Herbert+Marcuse

= Herbert Marcuse was a [|German Jewish]  [|philosopher], [|sociologist], and [|political theorist], associated with the [|Frankfurt School] of [|critical theory]. Celebrated as the " Father of the [|New Left] ,"[|[1]] his best known works are // [|Eros and Civilization] //, //[|One-Dimensional Man]// and //[|The Aesthetic Dimension]//. =   The ** New Left ** was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to  [|activists], [|educators] , [|agitators]  and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms , in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more  [|vanguardist] approach to social justice and focused mostly on [|labor unionization] and questions of [|social class]. [|[] In the U.S., the "New Left" was associated with the [|Hippie movement] and college campus protest movements. The British "New Left" sought to correct the perceived errors of " [|Old Left] " parties in the post- [|World War II] period. The confused response of the [|Communist Party of the USA] and the  [|Communist Party of Great Britain]  to the [|Hungarian Revolution of 1956]  led some  [|Marxist]  intellectuals to develop a more democratic approach to politics, opposed to what they saw as the centralised and authoritarian politics of the pre-war leftist parties. Those Communists who became disillusioned with Communism due to its authoritarian character eventually formed the "new left ", first among dissenting Communist Party intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom, and later alongside campus radicalism in the US and elsewhere Marcuse’ views Marcuse argued that Freud's pessimism about the prospects for happiness in civilization were derived from too rigid a notion of sexuality as the driving need for repression. Marcuse argued for a widened experience of sexuality through the embrace of //Eros //, in general, within polymorphous sensuality, fantasy, and the arts. ** Eros ** ( [|Ancient Greek] : Ἔρως, "Intimate Love"; UK:   [|/ˈɪərɒs/]   , US:    [|/ˈerɑːs/]    ), in [|Greek mythology] , was the [|primordial god] of sexual love and beauty. He was also worshipped as a fertility deity. His [|Roman] counterpart was [|Cupid] ("desire"). In the // [|Theogony] // Hesiod makes him a primordial god, while in some myths, he was the son of the deities [|Aphrodite] and [|Ares]. Marcuse's 1965 essay " [|Repressive Tolerance] ", in which he claimed capitalist [|democracies] can have [|totalitarian] aspects, has been criticized by conservatives. [|[2]] Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate s uppor t for " repressio n", since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as "inauthentic." Instead, he advocates a form of tolerance that is intolerant of right wing political movements: Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism derive s partially from one of Karl Marx’s main concepts : Objectification .,[|[4]] which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that c apitalism was exploiting humans; that the objects produced by laborers became alienated and thus ultimately dehumanized them to functional objects. Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of //One-Dimensional Man// Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,”[|[5]] meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they create, thus making commodities extensions of people's minds and bodies and calling into question the notion of alienation. Context At the time of war and during a time of considerable self-examination and anxiety among American people. Of the three great wars that Americans fought during the 20th Century, the Vietnam War was by far the most traumatic to American society. Nor did the war stand alone in the decade of the 60s. John Kennedy was shot and killed by assassins in 1962; Martin Luther King was shot and killed in May 1968; and Robert Kennedy was shot and killed while campaigning for office only one month later. Racial tensions, which had been strongly felt throughout the South during the Civil Rights movement, erupted into violence in Los Angeles, in 1965. At the same time, new inventions like the contraceptive pill and Sputnik had created a revolutionary and unsettling context for human life. The Vietnam War s truck America's youth with singular violence since they were the ones being asked [no, told] to go into the jungles of Vietnam to kill and be killed. At the same time, American youth and their parents found themselves more out-of-touch than perhaps any generation before them. Accelerating social changes had produced what was called "the Generation Gap" and young people looked increasingly at their parents' generation as "the Establishment." While American democrats had easily accepted the fact that the Second World War was a conflict between democracy and totalitarianism, the youth of America could see nothing in Vietnam other than American capitalism protecting its world-interests against communism. It was an economic contest, and young people were being told to die for the good of a profit-taking older generation that was incapable of telling the difference between principles of democracy and freedom and the secured advantages of corporate wealth. Weren't these precisely the same issues that had revealed themselves throughout the decade in the theme of racial and social injustice? The rising protest of American youth and those older folks who joined them molded itself gradually into what became known as the "Counter Culture " -- an amazing amalgamation of political and social rebellion. Young men burned their draft cards; young women burned their bras. In a way, that said it all. Aesthetic sensuality was precisely what the Establishment was most uncomfortable with. Men embraced long hair and beards and invested in wildly fashioned and colored clothing. Women took the form of earth goddesses. Everyone embraced flowers, little animals, drugs, Volkswagen buses, communal living, and the Beatles. [This is an exaggeration, by the way.] Marcuse employs concepts that derive from both Marx and Freud in his understanding of American society. The Marxian concepts are fairly standard, taking American society as an extreme expression of capitalism and, consequently, completely stratified in orders of domination. The Freudian concepts are somewhat non-standard, expanded as they had been in his book // Eros and Civilization //. In that book, Marcuse argued that modern societies had passed beyond simply repressive societies, adding what he called the Performance Principle to the already established Reality Principle. The Performance Principle, then, provided a system of Surplus Repression; and this was a concept that could be combined usefully with the Marxian concept of domination. Surplus Repression, in other words, was useful to capitalism in disciplining ordinary people to the designs of the overarching economic-political system. In a later book, // One-Dimensional Man //, Marcuse explored two especially insidious ways in which he believed that American capitalism had succeeded in dominating American society. (Very complicated)