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From prophecy to prediction
From Pro@cy
From Prophecy to Prediction Herbert
Marcuse:
to Prediction
147
A serialised survey of the movement
of ideas, developments in predictive fiction, and first attempts to forecast the future scientifically.
aspirations and utopia
Donald Gordon IN 1969 Herbert Marcuse published An Essay on Liberation. The book was written before, but contained ancillary comments upon, the student revolts in France in May of the previous year, and upon the moments of common cause that the militant students and some industrial workers enjoyed. The author accepted without resignation the remark of Human& that “every barricade, every car burned gave tens of thousands of votes to the Gaulhst party”.l What impressed him was less the fact of “uncivil disobedience”, or the successful reaction to it, and more the “radical utopian character” of the young militants’ demands. They had, he said with only apparent paradox, invalidated the concept of “utopia” by acting upon the possibilities inherent in modern corporate capitalism, believing that their objects (to take their lives out of the hands of politicians, managers, and generals and to make them worth living) “a struggle which can no required longer be contained by the rules and regulations of a pseudo-democracy in a free Orwellian world”. 2 The book was, as Marcuse says, the development of ideas put forward in Eros and Civilization (1955), One Dimensional Man (1964) and in his article “Repressive tolerance” (1965) .3 Since his emigration to the USA in 1934 he had written a great deal, including a Donald Gordon is the senior lecturer in Philosophy in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Gl IXH, UK.
FUTURES
Aprii 197l
long book on Hegel; but many of his most important papers were not published in book form until they were collected in ~~a~~o~ ( 1968).4 It seems correct to say that until 1955 Marcuse was a relatively obscure German philosopher-sociologist, largely neglected or shunned by academic philosophers and certainly by English-writing philosophers. These same philosophers continued to have little to do with him, but in a larger republic of Jetters he became all the rage, especially among the young militant intellectuals who, by attesting to a Marcusean account of society, gave him a resurgent hope of radical change. The new prophet’s success lay in his capacity to unify the fragmented and parochial voices of protest against the social order, against repression, exploitation, and bureaucracy in all societies, particularly in liberal-democracies, particularly in the USA. He did this with the aid of a formidable theoretical vocabuIary drawn largely from Hegel, Marx, and Freud. The primary instrument of his success was One Dimensional Man. By the time he wrote this book Marcuse had proffered in his social theory a number of accounts of past and present, and of the future, matching his long record of sympathetic addition to Marx’s work. He now claims that in the present capitalist world, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are still the basic cIasses but that they no longer “appear to be” the agents of revohrtionary change. The historical transformation of
148
From Prophecyto Prediction
society has been contained but by technology:
not by terror
Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of free-
dom and domination.5 Technological society appears to be the embodiment of reason. The historical classes collaborate, for example, in developing peacefully the means of destruction-” the perfection of waste”, as Marcuse calls it-because the making of these weapons makes life richer and easier for them both. Naturally enough, Marcuse believes such a society to be an irrational society but he finds a theoretical difhculty in his position. He wants to say that this society is unfree, repressive, exploitative, that the people in it are not really happy, and have false notions about their needs and interests. But how can one even sry this? Words such as “free” and “rational” express critical, “oppositional” concepts developed in periods of class struggle. But there appears to be no class struggle; accordingly, the concepts seem to be part of the critical lumber of spent antagonisms. Quite unsurprisingly, Marcuse manages to say something which previously he had argued could not be said: The fact that the vast population accepts, and is this society does not render and less rcprehensiblc.
majority of the made to accept, it fess irrational
The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.~ There are weighty considerations behind these views deriving from Marcuse’s early criticism of the work of the great sociologist Max Weber but here and in his later writings he is more inclined to explore Orwellian themes. The prevailing mode of freedom is servitude, and the prevailing mode of equality is superimposed inequality. The expression of this is barred by “the
closed definition of these concepts in terms of the powers which shape the respective universe of discourse”.7 Hence the irony of “‘free Orwellian world”. What then is to be said of the traditional sources of criticism? The pathological device used by Marcuse is that of one dimensional man. Art, philosophy, and politics should constitute a dimension of reality separate from social reality; they should be the instruments of criticism, dissent, and change, but more and more they are not. The success of technological capitalism has been such that men “introject”, absorb into themselves, its values; they become identified with their societies; the false consciousness of the rationality of man and his forms of thought and discourse becomes the true consciousness. Cultural values become absorbed into the established order and are not rejected by it. Great works of art do not become obsolescent; they are no longer subversive, no longer destructive, and therefore no longer true. This is the liquidation of two-dimensional culture, the assimilation of what can be and what should be, to what is; the loss of transcending elements in high culture, traditionally the realm of freedom and of the refusal to behave. Philosophy, at least in a famous set of fashions lumped together as Positivism, is no longer critique: it is content to leave everything as it is, to examine the common usage of words and to impose upon itself a restriction to the prevalent behavioural universe. Philosophy has become one dimensional. When he first paraded the con cept in an early paper Marcuse attacked the Positivists for advocating a single world of absolutely real facts, adding darkly that this world was dominated “by powers concerned with the preservation of this form of reality”. Sadly, Marcuse dismissed politically and philosophically radical thinkers as knaves or fools. AIthough there is always an edge of hope in these chapters, Marcuse gives
FUTURES
April 1877
From Prophecy to Prediction
impressive grounds for despair. How, for example, to a mind not completely conditioned, not completely absorbed into the social reality, can such newspaper headlines as “Labour is seeking missile harmony” or advertising such as “Luxury fall-out shelter” seem anything but irreconcilably contradictory and surrealistic? But there are also impressive grounds for another sort of with despair : the book is saturated transferred psychoanalytic theory, or the remains of psychoanalytic theory, and the humourless writing does not disguise but rather underscores the tragi-comic possibilities of many of the descriptions of one dimensionality. Affecting to show, for example, how acceptance of the technological reality limits the scope of sublimation Marcuse says :
compare love-making
in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticised. *
An Essay on Liberation is a much more narrowly political book. It is also a utopian book, and what has to be understood is Marcuse’s distrust of the is, in the writings of notion. “Utopian” philosophers and social theorists, a defamatory word; it was so used by Engels to describe the writings of SaintSimon, Fourier, and Owen. While delighting in their socialism, Engels described their visions as crude inventions detached from any knowledge of the economic process. “These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies”.g Marx did not produce such phantasies, nor did he produce a blueprint of an ideal society, nor did he ever say that socialism would be an ideal society. On these grounds Marcuse objects to Sir Karl Popper’s claim that Marx was a utopian. Thus-if Marcuse is a utopian-he is not utopian in the
FUTURES
April 1977
149
sense that Engels (describing Fourier) or in the sense that Popper (describing Marx) used the word. There are inspirational and aspirational utopias. The adjectives serve to distinguish not utopias as such, but the intentions behind them and the responses to them. Plato’s Republic is an interesting middle case for his aspirational vision sighs to a magnificent halt as an inspirational vision, “a pattern laid up in Heaven”. The benefit of the inspirational utopia is that it stands less chance of looking ridiculous in the light (or darkness) of events. Accordingly, aside the theoretical and leaving grounds that Marx gives or that Marcuse affects to give, one might say that the best prescriptions for an aspirational utopia are: Say little about the future that is clear, make no predictions, talk about tendencies, talk in negations. Marcuse himself is, in intention, an aspirational utopian and he has followed the rules faithfully. In One Dimensional Man he gives an account of historical tendencies which is neither speculative nor historical, but empty. It amounts to saying that an advanced industrial society will either contain change or it will not. Clearly any prognostic power his thesis has is in explaining the conditions which make for totalitarian societies and those which make for refusal. An Essay on Liberation professes to go further: What is denounced as “utopian” is no longer that which has “no place” and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies.1°
This thesis is ambiguous. When later in the book he talks about comprehending a future which is “contained” in the present he intends both the blocking of change that is pursued as an act of policy by the established society and the blocking of the sense required to say that utopia is a possibility which is immanently here, screened from our vision and not describable in our lan-
150
From Profihecy to Prediction
guage because our vision is uncritical and our language has been distorted by Orwellian syntax and logic. This is the restoration of two dimensionality with a vengeance ! Corresponding to these physical and metaphysical theses two sorts of action are required to achieve liberation: political subversion and political refusal on the one hand; and a revolution in perception and an attendant transformation of language on the other. The two modes are not ultimately distinguishable but on the second, Marcuse develops the themes of One Dimensional Man. What is needed is an awareness of what has happened to our once-critical concepts. “Obscenity”, for example is an establishment moral concept and is applied to the picture of a naked woman exposing her pubic hair and not applied, as it should be, to the picture of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression. “Happiness” denotes an objective condition and requires, for its definition, something more than feelings, and so on with other concepts such as “free”, “unexploited” and a host of others. In all this we are given glimpses of a free society in which work would cease to be toil and would allow the play of the productive imagination. We can even begin to conceive of society as a work of art. None of this is atavistic; it would require advanced technology but a technology freed from exploitative power and therefore serving the true ends of men-solidarity and h appiness. And the first steps in the liberation have been taken: reversals of meaning, the ingression of the aesthetic into the political, contradictoriness as a form of the great refusal: giving flowers to the police, “flower power” -the redefinition and very negation of the sense of “power”; the erotic belligerency of the songs of protest; the sensuousnessof long hair, of the body unsoiled by plastic cleanliness.” Plainly, an aesthetic pulse beats very strongly in these Marcusean pictures. It
probably has to. One of Marcuse’s least-relinquishable preconceptions has, for a long time, not been working; the objective factor in radical change, the industrial working class, is no longer the subjective, self-conscious factor in this change. But theoretical failure is turned into practical success. Subversion will not be determined by a “theoretically well-founded and elaborated strategy” but, in a shifting situation, by subjective factors, the development of authentic awareness, and a sense of real needs. The subversive forces are, because they have been seen to be, the young and the not-so-young intelligentsia. There is considerable pathos in Marcuse’s discovery of them and in the recovery of utopian optimism through them, particularly in his reiterations of the significance of the May 1968 rebellion. The pathos is to be found in his critical inability to account for them and it, and his strenuous effort to find, in the alliance of industrial workers and students, the single focusing of the historically exploited class and the harbingers of the new vision. As to the nature of the existence of free and happy men in a socialist utopia we are given, as was to be expected from an aspirational utopian, a brusque answer: it is meaningless to ask for a blueprint; the kind of life will be determined by trial and error. We cannot say: this is what man will be like when he is truly free and truly happy. We can say: this is what man will not be like when he is truly free. The trouble is, with a growing body of negations and the proliferating descriptions of man with false needs and false interests, that the concept of man will disappear altogether except perhaps in some inspirational account of a world without sin, 2% City of God. l2 But what are the people in a free society going to do ? The answer. . . was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.13 Marcuse
has had,
and
perhaps
FUTURES
con-
April 1877
From Prophecy to Prediction
151
tinues to have, a uniquely direct influence on practical affairs, much greater than that of any other man whose profession was philosophy. In his society he has contrived to escape “the wisdom of its kept intellectuals”, although how he has managed to do so is, on his own showing, a difficult question to answer. His favourite American targets-black oppression, the morality of big business, the absurdity of pluralism in a bureaucratised and creepingly totalitarian society -have been attacked with even greater point and verve by others-notably by those he mentions as influences, eg William H. Whyte, Vance Packard, and C. Wright Mills. He is not the master of the sleeves-rolled-up specific social programme in the manner of Ivan Illich. He has been cited as an advocate of violence and subversion, as an historical relativist, as an ethical absolutist almost in the manner of Kant, as an elitist. Not all of these charges can be true; one which can-elitism-is not. The charge of elitism is unfair, just as worries about the dictatorship of the proletariat were ill-founded. The selfappointed elite which would usher in the liberated society would be replacing another, but repressive, self-appointed elite, and would, as a subverting force in transition, be impossible in a society of free men. Some will wish to give a harsh judgement of Marcuse. In one place, he playfully chides Sir Karl Popper for his disparagement of utopian thought, on the ground that such thought has been
the conquest of nature and society. Tremendous forces, he says, may be released by the encouragement of utopian thought. He points out that in the Soviet Union science-fiction writers have been reproved for lagging behind science in their phantasies and have been told to “get their imagination off the ground”. It may be that some of Marcuse’s work will find its way into the canon of utopian literature, and that it will be said of him that he helped to release tremendous forces and that he did it by getting his imagination off the ground.
playing an increasingly
13. H. Marcuse,
FUTURES
April W7
decisive part in
References
1. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Warmondswortb, Penguin, 1969), page 68. 2. H. Marcuse, c)i tit, page x. 3. H. Marcuse, Eros and ~~oil~~at~on{h’ew York, Random House, 1955) ; One Dimensional Man (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); “Repressive tolerance”. in R. P. Wolff, B. Moore, and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pwe Ta~~rff~ce (London, Cape, 1969). (Harmondsworth, 4. H. Marcuse, Jv’egutions Penguin, 1968). 5. H.
Marcuse,
One
Dimens~anal
Man
(London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), page xii. 6. H. Marcuse, ibid, page xiii. 7. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 88. 8. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 73. 9. F. Engels, Socialism
: Utofiian and Scient&
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970). 10. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, ofi tit, page 4. II. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 36. 12. St. Augustine, 7ha Gi& of God. ibid, page 91.
From Prophecy to Prediction Herbert
Marcuse:
to Prediction
147
A serialised survey of the movement
of ideas, developments in predictive fiction, and first attempts to forecast the future scientifically.
aspirations and utopia
Donald Gordon IN 1969 Herbert Marcuse published An Essay on Liberation. The book was written before, but contained ancillary comments upon, the student revolts in France in May of the previous year, and upon the moments of common cause that the militant students and some industrial workers enjoyed. The author accepted without resignation the remark of Human& that “every barricade, every car burned gave tens of thousands of votes to the Gaulhst party”.l What impressed him was less the fact of “uncivil disobedience”, or the successful reaction to it, and more the “radical utopian character” of the young militants’ demands. They had, he said with only apparent paradox, invalidated the concept of “utopia” by acting upon the possibilities inherent in modern corporate capitalism, believing that their objects (to take their lives out of the hands of politicians, managers, and generals and to make them worth living) “a struggle which can no required longer be contained by the rules and regulations of a pseudo-democracy in a free Orwellian world”. 2 The book was, as Marcuse says, the development of ideas put forward in Eros and Civilization (1955), One Dimensional Man (1964) and in his article “Repressive tolerance” (1965) .3 Since his emigration to the USA in 1934 he had written a great deal, including a Donald Gordon is the senior lecturer in Philosophy in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Gl IXH, UK.
FUTURES
Aprii 197l
long book on Hegel; but many of his most important papers were not published in book form until they were collected in ~~a~~o~ ( 1968).4 It seems correct to say that until 1955 Marcuse was a relatively obscure German philosopher-sociologist, largely neglected or shunned by academic philosophers and certainly by English-writing philosophers. These same philosophers continued to have little to do with him, but in a larger republic of Jetters he became all the rage, especially among the young militant intellectuals who, by attesting to a Marcusean account of society, gave him a resurgent hope of radical change. The new prophet’s success lay in his capacity to unify the fragmented and parochial voices of protest against the social order, against repression, exploitation, and bureaucracy in all societies, particularly in liberal-democracies, particularly in the USA. He did this with the aid of a formidable theoretical vocabuIary drawn largely from Hegel, Marx, and Freud. The primary instrument of his success was One Dimensional Man. By the time he wrote this book Marcuse had proffered in his social theory a number of accounts of past and present, and of the future, matching his long record of sympathetic addition to Marx’s work. He now claims that in the present capitalist world, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are still the basic cIasses but that they no longer “appear to be” the agents of revohrtionary change. The historical transformation of
148
From Prophecyto Prediction
society has been contained but by technology:
not by terror
Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of free-
dom and domination.5 Technological society appears to be the embodiment of reason. The historical classes collaborate, for example, in developing peacefully the means of destruction-” the perfection of waste”, as Marcuse calls it-because the making of these weapons makes life richer and easier for them both. Naturally enough, Marcuse believes such a society to be an irrational society but he finds a theoretical difhculty in his position. He wants to say that this society is unfree, repressive, exploitative, that the people in it are not really happy, and have false notions about their needs and interests. But how can one even sry this? Words such as “free” and “rational” express critical, “oppositional” concepts developed in periods of class struggle. But there appears to be no class struggle; accordingly, the concepts seem to be part of the critical lumber of spent antagonisms. Quite unsurprisingly, Marcuse manages to say something which previously he had argued could not be said: The fact that the vast population accepts, and is this society does not render and less rcprehensiblc.
majority of the made to accept, it fess irrational
The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.~ There are weighty considerations behind these views deriving from Marcuse’s early criticism of the work of the great sociologist Max Weber but here and in his later writings he is more inclined to explore Orwellian themes. The prevailing mode of freedom is servitude, and the prevailing mode of equality is superimposed inequality. The expression of this is barred by “the
closed definition of these concepts in terms of the powers which shape the respective universe of discourse”.7 Hence the irony of “‘free Orwellian world”. What then is to be said of the traditional sources of criticism? The pathological device used by Marcuse is that of one dimensional man. Art, philosophy, and politics should constitute a dimension of reality separate from social reality; they should be the instruments of criticism, dissent, and change, but more and more they are not. The success of technological capitalism has been such that men “introject”, absorb into themselves, its values; they become identified with their societies; the false consciousness of the rationality of man and his forms of thought and discourse becomes the true consciousness. Cultural values become absorbed into the established order and are not rejected by it. Great works of art do not become obsolescent; they are no longer subversive, no longer destructive, and therefore no longer true. This is the liquidation of two-dimensional culture, the assimilation of what can be and what should be, to what is; the loss of transcending elements in high culture, traditionally the realm of freedom and of the refusal to behave. Philosophy, at least in a famous set of fashions lumped together as Positivism, is no longer critique: it is content to leave everything as it is, to examine the common usage of words and to impose upon itself a restriction to the prevalent behavioural universe. Philosophy has become one dimensional. When he first paraded the con cept in an early paper Marcuse attacked the Positivists for advocating a single world of absolutely real facts, adding darkly that this world was dominated “by powers concerned with the preservation of this form of reality”. Sadly, Marcuse dismissed politically and philosophically radical thinkers as knaves or fools. AIthough there is always an edge of hope in these chapters, Marcuse gives
FUTURES
April 1877
From Prophecy to Prediction
impressive grounds for despair. How, for example, to a mind not completely conditioned, not completely absorbed into the social reality, can such newspaper headlines as “Labour is seeking missile harmony” or advertising such as “Luxury fall-out shelter” seem anything but irreconcilably contradictory and surrealistic? But there are also impressive grounds for another sort of with despair : the book is saturated transferred psychoanalytic theory, or the remains of psychoanalytic theory, and the humourless writing does not disguise but rather underscores the tragi-comic possibilities of many of the descriptions of one dimensionality. Affecting to show, for example, how acceptance of the technological reality limits the scope of sublimation Marcuse says :
compare love-making
in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticised. *
An Essay on Liberation is a much more narrowly political book. It is also a utopian book, and what has to be understood is Marcuse’s distrust of the is, in the writings of notion. “Utopian” philosophers and social theorists, a defamatory word; it was so used by Engels to describe the writings of SaintSimon, Fourier, and Owen. While delighting in their socialism, Engels described their visions as crude inventions detached from any knowledge of the economic process. “These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies”.g Marx did not produce such phantasies, nor did he produce a blueprint of an ideal society, nor did he ever say that socialism would be an ideal society. On these grounds Marcuse objects to Sir Karl Popper’s claim that Marx was a utopian. Thus-if Marcuse is a utopian-he is not utopian in the
FUTURES
April 1977
149
sense that Engels (describing Fourier) or in the sense that Popper (describing Marx) used the word. There are inspirational and aspirational utopias. The adjectives serve to distinguish not utopias as such, but the intentions behind them and the responses to them. Plato’s Republic is an interesting middle case for his aspirational vision sighs to a magnificent halt as an inspirational vision, “a pattern laid up in Heaven”. The benefit of the inspirational utopia is that it stands less chance of looking ridiculous in the light (or darkness) of events. Accordingly, aside the theoretical and leaving grounds that Marx gives or that Marcuse affects to give, one might say that the best prescriptions for an aspirational utopia are: Say little about the future that is clear, make no predictions, talk about tendencies, talk in negations. Marcuse himself is, in intention, an aspirational utopian and he has followed the rules faithfully. In One Dimensional Man he gives an account of historical tendencies which is neither speculative nor historical, but empty. It amounts to saying that an advanced industrial society will either contain change or it will not. Clearly any prognostic power his thesis has is in explaining the conditions which make for totalitarian societies and those which make for refusal. An Essay on Liberation professes to go further: What is denounced as “utopian” is no longer that which has “no place” and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies.1°
This thesis is ambiguous. When later in the book he talks about comprehending a future which is “contained” in the present he intends both the blocking of change that is pursued as an act of policy by the established society and the blocking of the sense required to say that utopia is a possibility which is immanently here, screened from our vision and not describable in our lan-
150
From Profihecy to Prediction
guage because our vision is uncritical and our language has been distorted by Orwellian syntax and logic. This is the restoration of two dimensionality with a vengeance ! Corresponding to these physical and metaphysical theses two sorts of action are required to achieve liberation: political subversion and political refusal on the one hand; and a revolution in perception and an attendant transformation of language on the other. The two modes are not ultimately distinguishable but on the second, Marcuse develops the themes of One Dimensional Man. What is needed is an awareness of what has happened to our once-critical concepts. “Obscenity”, for example is an establishment moral concept and is applied to the picture of a naked woman exposing her pubic hair and not applied, as it should be, to the picture of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression. “Happiness” denotes an objective condition and requires, for its definition, something more than feelings, and so on with other concepts such as “free”, “unexploited” and a host of others. In all this we are given glimpses of a free society in which work would cease to be toil and would allow the play of the productive imagination. We can even begin to conceive of society as a work of art. None of this is atavistic; it would require advanced technology but a technology freed from exploitative power and therefore serving the true ends of men-solidarity and h appiness. And the first steps in the liberation have been taken: reversals of meaning, the ingression of the aesthetic into the political, contradictoriness as a form of the great refusal: giving flowers to the police, “flower power” -the redefinition and very negation of the sense of “power”; the erotic belligerency of the songs of protest; the sensuousnessof long hair, of the body unsoiled by plastic cleanliness.” Plainly, an aesthetic pulse beats very strongly in these Marcusean pictures. It
probably has to. One of Marcuse’s least-relinquishable preconceptions has, for a long time, not been working; the objective factor in radical change, the industrial working class, is no longer the subjective, self-conscious factor in this change. But theoretical failure is turned into practical success. Subversion will not be determined by a “theoretically well-founded and elaborated strategy” but, in a shifting situation, by subjective factors, the development of authentic awareness, and a sense of real needs. The subversive forces are, because they have been seen to be, the young and the not-so-young intelligentsia. There is considerable pathos in Marcuse’s discovery of them and in the recovery of utopian optimism through them, particularly in his reiterations of the significance of the May 1968 rebellion. The pathos is to be found in his critical inability to account for them and it, and his strenuous effort to find, in the alliance of industrial workers and students, the single focusing of the historically exploited class and the harbingers of the new vision. As to the nature of the existence of free and happy men in a socialist utopia we are given, as was to be expected from an aspirational utopian, a brusque answer: it is meaningless to ask for a blueprint; the kind of life will be determined by trial and error. We cannot say: this is what man will be like when he is truly free and truly happy. We can say: this is what man will not be like when he is truly free. The trouble is, with a growing body of negations and the proliferating descriptions of man with false needs and false interests, that the concept of man will disappear altogether except perhaps in some inspirational account of a world without sin, 2% City of God. l2 But what are the people in a free society going to do ? The answer. . . was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.13 Marcuse
has had,
and
perhaps
FUTURES
con-
April 1877
From Prophecy to Prediction
151
tinues to have, a uniquely direct influence on practical affairs, much greater than that of any other man whose profession was philosophy. In his society he has contrived to escape “the wisdom of its kept intellectuals”, although how he has managed to do so is, on his own showing, a difficult question to answer. His favourite American targets-black oppression, the morality of big business, the absurdity of pluralism in a bureaucratised and creepingly totalitarian society -have been attacked with even greater point and verve by others-notably by those he mentions as influences, eg William H. Whyte, Vance Packard, and C. Wright Mills. He is not the master of the sleeves-rolled-up specific social programme in the manner of Ivan Illich. He has been cited as an advocate of violence and subversion, as an historical relativist, as an ethical absolutist almost in the manner of Kant, as an elitist. Not all of these charges can be true; one which can-elitism-is not. The charge of elitism is unfair, just as worries about the dictatorship of the proletariat were ill-founded. The selfappointed elite which would usher in the liberated society would be replacing another, but repressive, self-appointed elite, and would, as a subverting force in transition, be impossible in a society of free men. Some will wish to give a harsh judgement of Marcuse. In one place, he playfully chides Sir Karl Popper for his disparagement of utopian thought, on the ground that such thought has been
the conquest of nature and society. Tremendous forces, he says, may be released by the encouragement of utopian thought. He points out that in the Soviet Union science-fiction writers have been reproved for lagging behind science in their phantasies and have been told to “get their imagination off the ground”. It may be that some of Marcuse’s work will find its way into the canon of utopian literature, and that it will be said of him that he helped to release tremendous forces and that he did it by getting his imagination off the ground.
playing an increasingly
13. H. Marcuse,
FUTURES
April W7
decisive part in
References
1. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Warmondswortb, Penguin, 1969), page 68. 2. H. Marcuse, c)i tit, page x. 3. H. Marcuse, Eros and ~~oil~~at~on{h’ew York, Random House, 1955) ; One Dimensional Man (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); “Repressive tolerance”. in R. P. Wolff, B. Moore, and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pwe Ta~~rff~ce (London, Cape, 1969). (Harmondsworth, 4. H. Marcuse, Jv’egutions Penguin, 1968). 5. H.
Marcuse,
One
Dimens~anal
Man
(London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), page xii. 6. H. Marcuse, ibid, page xiii. 7. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 88. 8. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 73. 9. F. Engels, Socialism
: Utofiian and Scient&
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970). 10. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, ofi tit, page 4. II. H. Marcuse, ibid, page 36. 12. St. Augustine, 7ha Gi& of God. ibid, page 91.