoking cigarettes, dazzled by the great orators of the revolution—would contain all of the themes that occupied Marcuse until the end of his life: revolution and counter-revolution, utopia and dystopia, hope and betrayal.
Marcuse was elected to one of the soldiers’ councils but quickly noticed that the councils were electing all of the old officers from the previous regime—a bad omen. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party coalition, now tasked with administering the new Weimar state, splintered. Rosa Luxemburg and her Spartacus faction cast their lot with a newly created Communist Party of Germany, and their most fervent members rallied for a putsch in order to bury capitalism once and for all. The SDP leadership, hoping to stabilize the country and consolidate power, unleashed nationalist paramilitaries on Berlin, who arrested, tortured, and executed Luxemburg, then dumped her body in a canal. The other Spartacus leaders met a similar fate.29
Marcuse, disgusted down to his core, resigned from the SDP and abandoned practical politics altogether. The revolution, he believed, had been betrayed and absorbed by the “reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces” of the German bourgeoisie.30 “I remember standing with a rifle in Berlin on the Alexander Platz and during all that time I began to be more and more interested in Marx,” Marcuse recalled sixty years later. “When the German revolution was gradually—or not so gradually—defeated, suppressed, and their leaders assassinated, I withdrew and devoted myself practically entirely to study at the university.”31
The subsequent decades of Marcuse’s life followed the same pattern of revolution and disenchantment. Marcuse earned his doctorate in literature from the University of Freiburg in 1922, worked briefly as a partner in an antiquarian bookstore in Berlin, then returned to Freiburg to study under the philosopher Martin Heidegger—who would later become a member of the Nazi Party—and eventually completed a second thesis, “Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity,” which qualified him for a career in academia.32 But as Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1932, Marcuse fled Germany alongside other Jewish academics and joined the Institute for Social Research, an association of prominent Marxist theoreticians who had escaped the Nazis, first to Switzerland, then to France, then to the United States.33
The group, led by scholars Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, and Friedrich Pollock, would pioneer the “critical theory of society,” which synthesized a vast range of concepts from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory in an attempt to explain the failure of traditional Marxism and to create a new, more sophisticated dialectic that could finally inspire the “radical act” of transforming the world. Their theory would contain three essential parts: radical criticism of the existing society, a method for the “alteration of society as a whole,” and a “utopian spirit” that could guide humanity beyond necessity.34
The institute’s scholars were careful to shroud their language in academic code—self-consciously replacing words such as “Marxism” and “communism” with “dialectical materialism” and “the materialist theory of society”35—but the implications were clear: the true object of the new Marxism was not the pursuit of truth, but the pursuit of revolution.
Marcuse eventually fled abroad, arriving in the United States on Independence Day, 1934. “When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I really felt like a human being,” he recalled.36 For the better part of the next two decades, Marcuse would work for the institute, then for the US Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services, where he conducted research to help fight Nazism. Following the war, he moved into academia, securing positions at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and, finally, the University of California, San Diego.
But Marcuse’s faith in the postwar world quickly went sour, too. Internationally, Marcuse watched the Soviet Union descend into tyranny and the United States initiate hot and cold wars around the globe. Domestically, he watched capitalism expand into mindless consumerism, conformity, and excess, while the poor were mollified with the false promises of the Great Society welfare programs.
The United States, Marcuse concluded, was little more than a “Welfare State and Warfare State”: a twin engine of repression, no longer capable of realizing any higher principle. “If I compare the country as it was, let’s say, in 1934, when I came, and as it is now, I doubt sometimes that this is the same country,” he said. “At that time, this country effectively fought inflation and unemployment, and prepared the war against fascism. You cannot say today that this country is opposed to fascism, if it helps to sustain and establish fascist governments in quite a few countries of the world.”37
Marcuse elaborated on this theme in a probing and pessimistic 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man. His main line of argument was that modern liberal societies had transcended their original purpose, perverted the methods of technological rationality, and become repressive. “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization,” he wrote.38 The capitalist economies had created mass prosperity, but rather than liberate man, they had created a new structure of manipulation and control. Rationality had devolved into irrationality. Freedom had turned into slavery. Progress had produced barbarism.
For Marcuse, modern liberalism had reduced man’s existence to a single dimension and hidden the social, economic, and political contradictions of the previous age, which had animated classical Marxism. In the new flattened society, he wrote, “domination—in the guise of affluence and liberty—extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.”39
The consequence of this transformation was twofold. First, the working class had been stripped of its revolutionary potential. Second, the political system had become a “pseudo-democracy” with no authentic opposition.40 For Marcuse, this was cause to despair. The theory of classical Marxism had been predicated on the revolutionary conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But after the rise of the one-dimensional society, these conditions had been subsumed: capitalism had seduced the working class with its “supreme promise” of “an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people.” The outcome was a new form of alienation. The proletarians had been reduced to “preconditioned receptacles” for production, advertisement, and domination.41 They had become “sublimated slaves,” unable to comprehend their own wishes and desires.42
The political outlook, Marcuse concluded, was grim. “The reality of the laboring classes in advanced industrial society makes the Marxian ‘proletariat’ a mythological concept; the reality of present-day socialism makes the Marxian idea a dream.”43 Modern man was condemned to “the hell of the Affluent Society” through a soft, diffused totalitarianism.44 He was deprived of his own imagination and found his “soul in [his] automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”45 America had become a society characterized by “repressive tolerance,” promising freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly, while, in practice, depriving men of the mechanisms for making those rights meaningful. These essential elements of political life—word, action, opposition—are allowed to exist as symbols, but deprived of any real power.
The implications of Marcuse’s theory were ominous. He painted Western society as a series of inversions: democracy was “pseudo-democracy”; liberty was “repressive tolerance”; freedom was “sublimated slavery.” The public, corroded by false consciousness and subjected to rational management, could no longer be trusted. “As long as this condition prevails, it makes sense to say that the general will is always wrong,” Marcuse wrote in An Essay on Liberation.46 The only solution, therefore, was to break through the illusion and enact a revolution against the system as a whole. “If democracy means self-government of free people, with justice for all, then the realization of democracy would presuppose abolition of the existing pseudo-democracy,” Marcuse wrote. “In the dynamic of corporate capitalism, the fight for democracy thus tends to assume anti-democratic forms, and to the extent to which the democratic decisions are made in ‘parliaments’ on all levels, the opposition will tend to become extra-parliamentary.”47
If not democracy, what should replace it? Here, appealing to Plato and Rousseau, Marcuse gently introduced his ideal political form: the “educational dictatorship”—or rule by elites who can distinguish false from true consciousness and freedom from slavery. “[Society] must first enable its slaves to learn and see and think before they know what is going on and what they themselves can do to change it. And, to the degree to which the slaves have been preconditioned to exist as slaves and be content in that role, their liberation necessarily appears to come from without and from above,” Marcuse wrote. “They must be ‘forced to be free,’ to ‘see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear,’ they must be shown the ‘good road’ they are in search of.”48
Following the orthodoxy of Marx and Lenin, Marcuse believed there must be a temporary dictatorship in order to move society from slavery to freedom. But, breaking from his predecessors, Marcuse offered an ironic twist: instead of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which represented the will of the working class, Marcuse proposed a “dictatorship of the intellectuals”—which, presumably, represented the will of men like him.49
At the time, however, Marcuse was pessimistic about the prospects for revolution. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society programs in the mid-1960s, Marcuse believed that the progressive political project was doomed by its own limitations.50 The one-dimensional society had swallowed up the very possibility of meaningful progress.
The only hope, Marcuse believed, was to unleash the destructive power of the slums and to hasten the collapse of the entire system. In the final passage of One-Dimensional Man, he appealed to “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders,” which, he believed, could constitute the physical, if not intellectual, forces of last-ditch resistance. “They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus, their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not,” Marcuse wrote. “It is nothing but a chance. The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.”51
This, for Marcuse, was all that remained: the Great Refusal; the symbolic revolt; the negative charge of the dialectic.
But he had spoken too soon. Almost immediately after the publication of One-Dimensional Man, a new cultural revolution would sweep through the nations of the West, overturning a series of economic, political, sexual, religious, and artistic orthodoxies—and making Marcuse’s lament about the permanence of the Establishment seem naïve. By the end of the decade, Marcuse’s Great Refusal would end up setting the contours of the new “counterculture.” College-educated bohemians would begin to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” of mainstream society. The war in Vietnam would start to alienate young people with sympathies for the Left. And the “outcasts and outsiders” of the American ghettos would riot, loot, smash, and steal in more than one hundred cities.52
The dialectic—against all expectations—had turned.
* * *
As the unrest spread through the United States, Professor Marcuse retreated to his little office at UCSD, settled himself at the typewriter, lit a cigar, and furiously updated his theory of the revolution. Between 1967 and 1969, Marcuse entered the most fertile period of his career, publishing a new edition of A Critique of Pure Tolerance,53 a collection called Negations: Essays in Critical Theory,54 and the seminal book An Essay on Liberation. During the same period, he also traveled across the world, delivered dozens of public lectures, and sat for lengthy press interviews, leaving behind a detailed record of his thought as it changed over time.55
This body of work would soon become the blueprint for the “New Left,” a loose coalition of student protestors, race activists, radical feminists, and counterculture figures in the United States and Europe. Marcuse, then turning seventy, would become their father, their guru, their guide. As the New Left rose to prominence, Marcuse abandoned his earlier pessimism and laid out an ambitious intellectual program for the new radicals. In a speech at the Free University of Berlin in 1967, Marcuse outlined the basic philosophical orientation of the movement: “The New Left is, with some exceptions, neo-Marxist rather than Marxist in the orthodox sense; it is strongly influenced by what is called Maoism, and by the revolutionary movements in the Third World.”56
The new movement was not the “‘classical’ revolutionary force” of the proletariat. It was, instead, the coalition of opposites that Marcuse had imagined in One-Dimensional Man: the intellectuals and the slum-dwellers, the privileged and the dispossessed. “It is an opposition against the majority of the population, including the working class,” Marcuse said. “It is an opposition against the system’s ubiquitous pressure, which by means of its repressive and destructive productivity degrades everything, in an increasingly inhuman way, to the status of a commodity whose purchase and sale provide the sustenance and content of life; against the system’s hypocritical morality and ‘values’; and against the terror employed outside the metropolis.”57
This movement, Marcuse believed, was beginning to develop into a real political opposition: anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-democratic. The new radicals were building a base of support on the Ivy League campuses and in the West Coast ghettos, beginning the process of “awakening the consciousness of the need for socialism, and that we must struggle for its realization if we are not to be barbarized and destroyed.” The goal, Marcuse explained to the university students in West Berlin, might still be “socialism and the expropriation of private property in the means of production and collective control,” but, he cautioned, in order to arrive at this stage, they must adopt a strategy of masking their intentions. “We must proceed from one step to the next.”58
Marcuse told the students that they could not call for the immediate seizure and redistribution of wealth, but they could create the conditions for it to happen in the future.
Marcuse became their hero. His book One-Dimensional Man sold one hundred thousand copies and was translated into sixteen languages. In Rome, students swore their allegiance to “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.” In Paris, students occupied university buildings and embarked on a spiritual quest they called “la journée marcusienne.”59 In New York, white bourgeois radicals and black militants flocked to hear Marcuse speak about the revolution at the Fillmore East auditorium.60 The New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Time, and Playboy all published features on Marcuse and his role as the “Father of the New Left.”61
Over the following two years, Marcuse would crystallize his program for the New Left in A Critique of Pure Tolerance and An Essay on Liberation, which he dedicated to the “young militants.” Together these texts outlined Marcuse’s new theory of the revolution. Technological progress, he argued, had finally made communism possible. The new proletariat could use race, rather than class, to prepare the grounds for revolution. The radical minority could legitimately use violence and suppression in pursuit of the “total rupture.” Marcuse had moved beyond classical Marxism and brought a coherent theory of neo-Marxism into being—the goal of making “the transition from capitalism to socialism” was the same, but the context, protagonist, and strategy had all changed with the progression of history.62
In the opening pages of An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse explains that the evolution of material conditions under advanced capitalism had finally created the material base necessary to meet the needs of all citizens. “Marx and Engels refrained from developing concrete concepts of the possible forms of freedom in a socialist society; today, such restraint no longer seems justified,” he wrote.63 The advanced nations of the West—and the newly industrialized nations of the East—simply needed to shift the control of the means of production and the distribution of goods in order to achieve the long-lost Marxian dream. “Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism,” Marcuse said. “The rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future.”64
This process of liberation could occur in two steps. First, through creating a system of “collective ownership” over economic production. Second, through a “qualitative change” in human nature “in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness,” which would extinguish the spirit of exploitation once and for all.65
Next, Marcuse addresses the question of who will initiate this revolution. Under classical Marxism, the industrial working class—the soot-covered and alienated men who labored in the factories, shipyards, and warehouses—was the great Subject of the revolution. But, as Marcuse had concluded, the old proletariat had lost its revolutionary potential and assumed a “stabilizing, conservative function” within the capitalist system. And so Marcuse shifted his hopes to the emerging proletariat of the New Left—the coalition between the “young middle-class intelligentsia” and the “black militants”—which had the potential to become a new locus of resistance.66
He squared this apparent contradiction by arguing that new conditions of advanced capitalism necessitated a new revolutionary Subject, and that the New Left coalition served an analogous function to the Marxist political parties that were able to destabilize the ruling order and radicalize the masses in the past.67 “The apparently impregnable economic fortress of corporate capitalism shows signs of mounting strain,” Marcuse wrote. “The ghetto populations may well become the first mass basis of revolt. . . . The student opposition is spreading in the old socialist as well as capitalist countries.”68
The emergence of this new proletariat also suggested a new axis for revolution: racial conflict, Marcuse believed, could provide a viable substitute—and eventual catalyst—for class conflict. “The fact is that, at present in the United States, the black population appears as the ‘most natural’ force of rebellion,” he said. “Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance.”69
Marcuse had watched as the black urban centers had erupted in rioting, looting, arson, and bloodshed during the tumultuous years of the mid-to late 1960s. Although not a conscious revolutionary force, the ghettos provided an instinctual, physical resistance to the forces of law and order. They were a living refutation of the capitalist system, which, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Great Society programs, had failed to absorb the minority populations into its mythology.
“The vital need for change is the very life of the ghetto population,” Marcuse explained.70 He saw the black militant movement, in particular, as a viable means of breaking the Establishment’s stranglehold on language and culture. These groups, which were coalescing under the banner of Black Power, had developed a “subversive universe of discourse” that threatened to subvert the smooth, packaged language of corporate America. They had, for example, desublimated the Platonic word “soul” and loaded it with “black, violent, orgiastic” connotations; they had coined the slogan “black is beautiful” and imbued it with the feeling of “darkness, tabooed magic, the uncanny.”71
Marcuse was careful to explain that this new coalition was not yet capable of revolution against the American regime. “The situation is in no sense revolutionary, it is not even pre-revolutionary,” he told the French newspaper Le Monde in the summer of 1969. “But I am not a defeatist, ever.” He hoped that the white radicals and black militants could soften the grounds for revolution at home and move beyond the confines of the university and the ghetto by uniting with the Third World revolutionaries who were leading the struggle for socialism abroad.
For Marcuse, the primary strategic necessity in the West was to relentlessly apply the negative dialectic, subvert the one-dimensional society, and destabilize the social order. As he explained in An Essay on Liberation, “the development of a radical political consciousness among the masses is conceivable only if and when the economic stability and the social cohesion of the system begin to weaken.”72 The white radicals and black militants, he believed, represented a “powerful force for disintegration” that might spur a crisis and, subsequently, develop into a real revolutionary class.73 “Radical change in consciousness is the beginning, the first step in changing social existence: emergence of the new Subject,” Marcuse wrote. “Historically, it is again the period of enlightenment prior to material change—a period of education, but education which turns into praxis: demonstration, confrontation, rebellion.”74
The precondition for revolution, in other words, was the complete disintegration of the existing culture, economy, and society.
By 1969, Marcuse believed that these conditions were beginning to appear. That year, he republished A Critique of Pure Tolerance, which featured his provocative essay “Repressive Tolerance” and a new postscript relating his ideas to the political turmoil of the moment.
Building on the argument of One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that the liberal-democratic notion of tolerance was an illusion. The “society of total administration” promoted the appearance of freedom and the simulation of dissent, but in practice it repressed and absorbed any real opposition into the system.75 Thus, the major power centers—corporations, media, the state—had created a “perverted” form of tolerance that served “the protection and preservation of a repressive society.”76 Meanwhile, political radicals, lacking the requisite economic and democratic power to influence society, are “left free to deliberate and discuss, to speak and to assemble—and will be left harmless and helpless in the face of the overwhelming majority, which militates against qualitative social change.”77
The solution to this state of “repressive tolerance,” Marcuse believed, was to destroy and replace it with a new regime of “liberating tolerance,” which would reverse the directionality of power and suppress all “institutions, policies, [and] opinions” that did not move the nation toward liberation and, eventually, revolution. As Marcuse put it: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: . . . it would extend to the stage of actions as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.”
For Marcuse, the practice of “liberating tolerance” would justify censorship, repression, and, when necessary, violence.78 “Surely,” he wrote, “no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people. This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means.”79
Those means would include the censorship of ideas, the suppression of the political opposition, and the “suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly” for the enemies of the revolution, who constituted, in Marcuse’s words, a “clear and present danger.” The new regime would apply strict censorship to all universities, corporations, media outlets, educational institutions, political parties, and the state itself. The radicals would enforce a policy of “intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word” in order to inoculate the public against reactionary politics at the deepest substratum of consciousness.80
This program represented a radical departure from the basic principles of the Constitution, but Marcuse, intoxicated by the fervor in the streets, went a step further.
In the pages of “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse patiently builds a step-by-step argument to justify left-wing political violence. First, he sets the premise: the modern capitalist democracies have produced the superficial appearance of peace, but in truth, they have simply masked and legitimized their own war of repression against the people. “Even in the advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails: it is practiced by the police, in the prisons and mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities.”81 Next, he argues that, if the system of law and order is, in fact, a system of suppression, democracy becomes pseudo-democracy; morality becomes immorality; legitimacy becomes illegitimacy. Moreover, under such conditions, the minority—the student radical with his Molotov cocktail, the black liberation soldier with his semiautomatic rifle—has the right to engage in physical resistance.
Marcuse makes this explicit. “I believe that there is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate,” he says. “If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person . . . has the right to preach them abstention.”82
In other words, in the revolutionary moment, the oppressed can exercise their right to overthrow their oppressors; they can justify their own violence as necessary for turning the wheel of history forward. “In terms of historical function there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence,” Marcuse concludes. “In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil—but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it.”83
Marcuse’s new theory of revolution was an instant success. The young radicals of the New Left, seeking intellectual justification for their revolt against the Establishment, immediately adopted Marcuse’s vision as their own and celebrated the old man as their prophet. Meanwhile, the historical process was accelerating on all fronts. Police were tossing tear-gas canisters into throngs of student protestors in Europe. National Guard troops were firing live ammunition at rioters in the United States.84 Mao Zedong was implementing the Cultural Revolution in China. Marxist-Leninist guerrillas from Cambodia to Mozambique had begun their long march toward liberation.
The world seemed poised for the “total rupture”—and Marcuse, abandoning any pretense of scholarly caution or detachment, gave permission for the “new barbarians” of the West to unleash havoc in the streets and in the halls of power. This was his chance, the moment that had escaped him in the crowds of Alexanderplatz in 1918 and on the ship passing by the Statue of Liberty in 1934. The revolution was finally within his reach. Man could escape the nightmare of necessity, liberate his instincts from repression, and create “the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil.”85 At long last, the vast literature of the revolution, from Hegel to Marx to Lenin, could be realized on earth.
All that was needed was the gun.