Charles Reitz’s Review of The Marcusean Mind

BOOK REVIEW

The Marcusean Mind

Edited by Eduardo Altheman C. Santos, Jina Fast, Nicole K. Mayberry and Sid Simpson

Routledge, London
2025. 602 pp.
ISBN 9781032462998

Reviewed by Charles Reitz

We are living in world-historical, conflict-ridden times. Many of us have spent our whole professional lives as teachers in the multicultural education reform movement. We have worked with excellent colleagues, but we have faced strong opposition all along the way. We worked hard to transform the curriculum in an anti-racist and anti-sexist direction – and over the course of about thirty years, we have succeeded. Some of us Marxists and critical theorists have called our work part of Dutschke’s ‘long march through the institutions’. Our progress has been opposed by the right-wing’s reactionary culture war against our advances in democratization. That we have actually been successful is shown by how desperate the right-wing is to turn back our advances in education and politics. It has been an uphill struggle all the way. That this election was so close in the popular vote shows that we have been effective, even if the outcome is a setback for multicultural democracy. Of course, it is not the educators, no matter how radical, who have been the greatest force for progressive change. Instead, it’s the progressive social movements – in the streets and elsewhere: the women’s movement, the environmentalist movement, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the student anti-war movement, Black Lives Matter, all of whom who have been the civilizing forces of our age. Radical educators have recognized this and stood in solidarity. Trump’s win was not an easy victory. It is a shame that so much of the U.S. population still rejects critical reasoning and a lacks any real sense of history. The bogus satisfactions of a patriotism of race and gender and nationalist superiority are still strong.

Are we not mortified by the outcome of the U.S. presidential election of November 5, 2024; further by the genocide and ecocide in Gaza, the global climate emergency, renewed danger of ‘tactical use’ of nuclear weaponry in Ukraine, famine in Sudan – catastrophe looming for humanity and the world? According to one of the more than three dozen critical essays collected in The Marcusean Mind, mass mortification may promote human survival (338). We may be driven by our political Eros, our love of life, ‘toward a transformation that fosters the emergence of new needs and the burgeoning realization that those needs can only be satisfied by revolution’ (338).

Herbert Marcuse’s caustic condemnations over fifty years ago of U.S. capitalism and its systems of economic waste, wealth distortion, neofascist tendencies, race-based police repression, terror war and environmental degradation deserve invigorated discussion in cultural and political circles today. Insights from some of the foremost Marcusean commentators and activists around the world today are brought together in the volume, published weeks before Trump’s election. One of its distinguishing features is that it includes numerous chapters by younger scholars from across the globe. This new generation is doing important work in advancing radical critical theory. Readers will be captivated by the wide-range of resources presented. The project was originally planned as a philosophical dictionary of Marcusean terms, but evolved into a critical consideration of issues, crises, controversies and strategies. It retains an encyclopedic quality covering the history of Marcuse’s relationships with others connected to the Frankfurt School and its intellectual tradition (Löwenthal, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Dutschke, Krahl), the philosophical foundations of Marcuse’s Marxist/Hegelian/Kantian/Freudian critical theory and the radical political implications of Marcuse’s thinking on the climate emergency, the advent of authoritarian populism and neofascism, the newest elements of queer theory and feminist critique.

Marcuse’s classic critique of technological rationality and the logic of domination function as a center of gravity in this volume (Feenberg, Simpson), given the prominence of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man in the overall reception of his political and philosophical influence. Still, among contemporary radical thinkers, Marcuse’s ‘afterlife’ evokes not only apt criticisms of lacunae in his historically conditioned work – a lack of a gendered analysis of reason for example (Kuhrshid), but this volume also extrapolates ongoing areas of Marcusean relevance. These include the following themes, which are intertwined across the volume and exemplify Marcuse’s intersectionality: global fascist counterrevolution and the mobilization of authoritarian populism. John Abromeit and Terry Maley carry forward here their earlier work drawing out the implications of Marcuse’s critique of neofascist tendencies in the U.S. They emphasize that Marcuse not only warned against ‘fascism emerging from within liberal democracies of the global North’ (475), but also how Marcuse valorized ‘the persistence of emancipatory possibilities and rebellious subjectivity’ (435). Marcuse’s emphasis on educational leadership and our ongoing need for critical political learning is highlighted: ‘people must liberate themselves from their servitude’ (351). We must also educate against the loaded and repressive use of tolerance in higher education and in the wider political culture. The volume’s contours further enfold: the decommodification of labor and life, Marcuse’s dialectic of immanent critique, the social power of utopian thinking, the aesthetic ethos, postcolonial struggles in the Third World/Global South, Marcuse’s relationship to Angela Davis and a prescient version of critical race theory and the far-right attack by Christopher Rufo, the carceral state and abolitionist politics, modern AI systems, the digital culture industry and algorithmic ideology.

Marcuse was the only member of the Frankfurt School whose revolutionary project included ecosocialism and radical feminism. The existential ecological threat of global oligarchic domination and the right-wing mobilization of authoritarian populism is countered by Great Refusal forces such as prefigured in Extinction Rebellion’s ‘appealing, erotic, festival-like protest against that which is’ (339).

Socialism’s minimum standards required the provision of adequate social needs-oriented programs and services such as housing, health care, childcare and education to everyone, as well as government policy, law enforcement and public media that ensure the optimization of the human material condition. But for Marcuse, the radical goals of socialism went beyond the elimination of want and poverty through efficient production and distribution of use-values: they involved a ‘qualitative leap’ in needs and values – not only against stupid performances and stupid merchandise, against pollution as a way of life. The fullest development of socialism/communism reaches further: to labor that is free from its commodity form (as wages or salaries), becoming common work for the common wealth. Labor’s liberation and sublation to the new commonwealth form allows human life to be infused with beauty from its foundation up – ultimately for the entire society to express itself as a work of art. All of this ground is covered with scholarly aplomb.

Our charge is to expropriate the expropriators, eliminate commodity exchange, reduce the work week, guarantee incomes to all and dismantle the military industrial complex. Under system duress, continuing allegiances to crumbling structures of power will be seen as fatally misguided, because they entail real material loss and suffering; they can and will swiftly shift. Our duty over the long haul is to replace capitalist self-destruction with intercultural labor force activism and humanism – to create laboring humanity’s self-governing cosmopolitan commonwealth on earth. We must build a new intersectional politics of Great Refusal, rebellion against fascism, and a revolutionary project of ecosocialism and radical feminism, for racial dignity, gender justice, the restoration of nature, leisure, abundance and peace.

(Review author: Charles Reitz is a retired professor of philosophy at Kansas City Kansas Community College. He has authored three monographs on Marcuse, with the fourth to be released by Routledge in 2025, entitled Herbert Marcuse as Social Justice Educator. Email: charlesreitz[at]sbcglobal.net)

18 November 2024

[This review from Marx & Philosophy Review of Books is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]