marcuse and false consciousness
Dec 21 2006 14:09
alright folks
i'm looking for decent critiques of marcuse's (of generally that New Left lot) 'false consciousness' thesis. any suggestions would be gleefully received with a free complimentary 'hooray'.
Dec 21 2006 14:20
#2
It's a pile of despairing wank and represents the true low-point of the Frankfurt School. At least Adorno can write.
Helpful? 
Dec 21 2006 14:23
#3
the button wrote:
It's a pile of despairing wank and represents the true low-point of the Frankfurt School. At least Adorno can write.Helpful? ;)
for me, yes.
I mean atleast Adorno went to the logical end of his pessimism and didn't leave any room for patronising students and other declasse fucks to "shake up the squares, man".
Dec 21 2006 14:31
#4
hoho. Is One-Dimensional man the one to read for this? I only know Marcuse from the outside, but does seem like an awful lot of crap.
benjamin's the best thing about the Frankfurt School, what a sweetheart
Quote:
"The more antagonistic a person is toward the traditional order, the more inexorably he will subject his private life to the norms that he wishes to elevate as legislators of a future society. It is as if these laws, nowhere yet realized, placed him under obligation to enact them in advance at least in the confines of his own existence. The man, on the other hand, who knows himself to be in accord with the most ancient heritage of his class or nation will sometimes bring his private life into ostentatious contrast to the maxims that he unrelentingly asserts in public, secretly approving his own behavior, without the slightest qualms, as the most conclusive proof of the unshakable authority of the principles he puts on display. Thus are distinguished the types of the anarcho-socialist and the conservative politician."
(i want a blush smiley, how do i make it happen?)
Dec 21 2006 14:33
#5
Benjamin is to Bloch as the Kaiser Chiefs are to the Manic Street Preachers.
Dec 21 2006 14:35
#6
I love Benjamin, too.
Quoting from memory here, but
Quote:
In [such-and-such a place] there is a statue called hope, which is a woman weeping because she cannot reach the apple which hangs over her head. But she has wings. Nothing is more true.
Dec 21 2006 14:36
#7
the button wrote:
I love Benjamin, too.Quoting from memory here, but
Quote:
In [such-and-such a place] there is a statue called hope, which is a woman weeping because she cannot reach the apple which hangs over her head. But she has wings. Nothing is more true.
bah Bloch shits on that.
Dec 21 2006 14:37
#8
I would start with Critique of Marcuse by Paul Mattick, Merlin Press 1972. Long time since I read it though.
Dec 21 2006 14:40
#9
Ernst Bloch wrote:
Only an atheist can be a good Christian;
only a Christian can be a good atheist.
Also I went out with Ersnt Blochs Great Great Niece.
*that's a lie but it helps me through the day.
Dec 21 2006 14:45
#10
bah. i am Benjamin's great great niece.
Quote:
(...)technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.
Dec 21 2006 16:00
#11
cheers all, especially revol's insightful comment about my own false consciousness. yeah i was really thinking about books really - the mattick looks good, cheers.
it is pretty dire and horribly elitist, and i'm in the process of critiquing his ass out of the water, just needed some more juice, as it were.
Quote:
Also I went out with Ersnt Blochs Great Great Niece.
well i snogged the niece of the bassist from Dexy's Midnight Runners. oh yes. nieces for all!
Dec 21 2006 16:09
#12
Quote:
nieces for all!
You do realise how bad that looks? 
Dec 21 2006 16:42
#13
oh. yeah. 
Dec 21 2006 16:45
#14
here's a good critique of 'false consciousness':
IT'S A CROCK OF FETID SHIT
Dec 21 2006 16:54
#15
You might want to look through Ralph Dumain's notes on Marcuse. He and I generally fight over science issues, as he is a big pro-science guy, but he is also a pretty astute reader when he is not making Revol look like a novice shit slinger. Of course he has 30+ years on revol I would guess, so I suppose practice makes perfect.
http://autodidactproject.org/my/marcuse1.html
http://autodidactproject.org/my/marcuse2.html
He also cites some other stuff you may find interesting.
The interesting thing in Ralph's work is his attack on lebensphilosophie: Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, which would extend to Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc. Ralph is angry about Marcuse's attack being focussed primarily on positivism instead of irrationalism/lebensphilosophie.
Of course, Ralph is focussed on MArcuse in the 1930's, not Marcuse of One-Dimensional Man (particularly Revolution and Reason and his letters and essays, published in a two volume set a few years ago.
Cheers,
Chris
Dec 21 2006 17:02
#16
Quote:
MarcuseMarcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, retained his analysis of society through Marxian categories as well as his commitment to revolution. He accepted that capitalism had succeeded in raising the living standards of most of the population. However, in his view, the manipulation of false needs established by capitalist advertising is repressive. It leads to one-dimensional thought. It blocks people's ability to realise that they are being controlled. Thus, in the United States at least the proletariat has lost its revolutionary potential, whereas in France and Italy, where the standard of living has not reached the same level as in the US, the proletariat retains radical potential. A great supporter of student movements of the 1960s, Marcuse considered that the coming revolution of the twentieth or twenty-first century would not be primarily motivated by material need, but rather by the general dehumanization, disgust with waste and the overproduction of the consumer society. While reforms should be attempted and achieved, reforms would eventually cut into the roots of capitalist production, namely the profit motive. At that point, where the system is forced to defend itself to ensure its own survival, revolution becomes necessary. (1971 : 17-18)
His view was that one of the most important mechanisms of control in capitalist societies is the manipulation of the conscious and unconscious. New needs have to be created to encourage people to buy the new goods which are produced. People have to be convinced that they really do have a need for these goods and that possession of the goods satisfies the needs they have. Thus, in attempting to satisfy their needs people reproduce the capitalist system. The false need to purchase these goods sustains social controls over a life of toil and fear.
Generally, Marcuse tends, like the other Frankfurt School members, to portray audiences as passive victims and, like them he laments the decline of the individual and the demise of authentic culture, a demise promoted by the rubbish produced by commercial radio and television. The central problem in the analysis provided by such theorists as the Frankfurt School is that they must base their condemnation of consumer society on something, some kind of values, which they consider to be authentic. Marcuse, as we have seen, bases his critique on the distinction between false and authentic needs. There is a double bind here in that the critic establishes his own notion of authenticity as somehow outside society, presenting a concept of the human being which is ahistorical and essentialist. The double bind, of course, is that this is just as ideological a project as the project of the supposedly dominant culture. Post-structuralism and post-modernism would certainly criticize such a totalizing project and treat it with considerable suspicion since we have seen in the command economies of the former eastern bloc just what a supposedly scientific recognition of authentic human needs can lead to.
from:
http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/marxism.html
Dec 21 2006 17:06
#17
Can someone please tell Malfunction to stop trolling, this thread is for two line quibs, vaguely poetic quotes from obscure Western Marxists and implied paedophilic realtions with family members, it's certainly not the place to be posting informative summaries of Herbert Marcuse's thougt!
Dec 21 2006 17:14
#18
aaaanyway, redtwister and malfunction those sources look neat.
Dec 21 2006 17:29
#19
I read 1d man, half looking for quotes which I did not agree with: didn't find anything iirc. Well maybe one line, but it was ambiguous. So I'd stick to primary sources if I were you.
Dec 21 2006 17:37
#20
Dumain is with the ICG isn't he?
I wasn't very convinced by him either. No offense. But when he says what he means, I disagree, and what he omits talking about seems important (or something), imho. He might have a good memory though
Eta: He ws kind enough to reply to an e-mail of mine though.
Dec 21 2006 18:06
#21
In some versions of 'Five Essays' it has an interview with him in which he has very ambiguous attitudes towards the various 'New Left' groupuscles of the time, failing to differntiate much between groups that no doubt held many differences in ideology and tactics, from the Leninists and Maoists like Red Army Faction, to Red Brigades, etc.
In the intro to An Essay on Liberation he says something about 'red flags and even red and black' flags, as if they are interchangeable.
In Soviet Marxism, he writes quite romantically, abouyt what was essentially a stalinist gulag (i think it was written in 53).
Bit of a muddled thinker you could hoist an immanent critque to, me thinks!
Dec 21 2006 20:05
#22
lem wrote:
Dumain is with the ICG isn't he?I wasn't very convinced by him either. No offense. But when he says what he means, I disagree, and what he omits talking about seems important (or something), imho. He might have a good memory though
Eta: He ws kind enough to reply to an e-mail of mine though.
Ralph has no affiliations. He is the caretaker of the CLR James e-library and his politics lean in that direction though I would by no means ascribe any particular brand of Marxism to Ralph. He has never been in, to his credit, any sect, and while I often disagree with Ralph, when he comes up for air from his vitriol, he is a good person to think with as he tries to be rigorous and will tell you straight out when he thinks you are peddling twaddle.
I never fear that no matter how frustrated we are with each other that I do not know where we stand.
Chris
Dec 21 2006 21:33
#23
I think Colletti's critique of Marcuse's "Reason and Revolution" is absolutely destructive. It's not directly related to this topic but it's not terribly hard to see the continuity between Marcuse's early work and his later work.
Dec 21 2006 22:34
#24
Quote:
will tell you straight out when he thinks you are peddling twaddle
Certainly
Quote:
he is a good person to think with as he tries to be rigorous
If I were to criticise, it would be do say that he is very rigorous in his demolitions, but less so in his premises. Perhps it is that we were not discussing his premises!
Dec 24 2006 05:55
#25
Colletti's critique is interesting, indeed, but it has its own problems. I would say as a critique of Marcuse, it has much to recommend it. As a proper alternative, however, it is somewhat miserable.
After all, the issue is just how capital employs machinery, that technology produced by capital for capital is not itself neutral, but is created to extract more surplus value, to replace obstinate living labor with dead labor, to ensure the domination of capital over labor.
This is not to argue against machinery, and in implying that the alternative is either to be a Luddite or to treat machinery as something which can simply be taken over is to mistake that no machinery, no technology, is deployed outside of a labor process, that it is designed to enforce certain relations of production.
No doubt revolution means the conquest of social power and also the conquest of the means of production, rather than a 'Great Refusal', but it also means that the way in which machinery is deployed, that much machinery itself, will have to be transformed. The labor process and with it much of capitalist technology, must be abolished in the short-medium term.
This does not imply of necessity a rejection of machinery or technology any more than a critique of science involves a rejection of the investigation of the material world.
I do not think that Marcuse (or Adorno and Horkheimer) are therefore wrong to point out that natural science has the problem that it cannot understand itself, that it cannot see its own location in society, or its own labor processes, or the basis of its world view. Rather, Marcuse cannot make much of this because he does do the things which Colletti claims.
The issue at hand in this, a question IMO that Colletti begs, is what makes the proletariat revolutionary?
Quote:
"precisely this function in the modern productive process makes the working class (from the mere manual labourer to the engineer) the historical agent through whom the new society can inherit the essentials of the old: the modern productive forces developed in its bosom, i.e. science, technology, industry, the critical spirit and the experimental style of life.
This statement is quite unhelpful. What "function" exactly? "Historical agent" of the new society? "Inherit the essentials of the old"? "The critical spirit"?
So is communism the realization of the good aspects of bourgeois society with the bad ones taken out? Is it the workers running the same production processes, but without capitalists? Is the proletariat an agent? Is science somehow outside of capital's development? Is the separation of natural from social science something we should look upon happily, merely replacing the bad bourgeois social science with good, scientific Marxism, while taking natural science whole cloth? I am not saying that Colletti necessarily means something Stalinoid about these things, but his expression leaves much to be desired and his membership in the PCI leaves me suspicious at best.
What is more, Colletti is a pre-cursor to Althusser and to all of the anti-dialectical Marxists, trying to ground Marx in Spinoza and Kant. The immediate import of that is not always evident here, but in the way he fails in the above quote I noted indicates to me some of his shortcomings. The political tendency of anti-dialectical Marxism as a whole in the second half of the 20th century was itself none too pretty.
Even though Colletti's comments on Engels, Lenin and diamat are quite spot on, he ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Part of the problem with this is evidenced in Colletti's incorrect treatment of Hegel as a reactionary. If anything, Hegel was a reformer who hung on to his tenure by the skin of his teeth as things went decidedly to the right after 1818-19.
I have just bought two articles by Colletti from NLR, if anyone wants them just send me an e-mail, I have them in PDF and .DOC, The Question of Stalin and Marxism and the Dialectic.
A somewhat more nuanced discussion of irrationalism, though I find it also lacking in the end and it is less focussed on Marcuse, is the much better article by Andras Gedo
http://autodidactproject.org/other/gedo032a.html
http://autodidactproject.org/other/gedo032b.html
Chris
Dec 24 2006 21:47
#26
Chris,
Much of what you say about Colletti is a kind of "common knowledge", but it is simply wrong. Colletti is an easy target for accusations of uncritical scientism and positivism only because he frequently used the term "science", but it is clear from his writing that his concept of science is very close to Marx's wissenschaft.
First of all, Colletti was NOT a precursor of Althusser. They were writing at roughly the same time. And, if you read Marxism and Hegel or his interview with New Left Review, you can see that he thinks Althusser is a quite miserable theorist. In the former text it is hinted at a few times, and in the latter it is explicitly mentioned. The fact that both Althusser and Colletti were fighting aginst Hegelianized Marxism does not at all mean that they were doing this in such a way that they can be grouped into the same category. Colletti's central focus was always precisely what Althusser rejected, namely the theory of fetishism and the constitution of history, i.e. humanity as the subject of history, rather than Althusser's bogus notion of history as a process without a subject.
Colletti's relationship to Hegel is also too complex to simply lump together with Althusser. In Marxism and Hegel, Colletti is quite clear that he does not think that Marx had a simple rejection of Hegel (contra Althusser) and that, instead, Marx did preserve certain aspects of Hegel's thought. But Colletti's point is that he preserved those aspects of Hegel's thought only by doing away with Hegel's dialectic of matter and with his idealist philosophical system as a whole. The aspect of Hegel's thought that he preserved were only preserved by completely transforming their meaning and significance. Colletti was probably one of the first Marxists to systematically theorize the relationship of Marx's categories in Capital to Hegel's philosophical system, and he does this in a way that is much more complex and nuanced than the whole slough of modern "theorists" who claim that Marx "used" Hegel's logic in what would be a rather a priori fashion.
Furthermore, your scepticism of him for being part of the PCI is unwarranted. I'm not going to say he was some great council communist warrior (he wasn't), but he was on the antagonistic left wing of the PCI, and he was a member of the party who broke with the PCI after Hungary in 1956, when the party failed to distance itself from the USSR. His relationship to Leninism is more complex, and I think, ultimately wrong; but it would nevertheless be incorrect to put him unproblematically in the Leninist camp. He is extremely critical of Lenin's theoretical views, particularly his "philosophical" ones, and he even criticizes Lenin's State and Revolution, (see Colletti's excellent preface to Marx's early writings, where he criticizes Lenin and Engel's understanding of Marx's concept of the state).
You also act as if he wanted to preserve two separate sciences, one of natural science and one of human and revolutionary science. This is true if you take into account only his New Left Review article on contradiction (which, although wrong, is an excellent article, if only for the fact that Colletti is the first Marxist I know of to really point out the apparent problem). But if you read Marxism and Hegel, you can see that this is a dramatic and complete reversal of Colletti's earlier position. Colletti was quite clear, in his pre-NLR writings, that he was developing Marx's idea of a single science. And I think he does a much better and systematic job of this compared to any other Marxist I have read, even better than people who I quite enjoy like Cyril Smith.
I'm sorry this is something of an aside to the main topic at hand, but I hear a lot of simply incorret things being said about Colletti both by Hegelian Marxists and Althusserians, who want to claim Colletti as a member of their bankrupt philosophical project.
Mike
Dec 25 2006 03:18
#27
Just for the record,don't you have mre pressing discussions to be getting on with?
BTW you clearly have no notion of Marxs hegelian influence as displayed in your objectivist postings on use values and society in general.
Dec 25 2006 08:23
#28
I'm out of town and I don't have all the time in the world to deal with your nonsense. It's obvious from our discussions that if you've read any Marx at all, it was very superficial and encompassed a very small portion of the work. The very idea that someone of your caliber could assert that I don't understand the Hegel-Marx connection astounds me.
I'll get back to crushing your nonsense in due time, comrade. I just posted here because since the issue was a simple factual one, and not subject to debate (unless Chris has opposing facts, but having read all of Colletti's works available in English I'm pretty sure he doesn't), I was able to do it rather quickly and off the top of my head.
Dec 25 2006 08:25
#29
I forgot to add that claiming that Colletti used Spinoza against Hegel is also wrong. Colletti details the Spinoza-Hegel relation at length and argues that Hegel was in many ways a Spinozan (it seems that Hegel himself accepted this label). So any criticism that Colletti made of Hegel would apply doubly to Spinoza. Colletti sees quite a bit of worth in Hegel but he never really discusses Spinoza any more than he has to to dismiss him.
Mike
Dec 25 2006 14:12
#30
mikus wrote:
I'm out of town and I don't have all the time in the world to deal with your nonsense. It's obvious from our discussions that if you've read any Marx at all, it was very superficial and encompassed a very small portion of the work. The very idea that someone of your caliber could assert that I don't understand the Hegel-Marx connection astounds me.I'll get back to crushing your nonsense in due time, comrade. I just posted here because since the issue was a simple factual one, and not subject to debate (unless Chris has opposing facts, but having read all of Colletti's works available in English I'm pretty sure he doesn't), I was able to do it rather quickly and off the top of my head.
Ho ho ho
Merry Christmas.
if you weren't so pacified by consumer false consciousness you'd do your own.