Most anti-capitalism conferences have a folding table at the back that is filled with dog-eared pamphlets, photocopied zines, and books whose spines have been cracked so many times that the titles are hardly readable. There will almost certainly be a mention of Herbert Marcuse somewhere in that pile. Not all of his books. Sometimes it’s just a citation in someone’s manifesto, a quote on a card, or a name mentioned casually during a panel with the assurance of someone mentioning an old friend. The question of why is worthwhile.
Eighty-one years old, Marcuse passed away in Starnberg, West Germany, in July 1979 after decades of witnessing his ideas appropriated, misunderstood, praised, and sometimes turned into weapons by movements he only partially supported. Born into a prosperous upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, he studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg before escaping Nazi Germany and arriving in the United States. This journey influenced every aspect of his thought process. He was more than just a Marxist. He was difficult to describe, which is likely one of the reasons he is so resilient.
His most well-known book, One-Dimensional Man, which was released in 1964, made the case that sophisticated industrial society had evolved a unique and efficient method of absorbing dissent. According to Marcuse, capitalism did not use force alone to crush opposition. By incorporating protest into consumer culture, transforming rebellion into a product, and flattening the kind of oppositional thinking necessary for real social change, it neutralized it. The title’s “one-dimensional man” isn’t a monster or a fool; rather, he’s just someone who has been subtly and persistently deprived of the mental resources necessary to envision an alternative reality. The diagnosis is depressing. It’s also unsettlingly familiar.
That’s what makes Marcuse so appealing to others. The majority of his readers lived in a comfortable, functional, ostensibly free democratic society, which was the target of his criticism rather than some far-off corrupt regime. In 1964, that seemed radical. For many of the attendees of these conferences, there’s a feeling that it still does.
Whether Marcuse’s framework applies to modern struggles is still up for debate. He was writing about a postwar American society characterized by Cold War ideology and Fordist production. His vocabulary did not include the platform economy, algorithmic culture, or gig work. However, the fundamental tenet of his argument—that a society can generate consent through saturation as opposed to suppression—continually finds new contexts to work in. Depending on who you ask, that kind of theoretical flexibility can indicate either remarkable vagueness or real insight.
For a brief period, he was referred to as the “Guru of the New Left,” a title he reportedly found awkward, perhaps because he knew what happened to gurus. He had a genuine and documented impact on people like Angela Davis, who studied under him at UC San Diego. It is indisputable that he was at the intellectual center of radicalism in the 1960s. Now, it’s more intriguing to see why younger activists who weren’t around at the time continue to rediscover him instead of taking his place.
As this develops at conference after conference, it seems that Marcuse fills a special niche that no one else can quite match: he is angry enough to feel honest, accessible enough to be cited without a degree in philosophy, and rigorous enough to be taken seriously. Contrary to popular belief, that combination is uncommon. Since no one has printed a better theory card, at least not yet, it continues to appear.
