We will cite this essay and then post a commentary of the source essay at Jacobin.
To me, Marcuse was always a fascinating thinker but in terms of the Marxist legacy, where he correctly saw problems, his position remained up in the air. To the long view the braiding of Marxism and Freud was doomed and the great Freud fad was to suddenly pass away in the seventies, even as Marcuse was so prominent.
He broached the issue of the working class and it is to his credit that he had the nerve to do so. In the age of Trump’s base, we end up baffled by the situation of a mesmerized proletariat, which has partly moved away overseas. Marcuse’s ‘bon idee’ was a brainstorm soon dated, and Freud’s legacy of pseudo-science was matched with the confusions of Marx himself.
The issue of Marcuse is irrelevant now, and we should focus on the problems with Marx’s legacy. Braiding Marx and Freud created a mess of pottage that however engaging Marcuse’s thesis and intent was a transient theory fetish of its own.
Marx’s great contribution was compromised by Marx’s obsessive attempt at historical theories which seem strangely simplistic now. In fact the core of Marx remains of great value if it can be restated without historical materialism and the obsession with the economic interpretation of history.
Marx’s stages of production theory has put his entire labor in doubt, unfairly. Along with Engels and the dubious dialectical materialism.
Freud, histomat, diamat, little wonder the left seems to so many as a dated cult.
Reviewing “Repressive Tolerance” and other works by Herbert Marcuse, the quack who became America’s most influential thinker
Source: Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual – TK News by Matt Taibbi
