Marcuse, "Political Preface 1966"

[Dave Monroe]

Selected selections from Herbert Marcuse, "Political Preface 1966," Eros
and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Botson: Beacon
Press, 1966 [1955]), pp. xi-xxv.

Written in Memory of Sophie Marcuse, 1901-1951 (dedication)

Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic,
even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced
industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of
progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction,
liberty and repression--in othre words, to learn the gay science (gaya
sciencia) of how to use the social wealth for shaping man's world in
accordance with his Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against
the purveyors of Death. (xi)

In the affluent society, the authorities are hardly forced to justify
their dominion.  They dliever the goods; they satisfy the sexual and the
aggressive energy of their subjects.  Like the unconscious, the
destructive power of which they so successfully represent, they are this
side of good and evil, and the principle of contradiction has no place
in their logic. (xi-xii)

As the affluence of society depends iuncreasingly on the uninterrupted
production of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of
destruction, the individuals have to be adapted to these requirements in
more than the traditional ways.  [e.g., "the 'economic whip,'" "the laws
and patriotism"] (xii)

Scientific management of instinctual needs has long since become a vital
factor in the reproduction of the system .... (xii)

Mass democracy provides the political paraphernalia for effectuating
this introjection of the Reality Principle; it not only permits the
people (up to a point) to choose their own masters ... it also allows
the masters to disappear behind trhe technological veil of the
productive and destructive apparatus which they control, and it conceals
the human (and material) costs of the benefits which it bestows upon
those who collaborate. (xiii)

It makes no sense to talk about liberation to free men--and we are free
if we do not belong to the oppressed minority.  And it makes no sense to
talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual
liberty than ever before.  But the truth is that this freedom and
satifaction are transforming the earth into hell.  The inferno is still
concentrated in certain faraway places: Vietnam, the Congo, South
Africa, and in the ghettos of the "affluent society" ... (xiii)

... man could avaoid the fate of a Welfare-Through-Welfare State only by
achieving a new starting point where he could reconstruct the productive
apparatus without that "innerworldy asceticism" which provided the
mental basis for domination and exploration.  This image of man was the
determinate negation of Nietzsche's superman; man intelligent enough and
healthy enough to dispense with all heros [sic] and heroic virtues, man
without the impulse to live dangerously, to meet the challenge; man with
the good conscience to make life an end-in-itself, to live in joy
without fear.  "Polymorphous sexuality" was the term I used to indicate
that the new direction of progress would depend completely on the
opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs:
to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.
(xiv-v)

The idea of such a new Reality Principle was based on teh assumption
that the material (technical) preconditions for its development were
either established, or could be established in teh advanced industrial
societies of our time. (xv)

When, in the more or less affluent societies, productivity has reached a
level at which the masses participate in its benefits, and at which the
opposition is effctively and democratically "contained," then the
conflict between master and slave is also effective contained.  Or
rather it has changed its social location.  It exists, anmd explodes, in
the revolt of the backwards countries against the intolerable heritage
of colonialism and its prolongation by neo-colonialism. (xv-i)

... the international proletariat would get its intellectual armor from
outside: the "lightning of thought" would strike the "naiven
Volksboden." (xvi) ["'You are perverting a great discovery to the uses
of commerce,' sez Thanatz," GR, V665]

Revolt against the false fathers, teachers, and heroes--solidarity with
the wretched of the earth: is there any 'organic" connection between the
two facets of the protest? (xvi)

The body against "the machine"--not against the mechanism ... but
against the machine which has taken over the mechanism: the political
machine, the corporate machine, the cultural and eduicational machine
which has welded blessing and curse into one rational whole.  The hole
has become too bog, its cohesion too strong, its functionong too
efficient--does the power of the negative concentrate in still partly
unconquered, primitive, elemental forces? ... --does guerilla warfare
define the revolution of our time? (xvii)

Historical backwardness may again become the histrical chance of turning
the wheel of progress to another direction.  technical and scientific
overdevelopment stands refuted when th radar-equipped bombers, teh
chemicals, and teh "special forces" of the affluent society are let
loose on the poorest of the earth .... (xvii)

The capacity to overkill and to overburn, and the mental behavior taht
goes with it are by-products of the devlopment of the productive forces
within a system of exploitation and repression; they seem to become more
productive the more comfortable the system becomes to its privileged
subjects.  The affluent society has now demonstrated that it is a
society at war .... (xvii-viii)

... there are photographs that show a row of half naked corpses laid out
for the victors in Vietnam: they resemble in all details the pictures of
the starved, emasculated corpses of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.  (xx)

It is not the striggle of Eros against Thanatos, because the
esatablished society too has its Eros .... (xx)

Can we speak of a juncture between the erotic and political dimension?
(xxi)

Perpetuation of the obsolescent need for full-time labor ... will
require the increasing waste of resources ... and the growth of the
military or destructive sector.  Escalated wars, permanent preparation
for war, and total administration ....  Technical progress ....
automation ... (xxii)

The system is at its weakest pint where it shows its most brutal
strength: in the escalation of its military potential .... (xxiv)

... the organized refusal to continue to ork on the material and
intellectuial instruments which are now being used against man ...
(xxiv-v)

... the beginning of the reversal ... (xxv)

... organization demands counter-organization.  Today the fight for
life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.  (xxv)