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One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

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Leftist thinking underwent a dramatic change during the Sixties. After fifteen years of unprecedented prosperity, the class issues that had bedeviled the old left seemed moot. The working class, instead of being immiserated and ripe for revolution, was now contendedly (seemingly) partaking in the general boom and as far from revolution as one could imagine. Already by 1950 C. Wright Mills had coined the term "liberal-labor establishment" to disparage the conservative turn in the labor movement (specifically, the CIO). This seeming repudiation of Marx's predictions fostered a great deal of thinking by members of the Frankfurt School, which included Marcuse, about how marxism should be revised and where it went wrong. One Dimensional Man is Marcuse's brilliant attempt to answer this question.

Why is Marcuse so upset about prosperity? Following in the foot steps of Marx, Marcuse is not simply worried about economic exploitation. His basic concern is liberation--a liberation he sees receeding ever further into the distance as modern industrial society (both capitalist and communist) buys off almost all potential opponents through increased abundance. He views modern society as a treadmill where workers are kept enslaved to their jobs by the desire to purchase newer and ever more products produced by their labor. Rather than seeking for liberation, workers willingly put up with the indignities of working for their capitalist (and socialist) masters in hopes of greater material, as oppossed to spritual abundance.

Yet this society is, at its core, irrational, according Marcuse. Written at during the height of the Cold War, Marcuse views the prepartions for World War III as especially telling of the insanity of the current system.

In the first four chapters Marcuse shows how modern society is able to contain and absorb its contradictions. Marcuse is in despair that the "machine" seems to be inescapeable. With the demise of working class opposition, the "machine" seems capable of carrying on indefinitely; unless, of course, it anihilates itself in a nuclear holocaust. Readers may find chapter 3 especially interesting for its Freudian analysis of modern society.

The next four chapters are devoted to philosophy. Marcuse seeks to show how modern scientific thinking (which made modern society possible) is part of a "historical project" aimed at "domination." As opposed to this "positive thinking" (i.e., postivist) Marcuse proposes "negative thinking," i.e. dialectical thinking which includes the contradictions and negations of the thesis in the form of the antithesis. These chapters can be some rough sledding at points, but Marcuse explicates his ideas well enough that most readers will be able grasp his basic argument.

Finally, after a chapter discussing why liberation is still possible, and how it might be achieved, he wraps up in a conclusion that would seem to be a manifesto for the New Left. Having given up on the working class, Marcuse invests his hopes for revolution in people of color, whether in the U.S. or in the third world.

For understanding why the left took the turn it did during the sixties this book, along with the Port Huron Statement, is a necessity. Before plunging into One Dimensioal Man, however, the reader might do well to first read Reisman's _Lonely Crowd_ and Whyte's _Organization Man_. These books form an essential backdrop to Marcuse's thinking. (He mentions his debt to these works in his preface.)

By pure chance I found an old, tattered copy of this in a used book shop many years ago. I still recall the bizarre sensation of realizing that someone else, much older than me and way ahead of my own experiences, had expressed so accurately, so vividly, a view of society that I understood, and suspect is resonant among many, but perplexing to articulate in a way that isn't flippantly dismissed outright by those who gauge the intrinsic worth of human existence by a poisoned belief structure's merits.

Marcuse's book is a damning examination of the dynamics of 'democratic unfreedom;' technological servitude in the guise of liberty. I remember how the notion struck me, that if such societal/institutional analysis was on target in the early 1960s, just how indoctrinated and delusional must the situation be in our currently perceived time? Precisely.

Thankfully there are a few truly aware pockets of critical thought to be found, but by and large, the Few Big easily control the UNcritical masses through a constant barrage of institutional, cultural and media propaganda(entertainment equals indoctrination)and the strategically manufactured 'values' and exhaulted social practices of this UNreality are then impressed upon one person to the other as the herd 'polices' and indoctrinates via familiarity, example and ostrcism, making opposition to greed and superficiality appear absurd, futile.

Marcuse discusses artistic alienation, how the inherent properties of truth and protest found in artistic expression were defanged:
"The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction-the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality. Their truth was in the illusion evoked, in the insistence on creating a world in which the terror of life was called up and suspended-mastered by recognition. This is the miracle of the chefd'oeuvre; it is the tragedy, sustained to the last, and the end of tragedy-its impossible solution. To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one *is* means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made for man become the actual unconquerable cosmic forces."

It's fascinating when observing various societal/cultural trends, tendencies and practices, to go back and see how it corresponds with Marcuse's prophetic warning...and yes, that is meant quite literally: this book is no less prophetic than Orwell's 1984, and what's more, is far more chilling in its range and scope due to it's realistic exploration of cultural indoctrination, mass delusion and mass denial. In Orwell's novel, 1984, Winston Smith's world is controlled through ideology, yes, but the Big Stick of state violence looms above perpetually, ensuring the perpetuation of an automatized populace.

Marcuse's book, on the other hand, is an irrefutable postulation of the Big Lie, the comfortably horrific ease in which society has become fatally entangled within a stupor of brainwashed self deception, welcomed, enthusiastic exploitation, zombie consumerism run amok, repression and lunatic militarism.

He uses words in a manner of stark clarification, refusing to allow modern society to slip the proverbial noose, and find comfortable, convenient excuses, denials and justifications. As the "Newsweek" review quoted on the cover appropriately exclaims: "A bitter cry of social protest, fortified by uncommon erudition and rationality."

What honest chance for our civilization, for our species, remains in such endless cycles of lunacy? Your hair would stand on end if you knew how many times we've come seconds close to accidental nuclear holocaust. That is reality, and to passively ignore it is to do so at our own peril. I wonder just how few people can actually comprehend that?...what is says about us.

The corporations and the 'Few Big' dominate the globe, and next they want the full militaristic dominance of outer space with their astonishingly psychotic "Star Wars" missle defense plan, which naturally has NOTHING to do with defense and everything to do with parting ways with long standing non proliferation treaties, and of course, global domination. Billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars are pathologically spent on nuclear weapons every year...gee, with the Soviet Union gone, who or what do ya s'pose they're gearing up for when they've already amassed enough weapons to implement race suicide a hundred times over?

This is the crucial point Marcuse is making: the populace is strategically marginalized into apathy and indifference, out and away from the concerns of policy making decisions by vested interests who strive to make huge profits by 'dumbing down' standards of humanity, tricking the public into subsidizing high end military technology, and appealing to base attractions and distractions(greed, superficiality, apathy)in order to secure the compliance of a mass of stunningly indifferent, dumb people who are actively participating in their own degredation and ultimate demise, if only by their inability and/or unwillingness to acknowledge what should be flagrantly obvious. We're all guilty of this to some degree. People tend to talk about what matters to them most...or, what they've been conditioned and programmed to care about most, right? So when you *don't* hear many around you discussing these common sense issues, life and death issues, think of the potential consequences for our species. Encourage those around you to read Marcuse's book, it outlines a lot of basic groundwork for what we, if we're to be honest, face today.

Marcuse offers a brilliant critique of advanced industrial society that fuses dialectical thought, Freudian theory, Marxist perspectives, and even a bit of existentialism here and there. It provides a comprehensive critique of our technocratic social order, as it has become, that is reminiscient of the works of later French poststructuralists, like Deleuze and Foucault. Ultimately, Marcuse founders on the contradiction between short-term and long-term interests, explicitly critiquing the Welfare State while implicitly, it could be argued, advocating it. However, "One-Dimensional Man" is the best basis for critique yet, with much of the insight that later emerged in the French intellectual fast track, but without the ambiguity of poststructuralist alternatives. Marcuse is both entertaining and brilliant, a must-read for specialists, and an eye-opening classic for the general educated public.

Marcuse was very perceptive about the nature of our technological society.Some of his ideas still have relevance today. He saw how the state and power elites were using technology to control people's lives. This has created a new form of totalitarianism. People are massively controlled and manipulated by technology.Our freedom today is to simply to walk about in our cages and choose the wallpaper. Marcuse points out that inner freedom or private space has been invaded and whittled down by technology reality. The media is especially at fault, and things are much worse than when he wrote in 1964. False needs are so pervasive that most people are not aware of the situation. Marcuse also shows how ideas and thinking processes are being used to limit our perceptions. Marcuse is heavy going, but he has many challenging ideas. My criticism of Marcuse is that he was a materialist himself, therefore could not offer a viable way out. He did not see that the real problem was a moral collapse, and this is destroying our materialist system from the inside.If Marcuse had a spiritual outlook, he would have found the answers in a new set of non-material values.

With this work, Marcuse aims to construct a critique of society and to show that our society is one-dimensional, he seeks to tease out the dialectical relations between two hypotheses. On the one hand, that `society is capable of containing qualitative change' (p. xlvii). On the other, the idea that `forces and tendencies exist which may break which may break this containment and explode the society' (ibid.). To achieve his critique, Marcuse uses two criteria, namely, that human life is worth living (in the Kantian sense), and that there exist opportunities for betterment i.e. to improve human life. In consequence, he first discusses the one-dimensional society, next the one-dimensional thought followed by the chances of alternatives.

As far as the one-dimensional society is concerned, Marcuse aims at showing that plural social praxis tends to be eroded. If the ultimate aim of freedom of enterprise has been the exertion of autonomy and competition in the sense of constantly proving one self, Marcuse pushes this logic to the point where such need is no longer required. Technology does have a crucial role in this respect as it can release `individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity' (p. 2).

But to reach such a point (if at all) one needs to become aware of the current societal realities. In particular, not the disappearance of classes, but rather, their amalgamation in that they all share a drive to preserving the establishment. Marcuse explains this phenomenon by means of the concept of "introjection" which denotes the tendency of replicating societal forms of control at the individual level.

The prevailing societal forms of control are technological in the sense of an instrumentality of reason that qualifies social production in a vicious cycle that encloses dual identities in a pure form of servitude. This is on grounds that the `progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements of culture ... as they succumb to the process of desublimation' (p. 56). For Marcuse technological reality limits the scope of sublimation as well as the need for it by upsetting the channeling of socially unacceptable impulses towards (aesthetic) activities regarded as more socially acceptable. Under such conditions one is preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of whatever is offered thereby contributing to the acceptance of established general repression. Ultimately, as he puts it, `an unfree society makes for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of this society. It is the token of declining autonomy and comprehension' (p76).

Language and its manipulation under the guise of unified functionality seems to have exacerbated the phenomenon because it is `irreconcilably anti-critical ... anti-dialectical ... and anti-historical' (pp. 97-98), considering that critical thought and language are essentially judgmental.

Concerning one-dimensional thought, Marcuse attempts to show that plural thinking tends to be undermined. In particular, he brings forth the contrast between formal and dialectical logic - the former being based on the unified functionality of language that fixes meaning in its attempt to construct quantitatively objective descriptions of the world. In arguing that `the objective world, left equipped only with quantifiable qualities, comes to be more and more dependent in its objectivity on the subject' (p. 148), Marcuse argues in favor of a dialectical logic since it is able to undo the abstractions of formal logic.

What is at stake here then is `preserving and protecting the right, the need to think and speak in terms other than those of common usage' (p. 178), which is, for Marcuse, the main task of philosophy - but not of analytic philosophy.

Finally, Marcuse offers some indication on how the alternatives mentioned in the previous two sections need to be considered with an overall focus on plurality, in particular linguistic and aesthetic following a technological rationale pushed to its extreme.

Overall, a powerful book that has lost none of its appeal and relevance to contemporary societal issues, whether political, economic, cultural or technological, despite the fact that some aspects of the discussion have evolved since. One-dimensionality seems to be here with us!

This is Marcuse's most famous work and one that was a major influence on and during the student revolts all over the European continent of 1968. Many of the catchphrases of that time, such as "repressive tolerance" and the like, are derived directly from Marcuse. He has since lost much of his popularity and audience, and in my view, quite deservedly so.

His main thesis is that modern man has become one-dimensional due to the totalitarian, all-encompassing exercise of power by the entrenched capitalist class. While this of itself is not such a bad idea, though certainly romanticizing and exaggerating reality, his approach to explaining and attacking it leaves very much to be desired. Marcuse overuses empty or unexplained phrases endlessly (like "cutting off perspectives through an overwhelming ossified concreteness of imagery" and similar things) while at the same time hardly making use of any prior thought or philosophy on the subject at all. This makes the impression of much ranting and little content. Even worse is his general laziness as a thinker - he never actually bothers to explain why such a full-spectrum dominance has occurred or how he wants to prove its existence, he merely asserts it and then goes on about the manifold bad effects it has.
Rather bizarre in this context, and perhaps even nihilistic, is his general dislike of what he perceives as "rationality". He only uses this word in negative contexts (particularly in the context of industrial expansion) and seems to consider it the primary form of "one-dimensional thinking", affected by the symbolism of capitalism. Now it is one thing to say that the fashionable concept of rationalism is false and ill-founded, but to reject relying on rational processes altogether as he seems to do is a bit too much.

To put it bluntly, everything Marcuse has written in this book has also been written in, say, Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle", and then in half as many words and quite more philosophically coherent. The early Marcuse (of Eros and Civilization) was much better; this book warrants no more interest than a purely antiquarian historical one.

This book is the most damning indictment of advanced capitalism ever written. Its author, Herbert Marcuse, was a walking encyclopedia, and probably the most accessible, directly political member of the infamous Frankfurt School. Unlike his brilliant (if personally troubled) colleague Theodor Adorno, Marcuse thankfully does not waste time criticizing things like jazz music and Betty Boop (although he does admit to not seeing any emancipatory possibilities in rock and roll).

Moreover, when the Frankfurt school members once toured St. Louis, Marcuse had nothing but scorn for the famous "Arch" of St. Louis, while his younger colleague Jurgen Habermas wanted to go all the way to the top (this obviously reflects different generational sensibilities among German intellectuals). Our good friend Marcuse was also known to wear flannels, smoke cigars, and drink good scotch, all of which he did in a 1960s visit to that hotbed of radical dissent (and my alma mater) Antioch College.

While his masterpiece, "One-Dimensional man", is a brilliant synthesis of Marx and Freud that leaves no doubt that we live in a seriously deficient society, it also does not leave much hope for the possibility of any one person or group effecting constructive change. In fact, the only really hopeful note in "One-Dimensional Man" is the fact that the book, like all of Marcuse's other books, is dedicated to his wife Inge, "again and again", which shows that true love can flourish even among the deadening cynicism inevitably brought about by full exposure to the omnipresent conformity of one-dimensional society.

Not disillusioned with the central theme of Marxism, Marcuse attempts to explain the arrested development of post-Marxist revolution, along with totalitarianism of both capitalist and communist systems, production for the sake of production, the sciences infiltrated by totalitarian ideology which leads to catastrophic consequences, the dialectic which portrays man's potential and man's defeat in the face of modern society and the systematic adjustment and tolerance to rebellion against existing society, like Che Guevara designer t-shirts.

Marcuse's most celebrated book has long been surrounded with misconceptions. It is not social science, but a prophetic text which needs to be seen in the context of late 60's radicalism and the emergence of what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle. Ostensibly a "Marxist", Marcuse was, perhaps, the last left Hegelian, who departs from Marx not just in particular prognoses but basic epistemological tenets. Marcuse's immense popularity on campus led to much resentment, hence the numerous false stories circulating about him by contemporaries ....

One of the greatest thinkers of our recent time and one of his greatest works. Also check out Eros and Civilization