The Frankfurt School, its Racist & Anti-working class "revolution"

[Terrance]

In the Introduction to SL, Pynchon says that the revolution failed
because of the failure of intellectual whites to unite with the working
class.

They knew that Marcuse's analysis did not support the possibility or 
feasibility of a worker-student alliance.  Marcuse reinforced the 
anti-working class attitudes many students already had.  They knew 
that Marcuse supported personal and sexual liberation as a 
revolutionary strategy.  They knew that Marcuse supported lifestyle 
revolution through a revolutionary youth movement, instead of a 
classical Marxist proletarian revolution.

When I argued that we should be building a student movement that 
allied with workers and fought racism, they used Marcuse to disagree 
with me.

Soon Marcuse became a kind of media celebrity, the "guru of the 
hippies."  For a short period of time he was pretty famous.  The 
media held him partly responsible for the revolt against authority on 
the college campuses.  Their attack on him, of course, increased his 
stature and his "revolutionary" credentials among students.  As the 
media and the government attacked Marcuse, marijuana, and free love 
as subversive and revolutionary, more and more New Left 
"revolutionaries" came forward to advocate those things as the true 
path to revolution.

By the end of the 1960s it became clear to me that Marcuse and his
ideology had played a mainly harmful role in the radical movements of 
that decade.  Marcuse's defenders may reply that his analysis and 
theories were distorted by the media and misunderstood by his student 
followers.  There is some truth to that.  The media certainly did not 
explain his sophisticated blending of Marx and Freud, his analysis of 
Hegel, or his analysis of how advanced capitalism sought to transform 
the working class from an agent of revolution into a consumer/supporter 
of capitalism.

Still, the central core of Marcuse's ideas offered a left wing 
alternative to revolutionary Marxism.  Marcuse asserted that the 
working class was no longer a revolutionary force.  He argued that 
sexual liberation and withdrawal from consumer culture by young 
people were truly revolutionary strategies.  He appealed to a notion 
of revolution as selfish, self-indulgent individualism, not as 
collective discipline and selflessness.  He made no attempt to 
provide a serious analysis of racism or sexism as capitalist 
strategies to amass super-profits and divide the working class, so he 
never explained to young activists how crucial it was to fight racism 
and sexism.

To relatively privileged middle class white students Marcuse 
reinforced rather than challenged elitist attitudes, both with his 
anti-working class message and with the dense and esoteric language 
through which it was delivered.

The capitalist class needed Marcuse to prevent students and young 
intellectuals like myself from accepting revolutionary Marxism.  They 
needed him at a particular time when many students were looking for a 
revolutionary ideology and rebelling against the lies they had been 
taught.  Moore and Adorno could not have done what Marcuse did, 
because their anti-activist orientation made them unmarketable to 
radical activists in the late 1960s.  By the early 1970s, when the 
student movement had subsided, the ruling class no longer needed 
Marcuse, and his cachet rapidly faded.



http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/may99/msg00535.html