Public Affairs: Portion of Philosopher Herbert Marcuse's Lecture at UNM

Ladies and gentlemen, it's my very great pleasure to introduce to you tonight a man who is a thinker for our time. He's a teacher and he's a fighter. At least I think of him this way. Tonight Professor Herbert Marcusa is going to speak on the failure of the new left. Professor Herbert Marcusa. Will I have to see whether I can handle these monstrosities here? I would like to add one

thing to the introduction. I would like to be introduced as a human being rather than as a greatest thinker and so on. Now the topic tonight, a failure of the new left should be read with a question mark. Moreover, I think before discussing the question whether we can really speak of a failure of the new left, we have to say what the new left is or was. Because I'm afraid that for most of you, this is already ancient history. Well, let me briefly characterize what I think we can understand by the new left, the following. Political groups generally left of the Communist parties which are searching for new forms

of political organization. Groups which are still without a mass base and especially in the United States, groups which are largely isolated from the working class. This movement, the new left, contained strong libertarian and anti-authoritarian tendencies. Thereby perhaps most clearly distinguished from the old left, which was certainly not an any-sensely libertarian and certainly not anti-authoritarian. However, this authoritarianism often new left has recently given way to a new kind of self-discipline if you want internal authoritarianism

practiced within small groups. But I believe that the most important feature of the new left is its redefinition of the revolution of the 20th century. A redefinition corresponding to the his or two unknown potentialities of freedom brought about by the achievements of capitalism itself. What the new left has done was the opening of a new dimension of change. Namely, not only economic and political change, not only a new mode of production,

a new production relationships, but also the subversion of the prevailing system of needs and satisfaction. I will come back to it. Here I only want to emphasize that precisely this, the emphasis on the need for a new mode of life qualitatively different from the one we have now, rather than merely a change in the institutions, this emphasis was originally the very substance of Marxian socialism. However, under the impact of the growth, the continued growth of capitalism, rather than the predicted disintegration, and under the impact of the

competitive coexistence with the Soviet Union and its satellites, this emphasis on socialism as a qualitatively different way of life changed. And socialism was seen as pre-conditioned by an ever better and ever larger development of the productive forces. But this development of the productive forces meant a constant increase in the productive apparatus itself, and with it it meant the continued submission of men and women to the instruments of their

labor. If abundance in social wealth is made a pre-condition for socialism, then it means a postponement, indefinite postponement of that turn from quantity into quality of that turn into a new mode of life which is the very essence of socialism. Now it is this entire conception of socialism as pre-conditioned by abundance. It is this postponement of the leap into a very different qualitatively different life which has been shaken by the emergence

of the new left in the 60s. This is emergence. A new vision, a new consciousness became a political movement. This movement originated first and was first carried by students, young workers, especially white-collar workers, and a part of the intelligence. In France, this movement was then joined by organized labor. There were days where 10 million workers were on strike in France until this movement among labor was taken in hand by

the communist party and by the communist trade unions. During these heydays of the 60s, the new left tried new forms of organization, new forms of protest revived from the tradition of the labor movement. Such forms as the occupation of factories, the organization of production and distribution, and so on. And from the beginning, and this is decisive, the movement assumes the features of a cultural revolution. Political and economic demands were combined with call for a new morality, for a new life environment, for the emancipation of the

census, a phrase of the early Marx, and the demand that the census be liberated from the experience and perception of human beings as objects of exchange values as they were primarily perceived and experienced in capitalist society. The most provocative and the most extreme formulation of this new dimension opened by the new left. We can still find in the famous Paris graffiti of 1968. I will mention only two, all power to the imagination. The most provocative of the fact that the given real possibilities of freedom surpassed

the traditional still repressive notions. In other words, realism was considered as conformism, as adjustment to a bad reality. And instead, the formulation of the graffiti be realistic and demand the impossible. You should still do it. It's plenty of room for it. Good, you will be blessed. No, no, seriously, I try it too, but I'm afraid it's a hard, hard, struggle. Yes, I know. Now, is this simply romanticism or elitism? In my view, no. What

is the fact is that this movement was far ahead of the so-called objective conditions. It articulated goals which advanced capitalism had made possible and at the same time distorted and suppressed. What happened to the movement? The answer must be given on several levels. The movement was taken in hand or suppressed by the establishment and the movement destroyed itself by a lack of organization in turn the division anti-intellectualism, impotent

anarchism and self-cooption. As to the first suppression by the power structure, we have the two forms, the violent, open suppression, example, Kent State, anti-normal suppression, perfected scientific controls of the entire population, blacklisting, job discrimination and an army of agents and informers. A suppression which was made relatively easy because the movement remained largely isolated from the people. Now, this isolation of the movement itself is

rooted in the very structure of advanced capitalism, namely in the integration into the system of large parts of the working class, expressing itself in anti-revolutionary trade unionism, reformist labor parties and so on. And these tendencies toward stabilization of the existing system reflect indeed a temporary stabilization, the stabilization of capitalism on a neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist base. Now, confronted with the centralized power of this integrated

whole, the revolt against the system became inevitably concentrated in minoritarian groups, mostly outside the core of the material process of production or on its margins, mainly the oppressed national and racial minorities, but also considerable parts of the middle classes, namely the still non-integrated groups if you want to privilege groups as you found them mostly among the student movement. But this questionable privilege of non-integration, of distance promoted or could promote the development of a radically political consciousness,

a political alienation from the existing society which came to rebel against the material and intellectual culture. However, this revolt did not come to fruition. The countercultures destroyed themselves by losing their political force. Private, personal modes of liberation, the drop cultures, the gurus, the spread of pseudo-religions, moreover an abstract anti-authoritarianism, the contempt of theory as died of praxis, the ritualization and fetishization of Marxism,

and the escape into psychology, all expressive of premature defeatism and disillusionment. I am glad you anticipated it. I shall say a few more words about psychology. The organization of the advanced capitalist societies, their integration is not and can never be undone by psychology, but it can also not be understood without depth psychology. The reason why this society operates through the interjection, the internalization of social

controls by the individuals. The individuals make the needs and satisfaction required for the reproduction of their society. They make these needs and satisfaction their own needs and satisfaction. This interjection is one of the most powerful mechanisms of reproducing that which is. It is collected with the general steering of instinctual needs and satisfaction, the commercial use of sexuality, what I call repressive desoblimation, and the extended release of primary aggressiveness in war. I remind you of Milai and in peace the spread

of crime in many cases gratuitous crime and so on. It is by virtue of this interjection that the individuals themselves reproduce the established system and thereby reproduce their own servitude. But the resulting sickness cannot be cured by psychology no matter how humanistic, no matter how radical. Psychology, individual or group therapy can indeed help to make the individual function better, to relieve some fear and anxiety, to weaken the repressive super ego, to solve some personal problems. If it does, none of us has the right

to reject it. But psychology should not be institutionalized as liberation. Psychology today tends to isolate the individual from the general unhappiness which permeates the society as a whole. Psychology today tends to reduce social to personal troubles and vice versa to socialize personal problems. And the result is often what can be called the creation of intimacy from outside, the management or organization of happiness or of unhappiness.

In short, translation of politics into psychology instead of the other way around. Now it would be very wrong to speak of the failure of the new left in spite of these aberrations. I try to show that movement is rooted in the very structure of advanced capitalism. It can regress and regroup in order to find new ways of organization of strategy and tactics. It can be suppressed by a new fascist regime. But nevertheless, there are science that

the message has been heard that it is spreading way beyond the original circles. What science? It is that the capitalist stabilization is being shaken now on a global scale. And the system reveals more and more blatantly its obsolescence, its destructiveness, its irrationality. It is enough to enumerate the most glaring indication. The end of the shameful war against the Vietnamese people, the continual unemployment and inflation, and the threatening exhaustion of natural resources. This is being experienced. This is being experienced by the population

at large. But still, this protest is unorganized, diffuse, disconnected. The science of the protest among labor, wild cut strikes, large absenteeism, hidden sabotage, protest against the union leadership, then the struggle of the oppressed minorities, the women's liberation movement. I will have to say quite a few about it presently. And generally, the decline in the so-called Birk ethic, that is to say in the operational values on which the functioning of capitalism

depends. Now, the lack of articulate protest, I think, is easily in understood. The first reason is the alleged lack of alternatives. Socialism, I think, that is vast majority of the American people understand by socialism what exists in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet satellite. And you can certainly not blame them if they don't consider this a better alternative. But there are other reasons. There seems to be an anxiety, a fear of a possible radical change which may subvert our entire mode of life, centuries of puritan

morality, centuries of alienation. Centuries during which it was taken for granted or during which it was ruthlessly imposed on the people, that full-time toil and repression were absolute necessity and a religious command, earning a living instead of life as an end in itself. Submission to the ever-growing productive apparatus was considered here to as a prerequisite of progress. Now, for a long time, this social repression may have been necessary to spur the struggle with scarcity, the mobilization of labour power, the mastery

of nature, and technical progress led to the sweeping development of the productive forces to ever-greater social wealth. But these achievements were ever more ruthlessly used to perpetuate scarcity, to sustain domination, to violate nature and to manipulate needs. Today it is obvious that the achievements of capitalism cannot be kept for any length of time within this repressive framework. Capitalism can continue to grow only by wasting and destroying the productive forces instead of developing them, wasting and destroying human lives on

a global scale. It seems that capitalism has indeed demonstrated the need for its own negation. You've been listening to philosopher Herbert Marcusa in a lecture delivered at the University of New Mexico.