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passive, fragmented audience, is a suitable symbol of monopoly capitalist consumerism.

Marcuse's concern with very feel and quality of social existence under capitalism.

If this has been an issue insufficiently aired by Marxism, so is another topic which Marcuse broaches: sexuality.

A well known European thinker once wrote: The motive of human society is in the last resort. an economic one'. . Not Karl Marx, in fact, but Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

For Freud, who is a thoroughly materialist thinker, the need to labour involves a repression of the human erotic and aggressive drives, which are channelled by the crucial mechanism of the family into socially acceptable routes.

Such repression is for Freud at the very basis of civilisation: the tragedy of human existence, as Freud sees it, is that men and women can only attain material security at the cost of a massive crippling sacrifice of their instinctual needs.

Suppression

But: Freud does not believe that all societies are equal in this respect. If, he argues, a society is such that the satisfaction of one portion of it depends upon the suppression of another, then:

"it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility toward a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share... It goes without saying that a civilisation which leayes so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them intó revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence." (The Future of an Illusion).

So much for the How common Marxist dismissal of Freud as no more than a decadent petty bourgeois. Leon Trotsky did not share that view (he seems to have been one of the few "Trotskyists' who didn't), and neither does Herbert Marcuse.

In his suggestive work Eros and Civilisation (1955) Marcuse agrees with Freud that all societies demand instinctual repression, but claims that capitalism demands a 'surplus-repression' Trotsky The brutal repression of human instincts under capitalism, with its vicious work disciplines, sexual puritanism and cultural degradation is a 'surplus' over and above the repression necessary for any society to survive; and Marcuse envisages revolutionary socialism as a liberation not only of the productive forces, but of the repressed instincts themselves. • capitalist society, instinct is. either 'sublimated' into 'spiritual' matters, or hemmed into a narrow enclave of permissable sexuality.

But with a socialist transformation, Marcuse claims, such drives would be released from that enclave and generalised over society as a whole. 'Libido' (sexual instinct) would not be restricted to 'genital' sexuality; it would infuse and invigorate all human relationships, so that even work would become 'eroticised' It is easy to dismiss this vision as naive, utopian, oI as a simple plea for 'permissiveness' '. But that is not SHORTE!

what Marcuse means.

There are plenty of signs in Marx's own writings that he envisaged the quality of all human relationships in socialist society, including work as 'aesthetic'-to have something of the concrete, sensuous, enjoyable quality which can now be found only in a few isolated activities such as art.

Prudish

And since the artistic and erotic instincts are closely intertwined, Marcuse's vision is by no means merely to be sneered at.

Much Marxism has, of course, been notoriously prudish about sexuality, which it has relegated to a merely "private' activity; it is part of the boldness of Marcuse's vision that he tried to reintegrate sexuality and politics, refusing the bourgeois separation of the two.

Eros and Civilisation does, however, raise severe problems. For Freud, the libidinal drives are inherently anti-social: if it were not for social conditioning (what Freud calls the 'reality-principle' ; as against the 'pleasure-principle'); individuals would merely sink self-indulgently into an orgy of egoism and aggressiveness.

(Such a viewpoint of course offends many earnest 'socialist" believers in the natural goodness and fraternity of mankind, as it offended the Viennese bourgeoisie of Freud's own day to hear their angelic children described as creatures of egoism; repressed lust and destructiveness).

Gloomy

So Marcuse needs to explain -which he doesn't at all adequately-the mechanisms by which liberáted instincts would be socially productive rather than anarchistic.

That there is much of the Romantic anarchist in Marcuse is clear; but this does not merely cancel what is suggestive in his work, any more than the Hegelian idealist in the early Marx means that he can be written off. • If Eros and Civilisation is a utopian work, Marcuse's next and most famous book, One Dimensional Man (1964), is exactly the reverse.

In page after gloomy page, we are offered a terrifying vision of late monopoly capitalism-of a society in which all revolution has been safely defused, all revolt safely 'incorporated', all contradictions neatly 'contained' Capitalism appears as a monstrous monolith, with an almost endless capacity to absorb and neutralise opposition; we are confronted with a social order which secures the willing complicity of those exploits by ceaselessly manipulating their desires, implanting 'false needs' , administering their lives through a vast array of ideological structures.

"Television rules' is really the message: the working class are little more than a bunch of catatonic zombies, lobotomised by advertising and the media.

Philosphy has disowned its critical role and reduced itself to a mere legitimisation of the given order; art has given up the ghost and become hopelessly commercialised.

Science and technology are inherently oppressive: Marcuse mournfully, contrasts the deep joy of making love in a field with the squalor of making love in a Cadillac. Logic is no more than a weapon of the ruling class; education no more than brainwashing.

What then remains? Two things, essentially: first, a small l elite oi men like Herbert Marcuse, who are able to perceive the deep social malaise from which they themselves are miraculously free.

Second, all those potentially 'revolutionary' groups Mass anti-Vietnam whom capitalism has been unable to fully integrate, and who are offered to us as the shining vanguard of socialist revolution: students, blacks, the Third World peasantry, lumpenproletariat.

As for the working class, they will get by as best they can.

Pathetic though it is, this 'vision' calls for three comments. First, there is a definite relation between the later, despairing Marcuse and the early HegelianMarxist who believed in the triumphant march of Reason.

Hegelian Marxism tends to see the working class philosophically rather than politically, as an 'essence' which will 'negate' capitalism; and while this has the benefit of keeping the revolutionary role of the class firmly to the fore, it means that the empirical nature of the working class-its actual material and ideological development-is fatally ignored.

Marcuse was never one to louse up his argument with the facts (his work on Soviet Marxism (1958) is remarkably untainted by such things), and this exacts a heavy political toll.

But this idealism of the class can just as easily tip over into an empiricism of the class. When you do come to take a cool hard look at the surface appearances of the working class, with its inevitably uneven. partially 'incorporated' nature, all you can do is write it off in contrast with the ideal.

Secondly, ' Marcuse's vision of monopoly capitalist America is closely conditioned by his experience of Nazism.

lhe Frankturt school. having fled from a form of 'totalitarian' capitalism to an apparently liberal one, discovered that tnis orm ol capitalism was a good deal ANITY AE BRIC var demonstration, 1967 more 'administered' an 'manipulative' than the had expected.

Accordingly, they fatall blurred the distinctio between fascism an American capitalism; th system which Marcus depicts is essentially totali arian', a black, one-sider of undialectical caricature ( American: capitalism as whole.

Thirdly, it is importar to record that Marcuse view that American capita ism had 'contained' its cor tradictions was, of coursi rapidly proved grotesquel incorrect.

Much as Lyndon Johi son would no doubt has re loved to believe in the 'on dimensional' nature e of American society, the ie blazing ghettos, battlefiel is and campuses of the 196( Ds made such a thought rathi er difficult to entertain.

Marcuse, to do hil justice, took the point: Or. Dimensional Man W: followed by Essays in Libe ation (1969), a central te: for the American studer 'New Left' Fatal betrayal Marcuse never revised his fatal betrayal of the Marxist tenet that only an independent working class can provide revolutionary.

But it can be said of him, at least, that whereas most of the other members of the Frankfurt School proved outright traitors to socialist revolution-one of them even ended up running Voice of America-Marcuse continued to support revolution in his own utopian and idealist way.

That, however, is not his primary importance. His importance lies in those. areas of Marxist theory which, however ambiguously, he enriched and renewed.

Trotskyism has still to take up the challenge posed by much of that work.

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Don SOCIALIST PRESS, EXIBO Wednesday 12 March 1980

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culture, then, extends beyond 'high art' to the

WeNGY BOSTON SOCALSY WODNER, P