Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'roll

[Paul Nightingale]

> 
> Herbert Marcuse was far from pleased with what he saw of the sexual
> revolution, which his 50's writing  had seemed to promote.
> 
> He spends many pages  in One Dimensional Man (1964) talking about
> such things as repressive desublimation.
> 

In the 30s and 40s Marcuse was a member of the group known the Frankfurt
School, including Adorno, Benjamin and Reich. Adorno in particular adopted a
critical view of the 'culture industry', so called, within capitalist
societies: one of his essays compares popular music to automobiles coming
off the conveyor belt. Marcuse shared some of those concerns. In ODM he also
echoes the ideas of convergence theory, which argued that capitalist and
communist societies were gradually becoming alike in their dependence on
technology and bureaucratic structures (and communist societies would
necessarily become more like their capitalist counterparts). The cover of my
1972 pbk version of ODM includes praise from the Daily Mail, a right-wing
newspaper (to put it mildly). Marcuse isn't pro-revolution here, to put it
crudely, but pro-individualism.

Medovoi's essay simply describes the way sex and politics were linked
discursively.

And Cleaver ended up as a born-again Christian supporting Ol' Raygun in the
80s.