Category Archives: New Utopia

This is an extract from Enzo Traversos new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations official communism and Cold War anti-communism also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive lans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other isms of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately ambiguous word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its anatomy, one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the long nineteenth century, and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenins The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotskys Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenins State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marxs ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the laws of history. The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue dure of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the laws of history. But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of historical laws, the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 179394.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik coup. Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a conspiracy. In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an overthrowing or an uprising (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik coup is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different not to say antipodal but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes as in Kronstadt against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 191819, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism either social democratic or anarchist of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (191821), the collectivization of agriculture (193033), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (193638).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a betrayed revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies notably the peasantry and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices pogroms and massacres pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s collectivization and the purges in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalins violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

Stalinism was a revolution from above, a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a feudal exploitation of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes. Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serges assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalins USSR had become in his words an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count. But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of primitive capital accumulation.

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the midwife of history and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the wheel of history rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry inherited from Marxs writings on French Bonapartism as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian backwardness.

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry instead of the urban proletariat as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself.

The proclamation of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marxs death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the civilizing mission of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties particularly those located in the biggest empires postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which civilized Europe could and must act as tutor to barbarous Asia. Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of white European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSRs foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empires involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a human face.

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSRs foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under Franois Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavias social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was municipal socialism in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian red belt. In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of local, postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious and largely achieved goal of defending the principle of the free market against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a plan that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentiers role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its savage face, rediscovered the lan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a natural form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the alter-globalization movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm piling wreckage upon wreckage, in Walter Benjamins image, and which millions of people mistakenly called Progress? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a cold utopia.

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and memory flash up. Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

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We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History - Jacobin magazine

Dior has announced its decision to postpone indefinitely the launch of a new collaboration with Travis Scotts Cactus Jack.

In a statement shared with Womens Wear Daily on Tuesday, a rep for the French luxury housesaid the indefinite postponement was spurred by last months fatal Astroworld Festival in Scotts hometown of Houston. While fans have already been given a look at the collaborative pieces, the items werent expected to begin rolling out until next year.

Out of respect for everyone affected by the tragic events at Astroworld,Diorhas decided to postpone indefinitely the launch of products from the Cactus Jack collaboration originally intended to be included in its summer 2022 collection, a companyrep said.

Complex has reached out to a rep for Dior for additional comment and will update this post accordingly. The announcement of the indefinite postponement comesweeks after Anheuser-Busch said that its Cacti seltzer line with the Utopia artist was being discontinued.

Meanwhile, a source familiar with the Dior situation told Complex that the latest move marked a mutual decision made by both Dior and Travis Scott to postpone the upcoming collection due in Jan 22 with both parties working to reschedule the launch at a later date.

As reported earlier this month, 10 Astroworld Festival attendees (including eight on the evening of Nov. 5 and two more in subsequent days) have been determined by medical officials to have died from compression asphyxia.Also this month, a congressional committee started an investigation focused on Live Nations alleged role in the tragedy.

In his first interview since the Astroworld tragedy, Scott told Charlamagne Tha God that hes aiming tobecome a voice for the larger issue of concert safety moving forward.

I gotta step up and be a voice to just figure out [how] this doesnt happen in the future at shows, period, or figure out the bottom solution of whats going on and ensure peoples safety, he said in the interview, which debuted earlier this month.

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Dior Has Decided to Postpone Indefinitely the Launch of Collaboration With Travis Scott's Cactus Jack - Complex

In 1642, Abel Tasman, an experienced Dutch sailor and penchant for rough justice, was confident that in the southern hemisphere exists a vast continent and was determined to find it.

He believed that he had discovered the great southern continent, evidently, it was hardly the commercial utopia he had envisaged and then he did not return.

BBC reported that Tasman was right after all there was indeed an undiscovered continent.

A group of geologists had made headlines in 2017 for their announcement of discovering Zealandia Te Riu-a-Mui in the Mori language. It is a vast continent of 1.89 million sq miles (4.9 million sq km) it is around six times the size of Madagascar, the broadcaster reported.

According to theBBC report, the world's encyclopedias, maps, and search engines for some time were determined over the fact that there are only seven continents, butthe team confidently informed the world that this was wrong.

"There are eight after all and the latest addition breaks all the records, as the smallest, thinnest, and youngest in the world. The catch is that 94% of it is underwater, with just a handful of islands, such as New Zealand, thrusting out from its oceanic depths. It had been hiding in plain sight all along," BBC reported.

Andy Tulloch, a geologist at the New Zealand Crown Research Institute GNS Science, who was part of the team that discovered Zealandia, said: "This is an example of how something very obvious can take a while to uncover."

This all is just the begging as four years on, and the continent is as enigmatic as ever, it is guarded beneath6,560 ft (2km) of water, BBCreported.

According to geologists, Zealandia is a continent because of the kinds of rocks found there, despite that it is thin and is submerged. The ocean floor is more just made up ofigneous ones such as basalt. While the continental crust tends to be made up of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks like granite, schist and limestone.

According to the report, geologists find the eighth continent still very intriguing it's still not clear how Zealandia managed to stay together when it's so thin and not disintegrate into tiny micro-continents.

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After 375 years, scientists discover eighth continent - Geo News

New Year's resolutions are often dismissed as being vague, overly-ambitious delusions that are ultimately doomed to failure. But resolutions that involve tech? Well, they're a different story.

Whether you're planning to peel yourself off the sofa towards a new fitness goal, or build the ultimate hi-fi setup, our new series (running from Sunday December 26th to Sunday January 2nd) will show you how to fly through the January wastelands using your tech-based hoverboard.

Why tie your resolutions to tech? There are a couple of good reasons. Firstly, a popular strategy for building new habits is called 'temptation bundling'. In short, linking something you like (gadgets) to something you're less keen on (your resolution) is generally more sustainable in the long-run. Also, we're big fans of blaming our failures and shortcomings on inanimate objects.

But while Apple Watches, Chromebooks and air fryers can all be springboards to better habits (as we'll reveal in this series), new year's resolutions don't have to be about self-improvement. As our Senior Computing editor Matt Hanson convincingly argues in his commitment to doing more PC gaming in 2022, it's also a good time for tech-based self-care particularly after the year most of us have had.

So while our guides cover how to reach classic goals using tech like Nintendo's Ring Fit, ergonomic keyboards and Pikmin Bloom, we'll also explore the more self-indulgent resolutions our team is aiming for in 2022 like why it's finally a good time to invest in an LG OLED TV or lose yourself in VR.

Whether you're a fan of new year's resolutions or not, make sure to bookmark this page to discover how we're planning to use tech for the better in 2022 it might just spark some ideas on how to use your new Christmas presents.

Whether you've just unwrapped a new Chromebook over Christmas, or been wondering how to master your existing Chrome OS laptop, our guide will show you how to harness its talents and achieve 'poweruser' status.

In the computing equivalent of a couch-to-5K, we cover how to embrace the Chrome OS launcher, get the most out of tablet mode, and much more. You'll be setting productivity PBs in no time.

Forget health kicks it's your home music setup that needs to hit the gym in 2022. Not sure where to start? Our in-depth guide is here to help you plan your hi-fi system, from the choosing your source through to amplification and speakers.

This new year project doesn't have to cost thousands either we cover how to fold your existing kit into a delicious audio sponge cake, and top it off with the best cables, stands and wireless accessories.

We're rapidly moving towards that time of year when ordering takeaways becomes nigh-on impossible to resist but our Smart Home & Appliances Editor, Carrie-Ann Skinner, has pledged to beat the habit this year with a seemingly unlikely accessory.

Air fryers might not sound significantly healthier than your favorite local fried chicken wing haunt. But as you'll discover in this insightful ode to the increasingly popular kitchen staple, they are far healthier than deep frying, while also offering the speed needed to beat your takeaway habit.

Boosting your fitness is a new year's resolution staple, but some of the classic methods like gyms aren't available to everyone particularly if you're already struggling with injury.

In this personal account of why Nintendo Ring Fit's customizable adjustments make it the ideal fitness companion for those who have been struck down with injuries of all kinds, TechRadar's Gaming Editor Vic Hood reveals why it could be your exercise BFF in 2022.

New Year's fitness resolutions don't have to all be about HIIT workouts and ultra-marathons getting started with a daily walk is a fine start, and TechRadar's Senior Gaming Editor Adam Vjestica is aiming to reinvigorate his strolls with a healthy dash of gamification.

LikePokmon Go, Pikmin Bloom lets you grow a miniature army of followers, but also compels you to get outside by diarizing your walks in a charming, motivational fashion. You can even use it to record your mood each day, making it arguably the ultimate January survival tool.

While many of us are looking forward to spending our retirements in a Black Mirror-style VR utopia, TechRadar's Computing writer Jess Weatherbed has vowed get a head-start in 2022 by sinking some serious time into the Oculus Quest 2.

Sadly, it's probably not wise to spend 12 hours a day playing Beat Saber, which is why this excellent summary of the full range of VR experiences out there from social apps like VRChat to artistic workouts like Tilt Brush is the primer you need to help you maintain a healthy VR life this year.

It's the job that photographers and videographers put off the most: creating a secure backup system for all their photos and videos.

But whether you're a pro with a bulgingAdobe Lightroomlibrary or a hobbyist who relies onGoogle Photos, creating a photo backup is a New Year's resolution that's well worth making in 2022 and James Abbott's in-depth guide is here to show you how to do it.

Over the course of 2021, Josie Watson started getting fed up with her dependence on a phone. From doomscrolling through social media to apps incessantly blasting notifications designed to trap you into an endless cycle of personalized ads wedged between posts from school friends and family members showing off engagement photos, sharing pixelated unfunny memes, or bragging about their culinary skills.

Flash forward to Josie starting at TechRadar andusing a smartwatch to learn more about her anxiety. She soon realized these wearables were so much more than just a fancy timepiece.

We'll be publishing new features daily between Sunday December 26th and Sunday January 2nd so here, in order, are the ones to look forward to over the coming week.

See original here:

Tech Resolutions 2022: how to upgrade your year with life-boosting tech - TechRadar

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Its no secret cannabis retailers have upped their game. Its not just what they sell but how usually a combination of design, staff excellence, and overall vibe that make the best weed stores standout among the pack. Customers are taking notice and looking for more than just a place to buy their legal cannabis products: They want an experience.

With more states coming online legalizing recreational cannabis, we expect there will be more and more exciting retail options opening around the country. Until then, here's a look back atfive top stores Green Entrepreneur highlighted in 2021, from a luxury dispensary in Toronto to an all female- and black-owned outfit in Los Angeles.

RELATED:Are You Ready to BuyWeedAt theMall?

With the launch of their second store in Toronto, Edition is establishing itself as the go-to name for luxury cannabis in Canada. If your post-pandemic travel plans arent taking you north of the border, their e-commerce site features all their curated cannabis offerings and elegant accessories. But its at their retail locations the newest being Edition St Clair that customers can best appreciate Editions elegant design, impeccable service and specially mixed playlists.

The Ottawa dispensary is a technicolor, Willie Wonka-like stroll into a cannabis utopia. Part boardwalk carnival, part retro diner, and part cannabis store, Supretteis a joint venture between co-founders Mimi Lam and Drummond Munro. "This new store really shows the evolution of Superette as a brand and how we can continue to push the boundaries on our retail experience. From vintage diner to house of mirrors this customer journey will be unlike any other," says co-founder Drummond Munro.

Known for selling premium flower to stores across California, Wonderbrett opened its own storefront in Hollywood this year.The company was among the thousands to apply to receive a coveted SocialEquity Retail License from the L.A. Department of Cannabis Regulation.WIth hand-hewn oak beams and textured pattern herringbone wood floors., A-frame skylights,hand-pounded Indian metal light fixtures with Edison bulbs, and even an"Instagram Wall" meant for shareable photos, it's a concept befitting L.A.

RELATED:5 WaysCannabis RetailersCan Differentiate Themselves

For a band that lost its almost-mythical leader in 1995, the Grateful Dead will simply not fade away. And when devoted Deadhead David Ellison, founder of craft cannabis start-upScarlet Fire, wanted to put his passion for the band on display at his new retail store in Toronto, he called onSevenPoint Interiorsto make it happen. Having designed several eye-catching cannabis spaces since 2017, ran with Ellisons vision, developing a brand identity for Scarlet Fire and even creating a gallery for Ellisons personal collection of Dead memorabilia gathered over thirty years of fandom.The results arepositively trippy.

When you cant find what you want, build it yourself.Thats what Whitney Beatty and Ebony Andersen have done withJosephine & Billies, their new speakeasy-style dispensary in Los Angeles. The concept was created specifically for Women of Color and allies by Women of Color, the first of its kind in the country.

Inspired by tea pads that existed in Black communities in the 1920s and 1930s, the South L.A. spot is as much about community and education as it is selling cannabis products. Its alsothe first official investment from Jay-Zs The Parent Company, which launched a social equity corporate venture fund to help discover and develop the industrys future entrepreneurs of color.

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5 Top Weed Stores We Toured This Year - Green Entrepreneur

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Hows everyone doing? Because I am not great.

Just this morning alone, while reading through my inbox, I wrestled withdisappearing orcas,melting polar ice caps, climate-related natural disasters, and the fact that we cant get a federal bill passed that has even a little bit of foresight.

There is so much bad news.

I am languishing. Burned-out. Feeling both overwhelmed and ineffective at fighting the dread. And then pissed at myself for feeling exhausted. Who am I to take a break when things are this grim? I have friends who are COVID-ward doctors.

But pushing yourself through burnout leads to more burnout, and we cant be effective citizens, advocates, humans, or friends when were grounddown. We need respite.

Luckily, we can look to a whole range of cultures for ways to achieve that and find light in the dark season. There have always been bad things happening, and across the subarctic, some of the darkest countries in the world have December practices that date back far before Jesuss birth. They remind us to get off the train of sad news for a second, take a breath, reflect, and catch up on the year. Maybe evenread something good.

In other years I might have glossed over the idea of reflecting and slowing down. But currently Im feeling the need to pause before rushing into a new year, longer days, and new resolutions. I want to focus on individual stories other than the wave of news breaking in my face. Taking that space feels like a form of resilience.

If you, like me, are not great at getting to that place of reflection on your own, here are some books and films from the past year or so that can help. Ive arranged them by what they offered me: a sense of wonder, connection, and hope.

This years most talked-about piece of media (at least in the very exclusive pod of tastemakers that is my running group) was My Octopus Teacher. The film won the best-documentary Oscar for its portrayal of a South African divers fascination with one of these creatures. What could have been a treacly, top-down flick about a man forging a connection with an animal is instead a joyful take on how nature changes us if we take the time to pay attention.

If you want to stay in the realm of animal consciousness but are after something completely reliant on visuals, consider Gunda, directed by documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. Its a meditative, mesmerizing piece about the inner workings of barnyard life, shot completely in black and white, without any narration or talking. Come for the cute baby pigs, stay for the crisp, patient cinematography, which is so vivid that it almost gave me ASMR-level brain tingles.

Essayist Margaret Renkl, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, is a genius at pulling expansive metaphors out of the natural world. For instance, shell gracefully equate butterflies with democracy to get into why we should protect both. She wields such metaphors beautifully in her newest release, Graceland, at Last, which looks at the complexities of her home state. (If you want a similar book, I read that Renkl loves Ross Gays Book of Delights, a collection of daily essays that Gay wrote to focus on finding delight in his own life. Topics range from wildflowers to nicknames, and theyll inspire you to pay attention to your own small pleasures.)

Over the past few years there have been several booksdelving into the neural networks of trees and how these organisms communicate with each other. (This years highlight wasFinding the Mother Tree, by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who pioneered this field of research.) It felt like the subject matter was ripe for a high-definition movie, and this yearsThe Hidden Life of Treesa documentary based on the 2015 book of the same name by Peter Wohllebencaptures the interconnectedness of forests and the myriad ways humans impact that web in hyperrealistic detail. Its exactly the kind of thing to watch if you want to be reminded of the fact that the earth is bigger and smarter than us.

Last winter, pre-vaccine, post-insurgence, when things felt particularly grim, I picked up Wintering, Katherine Mays book about seasonality and how were biologically geared to need time to rest, especially in the outdoors. It felt like the answer to a question I didnt even know I was asking, about why I felt stressed out and disconnected from the natural world. Ive now reread it twice and gleaned new details each time, on everything from swimming to Stonehenge.

Creating a livable future isnt going to be easy, and in Believers, Lisa Wells confronts that head-on. She profiles renegade groups working on creative ways to face climate change, and she digs into the very human struggles that come from trying to build a utopia, or at least a new way of living. The results are gritty, vivid, and real.

I love Elizabeth Kolbert, but Id held off reading her newest book, Under a White Sky, because it felt like more bad news than I could bear. However, a friend recently convinced me that Kolberts pragmatic, forward-looking realism could help buoy me against my worst anxieties. Her account of the ways we might try to use engineering and innovation to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis showed me that although humans cant keep operating indefinitely as we are, we do have options on how to proceed.

Kolbert is one of my heroes, for the way she tells clear, multifaceted stories about the overwhelming, intractable nature of climate change. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is anothershe always seems to be at the forefront of realistic discussions about climate policy and action. Her bookSaving Usis less about climate science than it is about how to talk to people who think and feel differently than you do, which seems like a crucial thing to learn right now.

One of the only things that keeps me from descending into a pit of existential despair is that children and teenagers these days are so much more savvy and clear-eyed about the future than I ever could have imagined being at their age. Thats on full display in Youth V. Gov, a 2020 documentary about a wide-ranging group of kids across the U.S. who are suing the government for its failure to address climate change.

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Our Environmental Columnist's Anti-Burnout End-of-Year Reading and Watching List - Outside

This article isreprintedfromCatalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you cansubscribe to the print editionofCatalystfor just $20.

Few intellectuals have been so closely identified with a social movement as Herbert Marcuse was with the transatlantic New Left in the late 1960s. In 1966, the yearOne-Dimensional Manwas issued in paperback, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) included the book in their political education curriculum, alongside the works of C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, Paul A. Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Following its translation into German and Italian the next year, it quickly became recognized as a primary ideological source for young radicals in Europe, according to Hubert J. Erb in theAustin Statesmenin 1967. In the upheavals that rocked universities during the first half of 1968, Marcuse, the prophet of the New Left, was suddenly everywhere. Students in Berlin held a banner proclaiming Marx, Mao, Marcuse! an alliterative slogan more elaborately formulated by demonstrators in Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword! Although dismissed by most liberal critics and increasingly denounced by a motley chorus of conservatives, left sectarians, and Soviet apparatchiks,One-Dimensional Man maintained its position as the bible of the New Left through the end of the decade, providing, as American commentator Allen Graubard noted in 1968, a special philosophical vocabulary that graced New Left journals as if it were part of ordinary language.

This article aims to introduce and critically reevaluateOne-Dimensional Manfor todays socialists. We begin with the books enthusiastic reception within the New Left, capturing why and how it resonated with a generation of young activists in the 1960s. Marcuses resolute moral and political opposition to the destructive direction of late capitalist society helped resuscitate the sense that the status quo was unsustainable and change was urgent. Unfortunately, however, some of the books weakest aspects such as its offering as alternatives to the status quo various paths (cultural radicalism, new subjects of history, ultraleftism) that proved to be dead ends were often its greatest draws for its New Left readers, something Marcuse himself understood and resisted.

In important ways, the New Left missed core aspects of Marcuses critical project that are worth retrieving for today. We turn to reconstructing and evaluating Marcuses moral and materialist analysis of late capitalism. We lay out the philosophical basis for his critique and his insistence on the breadth and depth of the moral commitments to freedom, equality, happiness, reason, and peace undergirding socialist politics. We then examine Marcuses materialist social theory, which raised critical questions about the gap between socialist theory and social conditions in the affluent society that resonate in our own moment. Our interpretation emphasizes the overlooked degree to which the classical Marxism of the Second International provides the underpinnings ofOne-Dimensional Man. Marcuses materialist analyses of working-class integration through consumerism, a rising standard of living, and the culture industry aimed to explain capitalisms unexpected resilience and absorptive capacities.

It would ultimately be left both to Marcuses contemporaries Ralph Miliband and Andr Gorz and to todays socialists to draw out the political implications of Marcuses questions and method and to formulate a socialist strategy adequate to the advanced capitalist world. Though he insisted that the basic premises of Marxist social theory remained correct a distinct and underappreciated quality of the book a sense of futility with the theorys practical implications in the present, as well as fidelity to a vision of social change as total historical rupture, drew Marcuse to paint an imaginative but inadequate picture of his moment as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels proverbial night in which all cows are black, void of possibilities for radical social transformation.

There are, we suggest, two souls of Herbert Marcuse on the one hand, the critical and materialist; on the other, the moralistic and defeatist each with its own significance for todays activists. We close by suggesting thatOne-Dimensional Mans decline from its previous stardom may offer todays Left a chance to learn from its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings regarding commodified liberation, while leaving firmly in the past its political Manichaeism and culturalist despair.

Hebert Marcuse, a German-Jewish philosopher, lived a turbulent but scholarly life that hardly seemed to set him up to become a household name and father to a mass movement. He grew up in Berlin, and though he was politicized by the abortive German Revolution of 191819, he soon went to Freiburg to study philosophy under Martin Heidegger. (Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers council during the revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.) Blocked in mainstream German academic circles with the rise of Nazism, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) and, in the late 1930s, emigrated to the United States to teach at Columbia University. During World War II, Marcuse worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helping to guide the war effort against the Nazis. He eventually returned to teaching, first at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego, where he became a bte noire of the Right, facing the condemnation of then governor Ronald Reagan.

Among Marcuses major writings, his first book published in English,Reason and Revolution(1941), remains one of the best interpretations of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and an expression of the engaged philosophy that he would continue to champion throughout his career. His other most important works were:Eros and Civilization (1955), a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud that aimed to historicize modern psychology, investigate the psychic sources of domination, and articulate a utopia of fulfillment and sexual liberation; The Aesthetic Dimension(1978), which argued for the centrality of art, imagination, and sensuality to human emancipation; and, of course,One-Dimensional Man(published in 1964, but substantially finished in the late 50s), which is the subject of this article.

Indeed, it may seem especially surprising thatOne-Dimensional Man, widely regarded as abstruse and pessimistic in the extreme, should have become so deeply insinuated in the discourse of a mass movement. While Marcuse promised, in his preface, that his argument would vacillate between two contradictory hypotheses that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future and that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society One-Dimensional Manwas virtually silent on the second point, ultimately presenting a critical theory of society with no liberating tendencies capable of translating it into reality. Reviewers charged Marcuse with overlooking the obvious social ferment in American society at a time of escalating civil rights and antiwar militancy. Others excoriated Marcuse for characterizing the welfare state as a container of radical energies rather than an achievement by and for the working class. Although remarking that qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without, Marcuse even expressed skepticism toward the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. This great refusal to name possibilities in the present, this maddening tendency to see all apparent opposition as always already absorbed into and reinforcing the system, followed from the traditional materialist framework of Marcuses analysis, on the one hand, and the Luxemburgian quest for a total negation of the existing order a social force capable of breaking out of this whole on the other.

Ultimately, it is the depth of Marcuses quest for revolutionary rupture, and his insistence on its necessity, that accounts for the impact ofOne-Dimensional Manon the youth of affluent nations. Even if the book suggested that such a rupture was nowhere on the horizon, its account of the domination and repression subtly pervading advanced capitalist society confirmed the unarticulated observations of many newly politicized activists who were, moreover, enchanted by Marcuses expansive conception of liberation and his willingness to speculate about a utopian future. While the books departures from orthodox Marxism caused less shrewd critics to conclude that he had retreated into the realm of Hegelian idealism, the Marxologist George Lichtheim correctly recognizedOne-Dimensional Man, upon its release, as the introduction of Western Marxism to an American audience. To Lichtheim, the book was a portent of things to come, and, indeed, the few hopeful passages in the book seemed to anticipate the social unrest coming from exactly the groups Marcuse identified as those who form the human base of the social pyramid the outsiders and the poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions. Thus did Marcuses elegy for the revolutionary working class intensify an ongoing search for new subjects of world-historical transformation, despite his explicit warnings that no such subject existed.

It is sometimes said of Marcuse that the students who follow him havent the slightest idea what he means, theWashington Post observed in 1968. Initial reviewers cautioned, This is not an easy book, noting its difficult syntax and disquieting aporetic conclusions. The ambiguities ofOne-Dimensional Man are legion. Does Marcuses argument depend, as Alasdair MacIntyre charged, on a crude and unargued technological determinism? Is his technological order in fact a political-economic system or not? Does he describe class exploitation, or universal enslavement to the apparatus of domination? While oblique references to the particular interests that organize the apparatus evince a class analysis, much of the language in the book including its very title aligns with conventional mid-century humanistic discourse. Indeed, while it was possible for one reviewer to describe the book as decidedlynotjust one more journalistic work on the alienation of modern man, R.D. Laing, writing in the New Left Review, drew the opposite conclusion. Anticipating much of the books reception, Laing channeled what he took to be the lament at its core: Will man be able to re-invent himself in the face of this new form of dehumanization?

To Marcuses New Left interpreters, at least one point was unequivocal: the working classes were bought off, a conservative force, leaving, three SDS theorists wrote in 1965, virtually no legitimate places from which to launch a total opposition movement. Invoking Marcuse against calls like Bayard Rustins for a coalition politics anchored in the trade union movement, these activists looked beyond purportedly oppositional groups that had succumbed to the lures of parliamentarism and the welfare state, calling instead for a thoroughly democratic revolution led by the most oppressed those least captured by existing institutions. But while they looked to the urban poor (as opposed to the working class), by 1968, the search for a revolutionary subject that was carried out under the sign ofOne-Dimensional Man just as often led to college students, disaffected intellectuals, and the new working class of salaried technicians and professionals. Within SDS, opponents of the workerist proposals put forward by the Progressive Labor faction drew heavily on the ideas of Herbert Marcuse to support an approach to organizing groups outside the traditional, narrow industrial working class. In Europe, students cited Marcuse on behalf of their view of the university as a nexus of revolutionary power. For his part, Marcuse at times seemed to encourage this reading. When asked about the radical forces in the world in July 1968, he placed the intelligentsia, particularly the students at the top of the list, followed only by minorities in the ghetto. They alone not the working class resisted incorporation.

This turn away from the labor movement accompanied other shifts in perspective: from exploitation to alienation, and from class to consciousness, as the source of radical opposition. As one popular underground newspaper,Berkeley Barb, summarized the argument of One-Dimensional Manin May 1968, Only those groups on theoutside of automation and progress the unemployed, the blacks and minorities, the students think. Late-1960s enthusiasts of cultural revolution, such as Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, enlisted Marcuse in their Romantic attacks on consumerism and technology, dispensing with the materialist underpinnings of his analysis and, as Russell Jacoby noted, conflating his critique of instrumental reason with a subjectivist abandonment of reason itself. By a sleight of hand, Roszak cited Marcuse in order to unmask Marxism as the mirror image of bourgeois industrialism, guilty of the same soulless hyperrationality as the society it ostensibly opposes. For Reich, meanwhile, the totalizing ideology-critique inOne-Dimensional Man had demonstrated that the source of domination is not in the social relations of production but in consciousness, attitude, and lifestyle. Nobody wants inadequate housing and medical care only the machine, he explained:

Nobody wants war except the machine. And even businessmen, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in America. They are all fellow sufferers.

While it is true that Marcuse could hardly be held responsible for these depoliticized corruptions of his ideas, it is telling that he felt compelled to respond to them more than once.

In fact, Marcuses drift away fromOne-Dimensional Manbegan almost from the moment it landed on bookshelves, as he attempted, in one historians words, to break out of the theoretical box he had placed himself in with that book. Writing in theInternational Socialist Journal in 1965, he declared, The contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger, thereby guarding against the impression that advanced capitalism had achieved permanent stability. Speaking to leftist students in Berlin the following year, he waxed enthusiastic about the militant Liberation movements in the developing countries and picking up a theme that would become dominant for the rest of the decade the alienated youth of the affluent nations. By 1967, he had come to view the counterculture as representing a total rupture with the ideology of advanced capitalism, a force heralding a total trans-valuation of values, a new anthropology and the development of needs that the existing political and economic system could not satisfy. The student uprisings of 1968 reinforced Marcuses growing conviction that the only viable social revolution which stands today is the Youth and that the New Left today is the only hope we have. So profoundly did this belief in these groups emancipatory potential shift Marcuses social theory that his 1969 bookAn Essay on Liberationwas initially to be titled Beyond One-Dimensional Man. In the 1970s, even as he worried over the turn to the right (counterrevolution) in US politics, he would embrace ecology and especially the womens movement perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have as pointing the way to a qualitative break with capitalist society.

In the final analysis, however, Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory. The student movement, the hippie counterculture, the radical intelligentsia these werecatalystgroups with a preparatory function. Their task was not revolution, but radical enlightenment; lacking a mass character, they could at best move the broader population from false to oppositional consciousness. Their signal achievement was having called into question the prevailing structure of needs and freed imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason. Marcuse applauded the New Left but cautiously warned his readers not to overrate its significance. The rebellions in Paris in May 1968, while encouraging as a mass action, were not a revolution, and the American campus revolts of that season in no way changed the fact that the situation in the United States was not even pre-revolutionary. Even at his most utopian, Marcuse inserted escape clauses like the following:

By itself, this opposition cannot be regarded as agent of radical change; it can become such an agent only if it is sustained by a working class which is no longer the prisoner of its own integration and of a bureaucratic trade-union and party apparatus supporting this integration.

Although he insisted that the traditional idea of the revolution and the traditional strategy of the revolution had been surpassed by the development of . . . society, Marcuse confessed in 1968, In spite of everything that has been said, I still cannot imagine a revolution without the working class.

By the end of the 1960s, it was clear to Marcuse that while the Great Refusal he had predicted in the conclusion toOne-Dimensional Manhad materialized, it was bound to remain a mere gesture even a reactionary confusion of personal with social liberation if it could not reawaken the working class from its slumber. And yet he was extremely pessimistic about the development of revolutionary class consciousness in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). For this reason, he strongly condemned New Left intellectuals who sneered at the student movement and retreated into vulgar Marxism, declaring in 1970:

To a great extent it was the student movement in the United States which mobilized the opposition against the war in Vietnam. . . . That goes far beyond personal interest in fact, it is basically in contradiction to it and strikes at the heart of American imperialism. God knows it is not the fault of the students that the working class didnt participate. . . . Nothing is more un-bourgeois than the American student movement, while nothing is more bourgeois than the American worker.

Statements like this one hastened the death of late-1960s Marcuse-mania. Already in 1968, he was booed by students at the Free University of Berlin for inadequately affirming their excitement about the supposed fusion of Third World and proletarian revolutionary forces. A Revolution is waiting to be made, one disappointed former admirer complained, and he offers us California metaphysics. A study of campus bookstores conducted in late 1969 found thatOne-Dimensional Manhad been surpassed in sales by the works of Black Power militants, such as Eldridge CleaversSoul on IceandThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, and a string of paeans to cultural radicalism (RoszaksThe Making of a Counter Culture, Abbie HoffmansRevolution for the Hell of It, and LaingsThe Politics of Experience). Marcuses defense of the university, his willingness to condemn violence, his concerns about the anti-intellectualism that had infected the New Left, and his calls for organizational discipline in the years that followed further diminished his standing. Although more than 1,600 people turned out to see him speak at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 1971, many in the audience were dismayed by his failure to discuss the joyful possibilities of youth culture. I have always rejected the role of a father or grandfather of the movement, he told Psychology Today. I am not its spiritual adviser.

So, what exactly was Marcuses theory, as laid out inOne-Dimensional Man? How much was it a product of and subject to the limits of its time? What remains from the work? We will focus specifically on the social theory of the work, on which Marcuses ideology-critique of culture and philosophy rested, which was the books greatest influence and is most relevant for left-wing readers today.

One-Dimensional Man, most of all, is a resolute, unsparing, and honest depiction of a monstrous society, set for destruction, whose possibilities for change seemed far dwarfed by the forces of the status quo. The society Marcuse analyzed had more than enough technological ability to be decent and humane; instead, it teetered on the edge of destruction, preserved deep injustices, and relied on mass quiescence engineered by systematic manipulation. It was a sick, insane society that passed itself off as reasonable and orderly.

Marcuses call to radicalism rested on three main diagnoses of mid-century capitalism that have only shown signs of intensifying as the ruling class has tightened control:

One-Dimensional Man, then, offers the case for the continuing relevance of the Marxist critique of capitalism. But what about the theorys understanding of collective action and social change? If social change is so urgent, why is society characterized by such a muted opposition?One-Dimensional Mananswered by attempting to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse is insistent that an adequate explanation for working-class quiescence will have to be a materialist one. Something deep must have changed in the economy and society for mass consciousness to shift as it has. It is difficult to understand what that thing is, since the mid-century United States was surely still capitalist, characterized by the same injustices and systemic dynamics. Moreover, Marcuse treats as his point of departure what we might call the basic strategic formula of classical Marxism (broadly, from Marx and Friedrich Engels through the Second International and ending with the last attempts of international revolution of the early Third International), as the only rational theory for comprehensive social change.

That formula, more or less, runs as follows:

working-class majority + party + crisis = socialist revolution

The emerging working-class majority has particular structural advantages for exercising power, with their numbers, their concentration and accompanying capacity to organize, and the power of their strikes to shut down production and touch the powerful where it most hurts. These workers saw their basic survival, let alone their thriving, as fundamentally threatened by capitalism, and they had the power to tear it down. They needed to be organized into a political party, in order to intervene on the level of the state, to develop a consciousness that things could be different, and to formulate a strategy for how to get there. (Of course, precisely these kinds of mass working-class parties had developed all over the advanced capitalist world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Finally, the persistence (and possibly radicalization) of generalized capitalist crisis would afford opportunities for dramatic revolutionary change, in which a class-conscious party would lead the majority toward a new, truly democratic order. (This theory sometimes goes by the name of Kautskyism, after its authoritative expositor, Karl Kautsky, inThe Class Struggle(1892), The Road to Power (1909), and other works.)

Marcuse argued that the conclusion of the Marxist theory of social transformation still uniquely followed from the premises, but that those premises no longer applied to the world in any obvious way. Some sinister combination of defeat and partial victory had paralyzed politics.

The interesting task ofOne-Dimensional Man is that, though it accepts both the necessity of fundamental social change especially given the severity of the threat of nuclear war and the irrational destructiveness of the social order and the classical Marxist formula of how to get there, it argues that social change has undermined the latter without providing any alternative. (This was a common problem for many heterodox [ex-]Marxists at the time.) Its a work that admits to beingstuck in a way that was both intellectually forthright and so unsatisfying that Marcuse himself and especially his epigones would search for easy ways out to escape the dilemma.

Beyond describing these matters and giving force to the kind of impossible frustration they must cause in anyone who reflected on the matter, Marcuse also laid out a hypothesis as tohowthis had happened. Marcuse argues that it was precisely the accomplishments of the working class and their institutions in the face of the last crisis that were standing in the way of the further, necessary change. There is perhaps no more powerful analysis of the capacity of capitalist society to absorb opposition and commodify liberation thanOne-Dimensional Man. Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.Another way he had of expressing this was the intertwining of the perfection of the means of production and the means of destruction, pithily summarized in the juxtaposition of the welfare and warfare state. Social democracy was, in this view, the enemy of democratic socialism.

One of the main achievements of the working-class movement was its cutting off the logic of immiseration characteristic of the rise of capitalism and creating the power to extract profound concessions from capital in the form of high wages and the welfare state. (It should be noted that Marcuse seems at times to severely overestimate capitals ability and willingness to accede to these demands in the text.) This increased standard of living, Marcuse insisted, was a real achievement, and was not to be denied as the basis for any real conception of human freedom.

However, this achievement had, for Marcuse, a fundamentally depoliticizing effect in several ways. First, the rising standard of living itself produced a cooling effect. Revolution occurs when, among other things, a subordinate class sees the existing order as absolutely opposed to its life. People revolt for want of bread give them bread, and they dont revolt. By giving the working class something to lose besides its chains, and by eliminating total immiseration for the vast majority in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism had made systemic change less likely.

Consumerism, the form in which this rising standard of living is realized, also, Marcuse argues, blunts working-class politics. This is, first of all, for material reasons. Consumption is atomized, so that the modes of life that once brought working-class people together now help to drive them apart. Working-class popular culture is replaced by a commoditized mass culture. There is, too, an ideological analogue. The systems demonstrated ability to increase consumption is used to sideline any questions around lifes quality and meaning, the destructive externalities and militaristic uses of the production process, and the increasing concentration of control.

This changing standard of living was also based in changes in the labor process itself that, Marcuse argued, blunted opposition. Marcuse speaks of the mechanization of the production process increasingly relieving work of backbreaking destructiveness, as well as an increase in white-collar work and administration. These diminish the strength of the opposition of the worker to the capitalist and also diminish the leverage of workers. Again, these changes have an ideological analogue: the machine seems to play a role in production independent of any particular capitalist it appears merely as the product of reason itself, and thus relatively uncontestable.

Finally, there was an overt trade-off between the satisfaction of needs and autonomy. (This is the best way to understand his characterization of false needs versus true needs.) The labor movement more or less gave up contestation over the prerogatives of management, ceding control of the production process; in exchange, it got greater wages and benefits. Marcuse saw this trade-off on the factory floor as the microcosm of a larger social transformation. Privacy and the freedom to criticize were being hemmed in on all sides. But the offer of greater prosperity and security quashed opposition. This is the basis for Marcuses use of the word totalitarian to refer to liberal-democratic capitalist societies just as much as Nazi or Soviet ones.

Advanced capitalist society delivers the goods to the majority, making questioning and attempting to change the irrational system itself seem totally unreasonable.In some ways, Marcuse simply updated for the advanced industrial world the criticism of Juvenal against the bread and circuses of Rome. Even as capitalism increased the power of the ruling class, exposed individuals to systematic and many-sided manipulation, and condemned the vast majority to alienated work and a still-significant minority to poverty, it also offered a two-car garage and spectacular entertainment. The most powerful and hard-to-counter ideology of the period was built on that basis things are the way they are because technology and prosperity say so.

Thus, Marcuse provides a materialist theory of working-class integration through the rise in the standard of living (capitalism delivers the goods), the changing structure of occupations, and the atomization of the class through consumption. (Indeed, in classic Marxian fashion, it is the workers themselves who produce their own integration and subjugation. That is, it is ultimately their labor, their social action, and even now their consumption that reproduces the conditions of their own comfortable and bland unfreedom.) On top of these mechanisms are built a cultural totality that increasingly invades individual experience. Capitalist mass culture, due to its corporate structure, fundamentally sifts out information necessary for working-class people to get a bearing on how society works and overwhelms the individual with distractions and entertainment. Socialization through mass institutions such as the media reinforces the obstacles toward social change that shifts in capitalist production and the partial victories of social democracy erected.

Some of Marcuses insights have become common sense on the Left. For instance, that corporate media systematically narrows the scope of political contestation is the raison dtre for todays growing left media ecosystem, both independent and through established channels. We know that it is part of our fundamental task to expose how opposition parties are anything but when it comes to the sanctity of profits, the blind faith in technologys ability to solve social problems, and militarism.

There are other insights that seem fresh and alive and worth recovering in light of some of the theoretical problems todays socialists face. The reorientation of the Left around a program of class-struggle social democracy has allowed it to finally grow and engage with political reality. Marcuse at his best made normative, analytic, and strategic contributions that are worth revisiting in this context.

Let us begin with the normative. One of the freshest aspects ofOne-Dimensional Mantoday is its attempt to wed the critique of inequality with critiques of unfreedom, systemic irrationality, and destructiveness. Todays Left has rightly restored obscene inequality and redistribution to the center of its politics, thereby broadening its base and concentrating its efforts. Still, Marcuse pushes us to remain expansive in our indictment of capitalism by discussing forthrightly aspects of the good life that it denies most individuals. Our societys degradation of the natural world, everyday cruelty and meanness, trivial intellectual culture, boredom, depression, and puritanical preening are not incidental to our criticism but form a core plank of it. Politics and philosophy ought to clarify, not deny, the ordinary ways in which people express their happiness and dissatisfaction. This is a deeply sick society that denies important and ordinary goods to most human beings liberty, love, satisfaction, security, peace and it is rational to rebel against it.

Moreover, in cases where the normative and the practical-political are in some tension, we should admit the difficulty rather than elide it. It can be too easy to neglect the most fundamental issues of our, as Noam Chomsky puts it, race to the precipice nuclear weapons and climate change because they are related in only mediated, complex ways to economic interests. There is a temptation to either engage in empty moral gestures or push the problem aside to a later day. But the difficulty in formulating a concrete strategy around these issues is no excuse. Serious moral thinking and serious political economy must be joined.

Second, Marcuse offers analytic resources for considering what should be the central problem of the day: the separation of the working class from radical consciousness. Much like in the period of the New Left, the Left in the advanced capitalist world is still relatively isolated among the highly educated, despite wide popular appeals of a left-wing economic program. Marcuse both foregrounds the centrality of this question for any radical political strategy and offers a materialist method for analyzing the problem. He began with an analysis of changing class composition to understand the limits of oppositional politics with a narrow base since, however much he welcomed the New Left, he insisted that no fundamental transformation would occur without overcoming obstacles to working-class radicalism. He then offered an intriguing and still relevant hypothesis: that capitalist consumerism integrates through atomizing the neighborhoods, leisure, and general experience of working-class people. The intellectual task for todays Left is to size up the sources of working-class atomization at work and at home, and to approach these obstacles as organizers.

And while hardly an immediate problem, Marcuses analysis of how partial victory can paralyze oppositional forces, and how a high level of capitalist development turned out to mean a low level of revolutionary potential, are absolutely essential for the Lefts long-term strategic perspective. It bears repeating that todays Left should begin with the analysis of a relatively stable capitalism due to the near elimination of starvation in the advanced capitalist world and the spread of democratic and activist states. Furthermore, the Left should be ready for both severe defeat and partial incorporation. Are there ways that the Left can anticipate these plausible paths and prepare for them? Already, the increasing will to organize on the Left remarkably well-developed since the Occupy Wall Street days is a good sign, as organization is essential for maintaining continuity between high and low points of struggle. The rise of member-based organizations with vibrant internal cultures is again a promising development. Most of all, the Left needs to fight for structural reforms that increase the capacity to mobilize in the future and to find ways to plausibly resist the urge to demobilize with victories.

Yet Marcuse also articulated a form of defeatism that has plagued the Left of the advanced capitalist world. Marcuses liberatory and socialist message was largely abandoned and repressed with the defeats of the New Left, but his doubts as to thepossibilityof majoritarian left politics became the common sense of the New Left and the elite liberalism that would follow.

Critics of the strain of gloomy mid-century social theory Marcuse exemplifies often point to how wildly inaccurate the portrait of a fundamentally static world turned out to be. High growth rates, proportional wage growth, high unionization, and more were hardly permanent. But Marcuse was certainly not alone in failing to accurately predict how far we could fall backward. Some variation on the theory of state capitalism was widely held at the time. Everyone missed the possibility of a strong revanchist turn to a seemingly permanently discredited laissez-faire liberalism.

More problematic is Marcuses obfuscation of class theory. On the one hand, Marcuse depicts a society ruled by the few, which the vast majority has an interest in changing. As we mentioned, he continually returned to the necessity for working-class action in order to change society. On the other hand, when describing the various mediations that interpose themselves between this basic sociological analysis and late capitalism, he frequently presumes what he ought to prove that working-class people have been not only effectively adjusted to but have even happily embraced their position in late capitalism. He presumes that the modal consciousness in advanced capitalist society is working-class consent rather than resignation. This has significant consequences for the theory and for organizing. Resignation is a different habit of mind to break through for organizers, which requires different tools than how one might approach the converted.

Some of Marcuses contemporaries noted the illicit presumption of working-class enthusiasm for the social order of the day and its quietist implications. InOne-Dimensional Man, Marcuse cites a pamphlet by the Trotskyist Marxist-humanists on automation and speedup in Detroit, among other studies on the mechanization of the production process and the bonding of workers to the machine. Yet Raya Dunayevskaya, in her review ofOne-Dimensional Manin theActivist, would write that Marcuse leaves out entirely the central point of the pamphlet, thedivision between the rank and file and the labor leadership in their attitudes toward Automation. Marcuse supplemented references to this pamphlet with many references to bourgeois studies which maintain the exact opposite; Marcuse has [failed] to hear this powerful oppositional voice at the point of production itself, and instead chosen to listen to authors who claim that workers have been incorporated; he is wrong to adhere to the view that the new forms of control have indeed succeeded in containing workers revolt. Even as Marcuse plausibly pointed to the change in workers situations as being enough to present fundamental problems for a theory of social change golden chains are less likely to produce revolutionaries he less plausibly claimed that the overall reaction to this situation mostly eliminated tension, dissatisfaction, and opposition rooted in the production process, between workers and their bosses. Though he would insist that the underlying conflict of interests remained, the gap between imputed and actual interests threatened to become an abyss.

This provided a basis for New Left activists inspired by his works to reach the conclusion he refused to countenance, that there could be a socialist politics that somehow occurred independent of working-class radicalization. The cultural turn, with its overvaluation of interventions into culture and the discourse and the increasing orientation to middle-class concerns that this implied was both a plausible implication of Marcuses pessimism about integration and at the same time a conclusion he had to refuse given the critical theory of capitalist society. The theory also seemed to countenance a never-ending search for actors who were too marginalized to be incorporated into the system, less because of the moral importance of the flourishing of every human being than the conceit that, there, one might find the real revolutionaries. Both these trends are in no way immune to the commodification of opposition characteristic of late capitalist politics that Marcuse himself analyzed.

Moreover, Marcuses presumption about the form of political change necessary does not seem to have been subjected to the same critical consideration he insisted on applying to the working class. This vision of revolution is nobly related to the barricades of Marcuses youth in the betrayed German Revolution. Yet it is also rather all-or-nothing. The intransigent anti-capitalist consciousness that demanded the narrow debate of the period be burst open also threatened to lead to a kind of apolitical idealism.

This is, again, not unique to Marcuse the severity of the chasm between the Second and Third International was real enough to facilitate the rise of Nazism. And Marcuse was severely critical of the parties or sects of the Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals. But the weakness of the vision of social change in the idea of the Great Refusal is related to Marcuses dismissive criticism of the parliamentary participation of the Italian and French communist parties (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI and Parti communiste franaism, PCF) and silence on the civil rights movement. Marcuse had little hope that participation in liberal democratic politics or the achievement of significant reforms could meaningfully shift the dynamics of the system overall (and the totality of the system is what mattered, in the final analysis). He only saw how they served to further integrate the working class into an increasingly powerful system, handicapping opposition before it could really get off the ground.

This led generally to anovervaluationof subjective radicalism and anundervaluationof objective transformation. The hope Marcuse placed in the New Left was that their cultural subversion, aesthetic sense, demand for a less narrow and repressed life, and expanded sense of need could flow over into demand for a transformation of the basic structures of social life, especially the economy. et he seemed to have very little hope that mass politics focused on redistribution could overflowitsboundaries in the other direction.

Yet this was hardly the only conclusion one might reach from his premises. Starting from the premises that the working class of the advanced capitalist world was not likely to lead an insurrection, especially given its higher standard of living, while all the same it continued to suffer from alienation, exploitation, inadequate public investment, and diminished democracy, other theorists looked to develop a political strategy on these grounds that did not presume the same subjective integration that Marcuse did. Andr Gorz in France, influenced by the Left of the trade union movement in Italy, introduced in hisStrategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal the idea of non-reformist reforms aggressive measures that took on capitals prerogatives, built the capacity of labor, and addressed the wide range of needs that were unmet by advanced capitalist societies as a path forward for the Left. Ralph Miliband in Britain would underscore the importance of this idea for a socialist strategy adequate to the fact that no advanced capitalist state had ever collapsed and that revolutionary dictatorships had hardly proved fertile ground for socialist democracies. Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington in the United States insisted that mass politics oriented toward (removing conservative obstacles to) expanding a hobbled American social democracy could spill over into fundamental system change. These theorists suggested that the causal arrow could, and indeed must, move the other way, from political action to a deepening of revolutionary consciousness.

We have said that there are two souls of critical theory in Herbert Marcuse. On the one hand, there are roots of what has become a sort of common sense among some of todays liberals (however little they would be able to trace this to the Frankfurt School): the replacement of interest-based politics by ethics, self-expression, and identity; of class organization by cultural contestation; of majoritarian aspiration by elite pose. This is the long-standing tendency on the Left to flee the dilemmas of organizing a working-class majority in the advanced capitalist world, which is understandable but not tenable. On the other, there is the attempt to preserve and develop a socialist strategy adequate to the transformations of contemporary society mass politics, the welfare state, the further application of technology to production, and mass media. Indefatigably critical, morally expansive, and analytically materialist, it forthrightly analyzes, and then seeks to overcome, new obstacles to organizing a working-class majority to press for a transition to a new society.

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What Herbert Marcuse Got Right and Wrong - Jacobin magazine

ENDLESS CINEMATIC REMAKES and sequels, nostalgic TV shows like Stranger Things, music that sounds like it was made 40 years ago but just came out yesterday, social media accounts devoted to 80s iconography these cultural staples signal our collective desire to grab onto comforting, seemingly stable aspects of the past in the face of a vertiginously perpetual present and a future that feels precarious. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner explores how we might look back not in order to freeze-frame a false, glossed-over past, but to envision other futures.

In his previous book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech (2020), Tanner explored digital utopianism and nostalgia for a pre-digital era as two related conditions of our time. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, when old prejudices are starting again to percolate into the present, he argued, Big Techs algorithms resist any attempt to exit the feedback loop of amnesia. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Tanner deepens this exploration of the politics of progress, citing ways in which nostalgia circulates in our culture both innocuously and destructively, from retro-themed consumer goods to social media meme accounts to political slogans like Donald Trumps promise to Make America Great Again.

Like all complicated emotions and most things that make us human, nostalgia is a contradictory and slippery phenomenon. Paradoxically, ideologies of progress actually proliferate cultural nostalgia: Tanner illuminates the sneaky ways our very human need to look back and yearn for a time before this one (imaginary or not) gets exploited, mutated, and used against us by Big Tech. Mixing personal history and anecdote with political theory, Tanner wonders how we might learn to live productively with nostalgia:

For too long, nostalgia has gotten a bad rap. Thats primarily because its been spread by political leaders to win votes and commodified by corporations to sell products. The attributes we commonly associate with nostalgia kitsch, backwardness, gross sentimentality are really just the products of its exploitation. Its often maligned due to its association with conservatism, but nostalgia isnt essentially reactionary or backwards. Its just been weaponized more frequently to carry out questionable, at times undemocratic, missions.

Its all fucking nostalgia. Its the only way they can get through the day, says Bod, a character in Derek Jarmans 1978 film, Jubilee, as someone inscribes the word LOVE on her back with a knife while someone else kisses a television while watching a punk band perform. This short scene, set around the time the punks affirmed No Future, features a pyromaniac who wants to burn the past and foretells our current temporal crisis. Nostalgia, a word whose etymological roots are to return home and pain or suffering, can be both destructive and productive, paralytic and radical a way to get through the day, to find a hold in a rootless-feeling whir of clicks and scrolls. Nostalgia can sneakily pave over the past, yet it also contains the emotional force necessary to rupture the paved-over present of neoliberal capitalism, making space for other visions of the future through flashbacks and painful desires for change.

Social media algorithms are also nostalgorithms, Tanner tells us, looping back slices of the past along with more of whatever weve previously been engaged with. The question becomes: How can we envision a future when glossy pasts repeat on feedback loops? Newness exists, but its not frontloaded. As Tanner writes, [A] future predicted by algorithms will remain stuck in the past. Things repeat, says Tanner, because decision-making is being outsourced to algorithms that rely on past data to predict the future. But predictive algorithms dont really predict anything, they just make certain pasts repeatedly go viral. While the past is thus mutated, the future seems foreclosed. We get stuck in a strange loop thats getting smaller all the time:

Part of the reason why memes and discourses have such short lives is because social media prompts users to constantly historicize the present, to archive events immediately after they happen by freezing them in posts online, thus closing the gap between experience and its memory. With social media, you can yearn for yesterday literally. Frozen into data, posts and content can be called up at whim, instead of merely forgotten. Before the age of Big Tech, nostalgic cycles were wider.

Gaps between what we experience and the memory of that experience are crucial. These gaps provide temporal grounding and perspective. Forgetting and loss happen in these gaps, pieces of the experience fall away in the dissolves that are part of human memory. What does it mean to be human during increasingly technological times? To be confronted by the technologies weve made, which now make us? To locate spaces of recollection and loss in times of digital recall when, as Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life (2014), loss itself is lost?

In the dystopian landscape of the 1982 film Blade Runner, humans use technology to enslave rather than liberate. The importance of memory is central to android Roy Battys famous monologue, delivered as he dies: hes mourning those memories that will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Memorys messy processes of accrual and loss, dissolution and return, and the duration necessary for those processes to work, help us to mark time. As Tanner shows, this closing of the gap between experience and memory is disorienting, knocking time out of joint in a sea of data, constant calculation, and flexibility/precarity. [M]emory is not what is recalled; it is rather that which returns, writes David Rodowick in Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (1997). As humans, we need wide and unfilled gaps to mourn the past and find traction in the present, where memories might return rather than reappear instantly.

Big Techs algorithms, combined with the whizzing and fragmented way we experience history and time under digitized late capitalism, result in turbo-speed loops of nostalgia. We can be nostalgic for a year ago, for yesterday, for any number of glossed-over pasts that pop up on our feed. In a present that can feel rootless, teeming with hyperlinks and economic and emotional precarity, we turn to the past for stability, rootedness. This turning-back isnt the problem, says Tanner; its more an issue of how. Throughout the book, he draws on the two kinds of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym identifies in The Future of Nostalgia (2001): reflective nostalgia, which is generally more harmless, looks back at a moment in time and yearns, while restorative nostalgia, often destructively deployed in political and entertainment spheres, aims to recreate a moment in history. Continually highlighting nostalgias ungraspable fluidity, Tanner notes that even Boym claims her categories are not absolute and that reflective and restorative nostalgias may overlap or bleed into each other. Emotions are messy.

In a section entitled You Are Now Entering Nowhere, Tanner describes Georgia State Route 316, which funnels commuters who live in Atlanta and work at the university into the small city of Athens. On Route 316, as with so many other non-places, [t]heres no way to really know where you are. According to Marc Aug, non-places are transit points and temporary abodes that proliferate under late capitalism: malls, screens, airports, train stations. Tanner cites social media as a kind of virtual non-place, pointing out that, whether were zooming down a nondescript highway or scrolling through Instagram, we may yearn for whats been smoothed over by capital, for whats been deracinated by constant movement, clicking, and scrolling.

In her 1990 essay On Art and Artists, Kathy Acker wrote that Culture is one way by which a community attempts to bring its past up out of senselessness and to find in dream and imagination possibilities for action. When culture isnt this, theres something wrong in the community, the society. In Tanners book, this diagnosis might also be a cure. Writing that nostalgia can inspire social change in ways other emotions cannot, Tanner compellingly proposes a radical nostalgia that can perhaps create space for what Acker says a healthy culture must do. Radical nostalgia might act as a stop cord, halting what Walter Benjamin called the storm of progress in order to widen the gap between experience and memory so that we can envision something new.

It makes sense, Tanner reminds us, that we yearn to escape to the past or the woods or wherever in anesthetizing times when humans get reduced to data. Perhaps the pain/suffering portion of nostalgias etymological roots is instructive here. In his 2020 book The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han argues that our society values information over knowledge, but information lacks the negativity of transformation and radical change only arrives through pain: Without pain, it is impossible to produce that kind of knowledge which radically breaks with the past. [] The negativity of pain is constitutive of thought. Pain is what distinguishes thinking from calculating.

Nostalgia cant be cured, as Tanner reminds us. So, we have to live with its pains and yearnings, which point to our human lack a lack that cannot be filled with content, consumer goods, or information. Indeed, to relate to the lack and break from the past, we need to regard the wreckage, to experience pain so that we can think and feel the incommensurability of nostalgia and other complex emotions, unhooking them from anesthetizing market forces. Like Mark Fisher, who argued for a new politics of mental health organized around the concept of public space against capitalisms tendency toward the privatisation of stress, Tanners book importantly invites a political and collective concept of nostalgia.

Because nostalgia has, as Tanner writes, the emotional power to conjure up the potentials of the past that are constantly being paved over by capital, it can serve as a kind of reawakening. As he points out, progressive politics have long been associated with looking forward, conservative politics with looking back. This is an outdated and false binary. There are many ways to look back/forward. Under neoliberal capitalism, with its pervasive ideologies of promise, progress, and optimization, radical nostalgia might help us to imagine a more habitable present.

Radical comes from the Latin for root. To pull from the root, to get to the source of a problem, requires time and commitment. We have a right to our roots, which nurture us and keep us grounded, Tanner writes. However, capitalism tears up these roots and then tells the rootless that staying put will hinder their ability to compete for a job. Indeed, late capitalisms atomized economy of entrepreneurialism, which extols the virtues of flexibility and mobility, is also an economy of precarity that fetishizes nimbleness and side hustles. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul, wrote Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (1949). Might we find rootedness in the puncture of radical nostalgia, opening up possibilities for the negative space of thought, as opposed to the mere accrual of information, data, and false promises?

In the books moving conclusion, Tanner notes that, as humans, we are irreducible to data, variables, and parameters, even though worshippers of technology like to think otherwise. When we try to fit a complex emotion such as nostalgia into calculable or clear-cut categories free of contradiction, we delete thought. Tracking nostalgia as an emotion, as well as the myriad ways in which that emotion gets mobilized and mutated by conservative and progressive forces, Tanner offers an illuminating examination of our now. What would happen if we were to refuse both technological utopianism and conservative, restorative nostalgia? To refuse both a calculative nostalgia that marginalizes past, present, and future and slick promise-oriented narratives that claim wholeness? To exit the loop and embrace the lack?

Emmalea Russois a writer living at the Jersey shore. Her booksareG(2018) andWave Archive(2019). Her recent writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and SF MOMAs Open Space. She is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and she edits Asphalte Magazine.

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Imagining a More Habitable Present: On Grafton Tanner's The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia - lareviewofbooks

Despite its pathetic fatuity, the assault on the Capitol vividly highlighted the depths of alienation that afflicted tens of millions of citizens. To a striking degree, Americans had become distrustful people, with scant confidence in their institutions and waning trust in each other. As those grievously disaffected malcontents continued to stew in their resentments, delusions and disappointments, they sought ever more aggressive challenges to the norms, values and institutions that had sustained the republic for more than two centuries. A tribal political culture had emerged, polarizing the electorate and paralyzing the political system.

And even as the federal governments successful promotion of unprecedentedly rapid vaccine development impressively demonstrated the awesome capacity of the modern state to marshal financial, human and scientific resources at scales and velocities once unimaginable when political will could be mustered and focused vaccine refusers no less impressively demonstrated the degree to which plain old irrationality could torpedo even the most beneficially enlightened policies.

Meanwhile, as Americans continued to squander their dwindling stock of social capital, and struggled to sustain an effective government of, by and for the people, on the other side of the planet, an ascendant China, repressive but remarkably resilient, was relentlessly demonstrating the efficacy of a radically different kind of social and political order.

Two societies, two systems of governance, two visions of the world ahead. Which would prevail as the 21st century unspooled was a question that lay uncomfortably and urgently in the lap of the future.

Claire Bond Potter is professor of historical studies at The New School for Social Research and co-executive editor at Public Seminar.

In 2021, Americans learned that schools were critical to a United States economic infrastructure that was underprepared and unready for a national crisis. Every school onsite or online became both a public health project and a political target. School board meetings became politicized and angry, and elections to those bodies suddenly became hot contests. As the nations instructors, students, parents and school administrators navigated in-person Covid-19 protocols and emergency online learning, school boards, librarians, administrators and teachers were bombarded with revived demands, often driven by political operatives, that subversive teaching materials about race, gender and sexuality be purged from classrooms.

What did Americans learn? When parents became remote or essential workers, they were also expected to be teachers aides, revealing that underfunded schools were a critical component of an equally underfunded, and understaffed, American childcare system. When students appeared in class erratically, often on mobile phones, the country learned it had vast internet deserts, affecting millions of Americans ability to fully participate in society. It learned that many public school students, and presumably their parents, were so loosely attached to the educational system that an estimated 3 million simply disappeared. When teachers, already exhausted from 2020, quit or retired in record numbers (Florida, a state hammered by both Covid-19 and the culture wars, saw vacancies increase by more than 67 percent), the nation learned that school personnel were frontline workers, too. In 2021, Americans learned that what used to be the best school system in the world had bent and broken under a cultural and public health crisis and that it was crucial infrastructure that had to be systematically rebuilt.

Catherine Ceniza Choy is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book Asian American Histories of the United States (2022) and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

The racial and medical scapegoating of immigrant and U.S.-born Asian Americans, the fastest-growing group of all racial and ethnic groups in the early 21st century, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic persisted in 2021. According to the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center, between March 19, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021, nearly 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experienced verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault and/or civil rights violations. Although Filipino nurses comprised just 4 percent of the U.S. nursing workforce, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of Covid-19 cases and deaths among nurses. Tragically, Asian American contributions to health care did not make them immune to coronavirus-related harassment and violence. Age-old stereotypes of Asians as disease carriers, perpetual foreigners and exotic objects were tenacious and deadly. These hate incidents and the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, which resulted in eight lives lost, six of whom were Asian American women, challenged cherished notions of the American dream and its promise of equality and upward social mobility. Asian Americans reckoned with contemporary anti-Asian violence and its longer history by organizing to raise awareness of their over 150-year-old presence and unrecognized contributions. Activists relied on existing Asian American advocacy organizations as well as created new ones. Artists and scholars documented loss, grief and survival so that we would never forget.

David W. Blight is Sterling professor of history at Yale and the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Behold, I have put my words in your mouth to pluck up and to breakDown, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Jeremiah 1:9-10

The year 2021 was remembered most vividly by its first month, in which a sitting president and his allies, including within Congress, attempted a coup against the United States government by trying to overturn an election and install the defeated Donald J. Trump instead of the duly elected Joseph R. Biden. The unprecedented, violent insurrection of Jan. 6 prompted the second impeachment, and eventual partisan acquittal, of Trump. In the long run, however, the coup began to succeed by failing, morphing into a potent Lost Cause ideology that millions clung to as a victory narrative a victory over liberalism and pluralism. A right-wing authoritarianism, increasingly prone to violence, craved a hopeless utopia without multiculturalism and rooted securely in local or state control.

2021 would be remembered as the year of a calming yet stymied Biden presidency, hamstrung by the Covid pandemic, by the withdrawal from Afghanistan and by divisions in his own party embodied in a senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who saved his patriotism for his own state. The Biden presidency was also thwarted by a virulent new neo-fascism embedded in a Republican party openly devoted to voter suppression, racism, states rights, tax cuts, investment portfolio enhancement and one of modern historys most pathetic yet successful Big Lies. The stolen election of 2020, Trumpisms most potent lie, thrived by sheer dint of its repeated uttering on Fox News. Political polarization, between completely separate information systems organized along ideological lines, morphed by the end of 2021 into what many commentators began to label as a new kind of civil war. Americans steadily lost hold of the very meaning of a nation, a composite of many peoples, cultures, and regions that all give up something dear to build and preserve the whole.

2021 was not the single moment of apocalyptic breakup of the 21st-century American experiment in democracy but the prelude to less visible yet routine coups against the constitutional republic. 2021 revealed the dysfunctional elements of the U.S. Constitutional system, especially the undemocratic U.S. Senate, the Second Amendment, the absurd electoral college and a fatefully politicized Supreme Court serving for life and driven by righteous right-wing ideologies. That Republicans practiced voter suppression so openly led to violent clashes during elections. Advocates of universal suffrage embraced going to jail and other civil disobedience to fight voter restrictions.

The left fought back in the wake of 2021 with the tools they had. The House of Representatives Jan. 6 investigation exposed the crimes against the state and the Constitution by former President Trump and his allies, although only handfuls were ever prosecuted and jailed after the right-wing took back control of Congress in 2022.

Year after year book prizes and artistic and journalistic awards would go to those who served as Jeremiahs, showing the people the future of their republic, always teetering on the brink of political and environmental collapse. The post-Trump era would produce great history, drama, art and literature as the nation atrophied and at times exploded in the streets. Mass shootings increasingly gave to classical tragedy a new American meaning. Across the turbulent world ravaged by pandemic and climate change, America was increasingly considered a failing democracy and often referred to in countries where liberal democracy survived as The United States of Guns. The Trumpian Lost Cause built its monuments in laws and stories and well-funded networks of communication, while liberalism fought with reason and logic against a foe with too many guns.

Brenda E. Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton chair in Womens History at St. Johns College, University of Oxford.

2021 was a year filled with hope of return to a normal way of life that had been stripped bare by a global pandemic that, by New Years Day of 2021, had killed at least three million, more than a tenth of that number of lost lives in the U.S. Just a few weeks before the end of 2020, the first American had received the Covid-19 vaccine. There was (or seemed to be) some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel thanks to rapid development of multiple vaccines that proved largely effective in curtailing deaths of those who contracted the illness. By April, some 200 million vaccinations had been given and Americans were optimistically returning to work, school, houses of worship and more. The economy, too, experienced a recovery, with unemployment falling over the year to just over 4 percent.

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How Will the History Books Remember 2021? - POLITICO

MIAMI, Dec. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Maritime Management LLC, based here, has reported that a ship under the company's management, the M/T Tropic Breeze, was struck last night at 22:03 p.m. by the super yacht M/Y Utopia IV approximately 15 miles NNW of New Providence Island, The Bahamas. The 160-foot tanker was traveling on its proper watch en route to Great Stirrup Cay when it was rear-ended by the 207-foot super yacht. The catastrophic force of the collision pierced the stern of the tanker causing the tanker to sink to the ocean floor at an estimated depth of 2000 feet.

Fortunately,the crew of the Tropic Breeze were uninjured, have been rescued and safely returned to a company-owned facility on shore.

The tanker's cargo included all non-persistent materials LPG, Marine Gas and automotive gas all of which are lighter than water and will evaporate if exposed to surface air. The Tropic Breeze, sailing under the flag of Belize was recently inspectedin December of this year and was found by the authorities to be fully compliant with all national and international safety and vessel integrity standards.

Due to the depth of the ocean at the location of the sinking, it has been determined that the tanker cannot be safely salvaged.

Relevant Bahamian authorities have been notified and Maritime Management continues to work with local and international maritime authorities and marine experts to ensure best outcomes with minimal environmental impact.

Maritime Management has expressed its sincere gratitude to Bahamian authorities for their support and assistance throughout this incident and are particularly grateful to the crew of the M/Y Mara who responded to the Tropic Breeze's distress call and rescued all seven crew members on board the sinking tanker.

Media Contact:Sean FitzgeraldWitt O'Brien's[emailprotected]

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M/T Tropic Breeze Struck by Mega Yacht Utopia IV and Sinks Off the Coast of New Providence Island - PRNewswire