Marcuse

Probably the most prominent "New Leftist" in American academia during the 1960s and 70s, Herbert Marcuse was born on this date in 1898 to prosperous Jewish parents in Berlin, and served in the German Army in World War I. He looked on approvingly as the rule of Wilhelm II was replaced by a Social Democratic government, although he grew disillusioned with its progress in light of the murders of Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

In 1922 he received his doctorate in literature from the University of Freiburg, and after working in a Berlin bookshop for a time, he returned to Freiburg to study with Martin Heidegger. There he began to weave together strands of Marxist thought with existentialist and phenomenological themes, asserting that socialist principles ought to inspire individual liberty, not just collective freedom from capitalist exploitation. He found particular inspiration in Marx's previously unpublished "1844 Manuscripts," in which Marx described a form of psychological alienation as a key ailment within capitalist society.

In 1933, Marcuse formed the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, with the aim of developing a "critical social theory" to articulate arguments at the nexus of Marxist economic analysis, social theory and cultural criticism. The Nazis were particularly affronted by this, and by the following year, Marcuse fled to the U.S., where he would house the Institute at Columbia University. In 1941, he published his first major work, Reason and Revolution, in which he argued that Hegel's philosophy of state did not provide a rationale for German fascism. In the same year, Marcuse joined the U.S. Office of Secret Services, eventually working as head of the Central European bureau of the Department of State by the end of World War II, submitting a report on the cultural aspects of Nazism ("Presentation of the Enemy") and authoring a civil handbook on de-nazification before leaving the government in 1951.

He obtained a chair at Brandeis and began his most productive period as a philosopher. In Eros and Civilization (1955), he synthesized Marx and Freud (less suspiciously than Wilhelm Reich had tried to) and postulated a non-repressive society in which self-fulfillment could be naturally cultivated through libidinous play, non-alienating labor and open sexuality; the book became a touchstone for 1960s New Left intellectuals. He became the first leftist to openly criticize the politically paralyzing Marxist dogma of the Soviet Union in Soviet Marxism (1958), staking out his position as a social Marxist. In One Dimensional Man (1964), he elaborated on his social Marxism, showing how advanced industrial societies create false needs, integrating individuals into an unbreakable cycle of production and consumption and eradicating dissent through industrial management, advertising and a corrupted mass media; with the seductive power of capitalist toys, luxuries and affiliations, according to Marcuse the revolutionary potential of the working class had been eradicated and the allegedly impending "capitalist crisis" predicted by orthodox Marxists had been averted.

He retired from Brandeis in 1965, and became the sole elder statesman of a youth-oriented radical movement while teaching classes at UC San Diego -- the tall, charismatic, white-haired European, smelling of fine cigars and driving a used Peugeot, the only mature inductee of long-haired peace and liberation movements. His "Essay on Liberation" (1969) celebrated the current campus causes, from opposition to the Vietnam War to the general liberation of the "hippie" movement, while Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) offered a more darkly realistic assessment of the potential success of such movements in light of the "counterrevolution" of the right-wing establishment. His final book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1979), he saw art as an essential component of emancipation, celebrating "bourgeois" art for its indictment of bourgeois society and criticizing the typical Marxist aesthetics that promoted a sterile notion of "proletarian culture." He died on July 29, 1979 on a visit to Starnberg, Germany.

Marcuse's work is now often considered marginal within 20th century American philosophy, although the availability of unpublished material seems poised to reveal Marcuse as a multi-dimensional critic of the intermingling forces of economy, culture and technology, one whose conclusions perhaps offer greater hope than the despairingly deterministic views of his French counterparts such as Baudrillard and Ellul.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian and co-founder of both the United Church of Christ (created from mergers of the Evangelical Synod, the Reformed Church and the Congregational Church in 1934) and of the Americans for Democratic Action (1947), was born on this day in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri.

Niebuhr spent his career drawing the Bible together with Western political philosophy, and his writings took aim not only at the complacency of orthodox Christianity, but also at the self-righteous secular relativity of liberal Christianity, as well as the deification of the "proletariat" by the Marxists. Recognizing the inability of human beings to transcend ego and selfishness -- admitting, unlike liberal Christians, that man is basically flawed, though capable of responding to divine grace -- Niebuhr asserts that therefore it is heresy for any church is to identify itself completely with God and to declare that opposition to its way is opposition to God's way. While Christians should never sit quietly by while evil becomes manifest, according to Niebuhr, realistically Christians are limited to trying to mitigate the influence of selfishness through contrition and the spirit of love, while recognizing that the ultimate cure for what is evil in our world can be none other than genuine, voluntary conversion and placing one's trust in God.

During the course of his career -- first as a pastor at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit (1915-28), as a Socialist candidate for office (he was a supporter of the Socialist campaigns of Norman Thomas until World War II), and as a professor of theology at the Union Theological Seminary (1928-60), he turned his observations upon such social problems as racial conflict, economic injustice, industrial exploitation (becoming a harsh critic of Ford Motors' labor policies, for example) and the morality of nuclear warfare. He died on June 1, 1971 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Marx

Much maligned by the post-Soviet world as a symbol of what the Soviets stood for, if Karl Marx were alive today he would no doubt be flattered by the attention, energized by his critics, but probably mystified by his identification with the Soviets, as he was when he learned before his death that a party in France had called itself a "Marxist" party; his response: "I, at least, am not a Marxist."

Born on this day in 1818 in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx was descended from a long line of rabbis on his mother's side. Marx's father Heinrich had changed his surname from "Levi" to "Marx" shortly before Karl's birth and converted to Lutheranism, hoping to take his place as a lawyer and community leader in Trier. While taking pro-monarchial stands in public, Heinrich privately raised his son Karl on the revolutionary, democratic writings of Locke and Voltaire. Young Karl devoured it all, in addition to all of the literature and poetry he could get his hands on, becoming, in his teens, a precocious scholar of Homer and Shakespeare with the encouragement of the Marxes' aristocratic neighbor, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen.

While words became his passion, Marx also developed an intense affection for Baron von Westphalen's daughter, a pretty and popular girl 5 years his senior named Jenny; and by the time Marx left Trier for the University of Bonn in 1835, they were secretly contemplating marriage. Heinrich Marx's plan was for his son to follow him into the law, but at first Marx seemed intent only to study beer, as co-president of Bonn's Trier Tavern Club; brawling (one scuffle with a Bonn gang resulted in a sword slash over Marx's eye); and the composition of love poems to Jenny, who consented to be his fiancée in 1836. His father, irked by the engagement and angry about his son's "rampaging" in Bonn, called for Karl's transfer to the University of Berlin. There, Marx did manage to come to the realization that he had no future as a poet, but yet the study of the law still took a back seat to his newly-found passion, the controversial philosophy of the late Berliner, G.W.F. Hegel. Embracing a new regimen that would last for most of the rest of his life, Marx eschewed company and poured over academic texts all night by candlelight, smoking cheap cigars and sipping cheap ale. With the idea of becoming a professor, Marx completed a doctoral thesis likening the debates over Hegel to the disputes between followers of Epicurus and Democritus.

Marx's literary antics, however -- anonymously penning a spoof against the Prussian monarchy, for one -- undermined both the pursuit of his doctorate (he finally received one from Jena, on a correspondence basis, in 1841) and his dreams of landing a job as a professor, so in 1842 he moved to Cologne and took over the helm of a small liberal newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung. Within 5 months, Marx's paper was shut down by the government for his complaints about local housing conditions and his criticism of the Czar Nicholas I.

He married Jenny in 1843, and moved to Paris, where he became aligned with the communists (then supporters of the utopian socialism of Etienne Cabet) and assumed the editorship of a journal-in-exile that opposed the Prussian government, which failed shortly thereafter when distribution in Germany became impossible. In Paris, Brussels and Cologne, he earned a reputation as a combative, intellectually acute "wild boar" (to paraphrase Jenny Marx), and was kicked from city to city by impatient officials (at least once on the direct intervention of Frederick William IV).

Among his Paris admirers was Friedrich Engels, the son of a rich industrialist, who would become Marx's lifelong colleague, apologist and benefactor. In an effort to set forth the principles of a burgeoning anti-bourgeois radical movement, Marx and Engels wrote the 21-page Communist Manifesto (1848), a utopian polemic, published in the midst of the riots leading to the abdication of Louis Phillippe in France and similar unrest in Berlin, Prague and Vienna, which called for workers to throw off the bourgeoisie and establish a property-less, classless society. Ultimately booted from Cologne and banished to a town in Brittany after using part of his mother's inheritance to buy "blood-red ribbons" for the Paris Communists, Marx finally moved his family to London's Soho district in 1849.

Living in dire poverty, he eked out a living as a journalist, occasionally speaking out as a leader of the First International (a group of radicals who had played a small role in the Paris Commune of 1871), while tending to his true calling -- occupying a dark corner of the British Museum, reading Adam Smith and David Ricardo and countless econometric studies and tracts, in preparation for the writing of his life's work, which would come to be known as Das Kapital (1867-94). In effect, it would be a top-to-bottom study of capitalism with an eye toward exposing its inherent structural flaws.

Picking up where the Communist Manifesto left off, much of what became influential in Marx's thought among the Russians, the Chinese and their constituents can be found within its dense pages. His "historical materialism" was simply a theory about history in which Marx held that the history of society is the history of class struggles -- contemporarily, in 19th century Europe, the struggles between the bourgeoisie (big capitalists) and the property-less proletariat. Impinging on this class conflict and the social relations inherent in the activity of producing goods were "production forces" -- not just human labor, but technological advancements and other popular currents. For the production forces that exist in a given economy, according to Marx, there is a set of social relations which will, as a result of conflicts or otherwise, naturally coalesce around them, ultimately inspiring an enabling superstructure of laws, political institutions, religion, art and philosophy. Thus, for Marx there is a kind of self-feeding inevitability, or "historical determinism," to human processes that arises out of conflict.

In Das Kapital, Marx further defends and elaborates this thesis, introducing the "labour theory of value" and the "theory of surplus value" to illustrate how the engines of capitalism deprive the worker of the true value of his or her labor, showing the chinks in the armor of 19th century capitalism that would result in the next big change. Marx's most passionate writing describes the rise of capitalism, its inherent miseries, and its trend toward the centralization of production and socialization of labor which ultimately will cause capitalism as we know it to "burst asunder."

Although it was clear to Marx that the activism of the proletariat would be an essential ingredient in the demise of capitalism, Marx also suggested that for change to take hold, there could be no skipping of steps: the next phase, the hoped-for classless society, could only occur as capitalism reached its most mature, hopelessly self-immolating zenith. Impatient disciples such as Lenin and Mao summarily ignored this aspect of Marx, of course, taking barely post-feudal agrarian societies and violently yanking them to a version of a communistic society Marx never actually envisioned. Indeed, Marx never actually described the post-capitalistic society in any detail, arguing that it wasn't his job to "draw up recipes for the cookshops of the future." When asked who would shine shoes in a post-capitalist society, Marx replied (with tongue firmly in cheek), "You should."

Two of Marx's indelicate phrases -- "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "religion is the opiate of the masses" -- were writerly impertinences: in the former, he was describing what he saw as an inevitable temporary state of affairs as the institutions of capitalism violently came tumbling down, to wither away completely upon the emergence of a classless society; in the latter, he merely referred to the comfort workers take in worship when all else is drudgery. Although not religious himself, Marx did charitably observe, "We can forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child."

Marx's influence on the West, apart from the radical activities of party regulars, was to form the basis of a critique of the social superstructure, enabling the Western Left to trace the ideological roots of Western law, politics, literature and other institutions back to the economic structures on which they are based. To those who would argue, say, that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are autonomous embodiments of "liberty," Marx might say that this was a "false consciousness" and that the point of view fails to understand or acknowledge the ways in which those laws are designed to promote the economic status quo in the service of the ruling bourgeoisie.

Also essential to the Marxist critical arsenal was Marx's concept of "alienation," first articulated in his unpublished "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (1844) -- the notion that human beings are not "themselves" in a capitalist society in which they lose the full value of their labor, that they are not permitted to fulfill their full human potential. In Marx's view of alienation, those who continue to see Marx as a prescient thinker on economic issues -- one who would have been unsurprised by globalization, accounting scandals or the rise of Wal-Mart -- find a hopeful vision of a post-capitalist society in which humanity takes precedence over property.

Marx himself was, however, an abject slave and victim of capitalism -- always behind in his bills, relying on Engels' handouts, losing some of his children to illnesses of poverty. He died poor and relatively obscure on March 14, 1883 in London -- but at his funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels, at least, knew that his friend's name would not be forgotten.

Categories: Philosophy, Economics, Marxism

'Against Such Things There is No Law'

Marxist legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis was born on this date in 1891.

A Russian of Lithuanian parentage, Pashukanis joined the Bolsheviks in 1912, and following the Russian Revolution in 1917 became a leading writer in Soviet jurisprudence. Unlike other Soviet legal writers, however, who thought that pre-Revolutionary forms (i.e. laws and courts) could be adapted to serve the cause of the Revolution by changing the content of the laws and putting revolutionaries in positions of authority on the courts, Pashukanis' critique began with the radical view that the concept of "law" itself was an outgrowth of capitalist society -- a product of the capitalist's desire to protect property and dominate the proletariat -- and that in its highest evolution a post-capitalist society would see a "withering away" of the law in favor of new forms of social behavior and organization based on the absence of commodity fetishism, much like the "withering away of the state" proposed by Karl Marx himself.

Pashukanis' vision of a disappearance of laws echoes the brash optimism of a revolutionary from another period -- the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians, in which he writes: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us . . . Stand firm therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and don’t be entangled again with a yoke of bondage . . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law."
There is, of course, much that separates theoretical Christianity from theoretical Marxism -- but at the core of both Paul and Marx was a fervent belief in the better part of one's nature, unlocked within a new order of social relations, as well as a hopeful expectation of ethical expression that can only come from within, and not from an old set of rules.

Pashukanis' critique of the nature of legal authority was destined to be short-lived within the atmosphere of terror imposed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who gave lip service to Marxism as Pashukanis and the theorists saw it, but ruled as a despot. At the age of 46, Pashukanis was murdered by Stalin's secret police, and his writings were burned by the Soviets, only to reappear in translation in the 1950s.

Michel Foucault

Long after the cults of other 20th century French thinkers have faded here in the U.S., American academics still seem to love Michel Foucault, who was born on this day 79 years ago in Poitiers, France. Going out on a limb here, I'll guess that this has something to do with the fact that the historical, public ebb and flow of our Democratic institutions has given us a well-developed sense of injustice -- that, and we do love our conspiracy theories here. Although Foucault himself doesn't necessarily focus on such matters, his arsenal of critical weapons and predilection for piss-taking certainly have allowed us Americans to beat injustices and conspiracies with a stick.

A brilliant youth, Foucault entered the highly prestigious Ecole Normal Superieure in 1946 at a time when official France still required his homosexuality to be hidden from broad daylight. In the pressure-cooked environment of the ENS, Foucault developed an armor of argumentativeness, intellectual superiority and scorn for those who earnestly played by the rules, coupled with an obsession with suicide resulting in an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself in 1948.

Although he read philosophy voraciously, particularly Heidegger and Nietzsche, and studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem and Louis Althusser, he supplemented his education by immersing himself in psychology. After graduating in 1952, he taught at Lille and Uppsala and worked in a psychiatric hospital before publishing his first work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), in which he argued that the notion of "insanity" was a discursive tool used by authorities to categorize acceptable and unacceptable behavior (rather than an illness), and that insane asylums were depositories for excluding nonconformists (rather than treatment facilities).

In this first book, he established some themes that would dominate his subsequent work: writing beyond the genre of "philosophy," Foucault wrote about the history of thought, science, society and institutions with highly personal doses of irony, cynicism and wit (remnants, no doubt, from his old ENS suit of armor) to supplement his philosophic seriousness and skepticism, exploring the ways in which those who are in power cultivate distinctions within society -- dividing and conquering in the process -- and therein hide the mechanisms of their self-preservation.

His books The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) discussed the rationalization of practices which were ultimately used to control subjects within the domains of the physician and the state, respectively; and The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) examined the embeddedness of "organization" or "order" as a component of social knowledge and self-identification, and the limits of revolution as an effective device for change in the face of such organization.

Finally, his unfinished History of Sexuality (1978-87) revealed some of the aims of his later work, that he was less interested in articulating a theory of power than in providing opportunities for reexamining the "self," taking Nietzche's destruction of cause-and-effect and the notion of phenomena not having any intrinsic meaning as points of departure for crashing through the web of social relations which constitute the "self."

Foucault was often grouped with the Structuralists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss, because his arguments were based on the view that the world is only intelligible to humans because of the order they impose upon experiences. Although he personally campaigned for the same causes as the Marxist radicals (prison reform, gay rights, the student uprisings of 1968), he rejected Marxism for its strident scientific strains. In fact, he stubbornly refused to attach himself to "movements," as "movements" for him were themselves rationalized regimes for perhaps casting himself as intellectual victim.

Foucault, who died of AIDS-related complications on June 25, 1984, concealed the nature of his illness at the end (some would say, as a way of dismissing the relevance of biographical facts), and ironically died in the same hospital, once an insane asylum, that he had researched for Madness and Civilization.