The third and final essay in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) is by far the most fam ous, "Repressive Tolerance" by Herbert Marcuse. It occurred to me that an introduction would help before I discuss the essay directly, because the essay is written in philosophical language that, it's fair to say, is not so easily accessible.
There are biographical sketches of Marcuse online, especially at this Website: Herbert Marcuse Official Homepage. I've also done a brief biographical post on him: Herbert Marcuse Web site 07/11/04.
Here it's important to note that Marcuse was known as someone who synthesized the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud into social criticism. He was part of the Frankfurt School who practiced what they called "critical theory". Marcuse was also a specialist in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, and Hegelian dialectics and historical philosophy are very evident in "Repressive Tolerance".
Marcuse could be accurately described as a utopian socialist, and even in "Repressive Tolerance" he talks about the role of utopian thought. His utopian bent was one reason more traditional Marxists criticized him for philosophical "idealism" (which is not the same as the colloquial meaning of "idealism"). But he did not lay out visions of what his kind of model society would look like. He concentrated on analysis of existing societies, mostly the highly-developed Western capitalism societies. He also wrote a book on Soviet Marxism (1958).
During most of his career, I don't believe the term "thinking outside the box" had become an everyday part of American English yet. But Marcuse, for better or worse, thought outside the box. And he looked outside the expected channels to understand society and its transformations.
So, for him, the civil rights and Black Power movements, the student and antiwar movements, the beatniks and the hippies, raised vital issues about the fundamental conditions of society. He did not believe those movements could bring about fundamental transformation in the short term. (Marxists, somewhat like American generals predicting troop withdrawals from Iraq, are good at pushing out the time horizon for The Revolution.)
His willingness to think outside the proverbial box meant that he also saw great potential in the feminist movement. And he understood the necessity and transformational potential of focusing on ecological issues, long before the emergence of the German Green Party or the scientific consensus on global warming having formed.
I'm making this a long introduction because "Repressive Tolerance" employs a couple of concepts that are essentially unknow to the American punditocracy: dialectical social analysis and radical democratic theory.
The Hegelian concept of negation is key to Marcuse's Critical Theory. Negation in the Hegelian dialectic is the normal process of transformation, which involves preserving the original but also cancelling it and lifting it up. The seed is "negated" by the tree. The grown tree preserves the essence of the seed. But it is not the seed, it is something else: a higher development of the seed.
(Sorry, that formula that seemingly every American who's heard of "dialectics" has been taught at some point, thesis-synthesis-antithesis, is Kantian dialectics, not Hegelian.)
Marcuse's Critical Theory applies this dialectical approach. In the 1960 additional preface to his 1941 Reason and Revolution, he explained:
Dialectical logic is critical logic: it reveals modes and contents of thought which transcend the codified pattern of use and validation. Dialectical thought does not invent these contents; they have accrued to the notions in the long tradition of thought and action. Dialectical analysis merely assembles and reactivates them; it recovers tabooed meanings and thus appears almost as a return, or rather a conscious liberation, of the repressed! Since the established universe of discourse is that of an unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever liberation it may bring is a liberation in thought, in theory. However, the divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of the unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task. (my emphasis)
IN other words, Marcuse applies critical thinking to social analysis using this concept of dialectical negation. This approach largely eliminated the possibility of his work being turned into a set of guiding principles for a political party or group. And while he did have some definite influence on activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Europe, I don't recall ever hearing of any group trying to organize a "Marcusian" political party.
And it also means that his approach is not something that is necessarily intuitive in the language of political consultants and Big Pundits. It would be both entertaining and painful to see David "Bobo" Brooks go about describing Herbert Marcuse.
I would say that the emergence of the blogosphere as a tool for activism and a significant factor in politics could be seen as a "Marcusian" event, producing challenges to the established institutions of politics and the press.
The same goes for the current immigrant-rights movement. Perhaps even more so, because in addition to being a movement of "outsiders" involving Latinos, non-citizens and poor people, it is also a heavily workingclass movement.
All of which is another major element that, sad to say, makes Marcuse's thought especially challenging for readers today. And that is, however many philosophical approaches he incorporated, Marcuse was working from a radical democratic perspective.
That means words like "repression: and "revolution" were normal for him to use. The observation was often made during and after the Vietnam War, and is at least as relevant today, that a lack of widespread understanding of our own American revolutionary history was one of the United States' beigggest problems in trying to comprehend revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world. Celebrating the Fourth of July with fireworks displays is fun, but it doesn't teach anyone much about the history of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
So, for any trolls who identify the world "revolution" exclusively with Sunni Salafist suicide car bombers, I'll quote a sample of Marcuse's approach to the issue from a time that was far more tumultuous in the US and western Europe than 1965. This is from Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972):
Distinction must be made between violence and revolutionary force. In the counterrevolutionary situation of today [1972] , violence is the weapon of the Establishment; it operates everywhere, in the institutions and organizations, in work and fun, on the streets and highways, and in the air. In contrast, the revolutionary force which is destined to terminate this violence does not exist today. Revolutionary force would be the action of masses or classes capable of subverting the established system in order to build a socialist society. Examples would be the unlimited general strike, the occupation and taking over of factories, government buildings, centers of communication and trasnportation, in coordinated action.
For good white suburbanites today, this may invoke images of swarthy men with Taliban beards swarming into the Pentagon and seizing it. But in the peaceful revolutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall in eastern Europe and in the USSR, something like this actually happened not so long ago. And many of those same surburbanites were thrilled to hear about it.
It's worth quoting something else he said about the distinction he makes in the quotation just given between "violence and revolutionary force". In "Repressive Tolerance", he wrote:
In terms of historical function, there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors. In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil - but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it. (my emphasis)
Again, enough to send a good Republican gasping for breath worded that way. But the ethical point is one typically made in war. What's unethical and evil in itself - systematically killing people - is heldby every country on earth to be sometimes a necessity of state, where the alternative would have worse consequences from their viewpoint.
I would stress, though, that it's vital to distinguish between necessary violence and unnecessary, between just wars and unjust ones. But violence is violence. A Russian bomb dropped on a Afghan village in the 1980s in the name of Communism and international solidarity is the same kind of violence as an American bomb dropped on a Afghan village in 2006 in the name of democracy and Global War on Terrorism. It's the same kind. Whether one is necessary and the other not is a different question.
It might be objected that even talking in terms of the right of revolution or similar things in today's environment will only give encouragement to militia nuts, to Christian terrorists like Timmy McVeigh, and to fans of Mad Annie Coulter. Yeah, right, like they need any encouragement from me or anyone else in Left Blogostan.
But whether we're tlaking about the American Civil War or the fall of the Communist governments in easter Europe or the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, some basic knowledge of the role of revolution in our own American history would broaden the discussion in a beneficial way.
Finally, a related impoverishment of the political language in America obscures the distinction between formal liberalism and social rights. Historically, this division came into clear sight in the European Revolutions of 1848, something else rarely mentioned in America. It wouldn't be far off to say they are virtually unknown in America. But they were a world-historical event, to use a good Hegelian/Marcusian term.
Briefly, in 1848 democratic revolutionary movements broke out all over Europe. In Germany, a democratically elected parliament met in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which today is a virtual monument to this key event in the development of democratic institutions in Germany. In Vienna, the Emperor Franz Joseph was obliged to depart the city, which was held for a time by democratic rebels.
In those revolutions, the parties known as "liberal" parties represented capitalists big and small as well as other "respectable" professionals. They supporteddemocracy but also opposed unions, workers' economic rights and radical property reforms The socialist groups representing workers as well as some militant farmers' groups supported democratic rights, but looked much more favorably on the social goals, as well.
It's not that this distinction is unknown to Americans. Voting is a "liberal democratic" right; Social Security involves a social right. When Bush and the Republicans floated a radical Social Security phase-out plan in early 2005, the harshly negative public reaction showed that most people understood the social right to minima economic security in old age.
But the Big Pundits don't often talk in these terms. So when someone makes an argument, as Marcuse does in "Repressive Tolerance", that draws a distinction between formal democratic rights and the substantive social realities imposed by income, wealth and class, it doesn't necessarily sound clear to American readers.
So, in the next post, we'll look at how Marcuse actually applies dialectical social analysis and radical democratic theory to the question of "pure tolerance".
Other posts in the series:
1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form
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