Last month Matt Taibbi (author, journalist, and podcaster) sent the hornets into a fit of fury with “Marcuse-Anon: Cult of The Pseudo-Intellectual” an angry piece on Herbert Marcuse, a (or the) sacred cow of the identitarian Left.
And no one was more evidently furious than Jonathan Feldman (docent at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University), who replied with “Matt Taibbi, Herbert Marcuse and the Journalistic Appropriation of Philosophy”.
Although I sympathise with Taibbi (yes, I ain’t no fan of Marcuse and I’m even less favorably disposed to educated, relatively affluent, upwardly mobile identitarian Leftists – which Feldman seems to champion) I am sorry to say neither side covered itself in glory in this brouhaha.
By coincidence, however, current Australian affairs offer a good opportunity to illustrate where Marcuse has valuable things to say and to start my comment on that controversy.
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A little digression is needed.
Australian women are protesting the COALition Government inaction on women’s rights at work and against sexual and other kinds of gendered violence. This comes after a series of rape allegations against current Cabinet members and their staffers (one of the alleged victims took her own life).
Yesterday women protested around Australia. To that effect, they organised a series of peaceful rallies to express their frustration.
This is how PM Scott Morrison began his speech before the House of Representatives, as protesters just outside Parliament House were left unsuccessfully demanding his presence:
“Today here and in many cities across our country, women and men are gathering together in rallies both large and small to call for change and to act against violence directed towards women. It is good and right that so many are able to gather here in this way, whether in our capital or elsewhere, and to do so peacefully to express their concerns and their very genuine and real frustrations. This is a vibrant liberal democracy. Not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets—but not here in this country. It is a triumph of democracy when we see these things take place.”So, a liberal democratic government’s inaction on women’s issues is redeemed by the fact women can protest that inaction without being shot.
Local politicians, observers and commentators didn’t fail to notice that. What they failed (or refused) to understand is its implications.
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What does that have to do with Herbert Marcuse? Well, he deals with such situations in “Repressive Tolerance”:
“The exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude”.Readers can see Morrison’s 2021 speech foretold in Marcuse’s 1966 fragment, yes? So, Marcuse’s work is not just wankery.
Let me spell out the implications of that for Aussies: liberal democracy is a sham.
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A problem with Taibbi’s criticism is that he seems to believe until Marcuse had his Idea (with big I), people acted otherwise. Instead of the Devil, it was Marcuse’s Idea who made them do it. But that’s not true.
Mind you, if I’m right and my assessment of Taibbi is fair, he isn’t the only one – or the first – to believe that Idea precedes and makes reality.
Nobody can realistically believe Scotty from Marketing has ever read any literature beyond whatever Hillsong produces. More relevantly, I doubt even his speechwriters have read Marcuse.
Identitarian Leftists, however, do use Marcuse as an intellectual cover for what they were already doing.
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This brings us to Feldman’s really long reply (roughly twice as wordy as Taibbi’s already wordy post). He proceeds by points. I will only comment on one, that I find particularly wrong: “Did Marcuse Trash the Working Class as Agents of Change?”
Marcuse didn’t, Feldman asserts and dugs up two quotes (from 1967 and 1969) to prove it. The first one, for example, was a lecture Marcuse delivered at the Free University of Berlin, explaining in public that he never trashed the working class.
The question is if Marcuse’s comradely love for the working class was so evident, so clear for all to see, why would people – even in his own time, for Christ’s sake! – doubt it? Because on one thing Feldman is right: many people before Taibbi believed Marcuse trashed the working class.
So, why did these people entertain such idea? Ask them. My guess is that they may have read what Feldman forgot to read: thesis 32 in Marcuse’s 1947 “33 Theses” (which, incidentally, also addresses his “Did Marcuse Love Lenin and Dictatorships?”). Let me quote Marcuse in full (the emphasis is mine):
“While the unions in their traditional structure and organization represent a force hostile to revolution, the political workers’ party remains the necessary subject of revolution. In the original Marxist conception the party does not play a decisive role. Marx assumed that the proletariat is driven to revolutionary action on its own, based on the knowledge of its own interests, as soon as revolutionary conditions are present. In the mean time monopoly capitalism has found the ways and means of economically, politically and culturally leveling the majority of the proletariat. The negation of this leveling before the revolution is impossible. The development has confirmed the correctness of the Leninist conception of the vanguard party as the subject of the revolution. It is true that the communist parties of today are not this subject, but it is just as true that only they can become it. Only in the theories of the communist parties is the memory of the revolutionary tradition alive, which can become the memory of the revolutionary goal once again; only its situation is so far outside the capitalist society that it can become a revolutionary situation again”.
Again, Marcuse’s Idea did not create reality. He only expressed in scholarly language what less scholarly minds always believed: at best the working class was their tool, their asset, which they could use to attain power for the greater good (aka Leninism) or write it off when it becomes unprofitable (aka identitarian Left).
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I won’t quote from it, but you will find in Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen’s “White Blindspot” Marcuse’s ideas on the working class, more crudely expressed, with less care for philosophical nuances – or PR. Their message, however, is the same: the white working class (the majority of the American proletariat) made a sweetheart agreement with the US ruling class.
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Feldman seems oblivious to this, but any moderately thinking working person can bear witness to the disdain our better off brethren feel for us. But you won’t take our word for that. The “lived experience” thing does not apply to us. No matter. Occasionally, even some among our better off brethren have remarked on it. Barbara Ehrenreich, for one, has. George Orwell, too. The second part of his 1937 book “The Road to Wigan Pier” became infamous for that.
Indeed, back in 1879, Marx and Engels also witnessed that and as a consequence threatened to disown German social democracy (see part three of that circular letter).
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We leave the Taibbi/Feldman quarrel at that.
Once upon a time, the liberal/Leftish parasitising the workers’ movement from its very start and sapping its energies like a tapeworm could speak their minds openly. Workers needed their representation, because of our “seedy appearances”; we didn’t look respectably bourgeois. We lacked their good manners and taste; we were “louts besotted with barricades”. Their British contemporaries, less tactful, would say we smelled (or were dysgenic).
Eventually, such openness became unacceptable. So, come election time, everybody dons hi-visibility vests and hard hats. But as soon as electoral defeat happens, we become throwbacks; homogeneously bigoted among all others in society; sell-outs who don’t know our own interests and stubbornly reject the caring guidance of those who know better (sometimes, however, we still revert to dysgenic or just plain stupid and inbred a la Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel).
At any rate “the working class is incapable of emancipating itself by its own efforts. In order to do so it must place itself under the direction of ‘educated and propertied’ bourgeois who alone have ‘the time and the opportunity’ to become conversant with what is good for the workers”.
When Marx and Engels denounced that, Leninism and the New Left were still in the future. They could have written it about them; what they wrote then still applies to our own time.
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