 Another edition of Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukhoff. We are pleased to have with us today, Douglas Kellner, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Today, we're going to be discussing Herbert Markuza and his relevance for today. War, climate and democracy a way forward. Professor Kellner recently retired after teaching philosophy for 25 years at University of Texas at Austin and philosophy of education and cultural studies for 25 years at UCLA. He probably is the foremost expert in my opinion on the work of Markuza in the English-speaking world. And on a personal note, I know Doug through our participation in the International Herbert Markuza Society. Welcome to the show, Doug. Well, thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here. That's great. So we have a lot to cover here. And I'm gonna try and keep the conversation moving forward, but I wanna start out with what is critical theory. We've talked a lot about critical theory on this show. I've had two or three guests talk about it, but what is critical theory for you? And then I wanna segue into Herbert Markuza and his critical theory. Well, I identify myself with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. So when I use the term critical theory as Herbert Markuza, D.W. Adorno, Eric Frome and their colleagues use, it refers to a critical theory of contemporary society. And what's distinctive about critical theory, it's a critique of society as a totality. So it sees capitalism, for instance, as being the organizing principle in the capitalist world, but it also sees our being on earth, that our everyday lives are grounded in an environment. And in this totality that critical theory is analyzing, they focus on the principles or the institutions of domination and liberation. So they show how individuals are dominated, controlled, repressed, but they point out pathways to liberation and particularly Markuza as a dialectic of theory and practice. So he critiques the problems with contemporary society, but then he addresses solution and practice that will try to create progressive social change. Now, let me stop you right there for our listeners who may not know anything about any of these concepts. Could you give an example of what Markuza meant by domination? Well, domination would be labor. For instance, we have to go to work, most of us, eight hours a day, that survival requires getting a job and that requires a 40 hour week of employment. And this was my middle-class family and all my relatives basically worked this all life. I spent two summers working in a factory in Chicago and I was in college to earn money. So I got sort of a sense of what Markuza called the alienation of labor, that you're not doing a job you have any control over, you're sort of a cog in the machine. And so you're dominated by the labor system and by your boss and the technology at the workplace, et cetera. This is one of the reasons guys like you and me become college professors and writers and researchers because we can choose more of how we wanna spend our life and hopefully we like teaching and interacting with students and young people. Absolutely. And for the vast majority of people on this planet, I would assert that they are doing forms of labor or work that is not satisfying to them that may be pretty meaningless. I mean, of course there are different levels of this. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great example of domination. Now you mentioned, well, you mentioned I think the dialectic. Maybe we can get into that later rather than get sidetracked by that now. Okay, so let's move into, who was Herbert Marcuzzo? You know, tell us a little bit about him and then we'll get into his ideas and why you think they're important. Okay, Herbert Marcuzzo was a German Jewish-American member of the Frankfurt School, which was a group of scholars that immigrated from Germany under fascism because they were Jewish, they were radical and they were affluent and privileged enough to be able to get out. And they ended up at Columbia University, which was my alma mater. And then Adorno and Horkheimer, as you know, came to retire in Los Angeles close to where I live. And Marcuzzo taught for many years in University of California at La Jolla, where he had Angela Davis and many others as his students. So Marcuzzo and the Frankfurt School came to the U.S. and Marcuzzo went and worked for the U.S. government in the fight against fascism with the U.S.S. that was the intelligence service of the day, the predecessor- Office of Secret Services, I think. Office of Secret Service. It was the predecessor to the CIA. And of course they focused on Nazi Germany. It was World War II. And Marcuzzo stayed after the war for about five or six years, working for the State Department, focusing on communism and Soviet Marxism. It was the Cold War. But then he chose to have an academic life. Yes. Went to teach at Brandeis University and spent his next year's teaching and fighting and being father of the New Left and a political activist. Okay, well, I wanna stop you right there. Maybe we'll get to that, but this moniker of father of the New Left, at some point I'd like to unpack that a little bit because it's kind of like, it's a gloss of what he actually did. Right, right. First I want to say that I was a member of the New Left. I was a graduate student at Columbia University. And I heard Marcuzzo lecture at Columbia in 1969 and he was talking about the New Left and revolution and the next day we had a reception for him in the philosophy department. And so I went to that reception and then Marcuzzo wanted to go to the West End Bar where Jack Kerouac and Helen Gidsburg and the Beatniks went. So I actually got to drink beer with Marcuzzo. Oh my goodness. Marxism, that was the day that I met him. Wow, that's wonderful to hear about that. Okay, so yeah, there's so much we could say about him and his life, we've both written about him. But maybe we should talk a little bit more about his ideas. What of his ideas do you think are most important for us to understand today? Okay, I would say it's both his critical theory of capitalist society and his theory of radical social change and particularly human emancipation. I might say just the word about the New Left versus the Old Left. The Old Left was the Communist Party in the United States. It was the Soviet Union as the model of really existing socialism. That the Old Left saw as its idea. Right, and this is, yeah, maybe between around the early 1920s up until World War II? The Soviet Union actually lasted until 1989. Yeah, right. It collapsed with the collapse of communism. Right, yeah. But unfortunately, Russia has now Vladimir Putin who was sort of old KGB, old sort of Stalinist, but that's a whole nother story. Yeah, that's another show. But Markuza, we should say, while he was at Columbia, I think, wrote a book called Soviet Marxist. Markuza was for a form of democratic socialism, which we identified today with Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialism. And Markuza also, though, was a theorist of liberation, ranging from sexual emancipation to democratic control of society and learning, studying philosophy and developing your critical faculties, et cetera. So this is a whole different project than Orthodox Marxism was. Right, and Orthodox Marxism meaning? Meaning the Soviet Union's ideology of a dogmatic kind of scientific socialism that took a very ideological interpretation of Marx and Engels, who actually are great historians and great critical theorists. They were analyzing their contemporary society and the changes in contemporary society that were brought about by developments of capitalism, new technologies, new crises of the environment like fascism, war. The critical theorists were always developing their theory as did Karl Marx. So that's what a critical theorist is. It is anti-dogmaticist. And that's what Markuza opposed. Right, and I just wanna ask you, you use the term ideology. That's a term that's in common language today. It's thrown about as if everybody knows what it is. But Markuza and the Frankfurt School theorists had a particular notion which goes back to Karl Marx of what ideology was. Did you just say a sentence or two about ideology? Sure, ideology is our, ideologies are the ideas of the ruling class. So during Markuza's growing up in Germany, this was first the ideas of the Weimar Republic of liberal democratic capitalism. And then when fascism took over, the dominant ideology was fascism. Just as Russia had a czarist regime where the ideology was bought in the czar or the fathers of Russia, whereas Lenin and the communists had a Marxist ideology. So the dominant ideas of a society are the dominant ideologies. This is what Markuza focused on, keeping American ideology of the consumer society of bureaucracy in this state, of domination. I think it's important to also note that for Markuza and the Frankfurt School theorists, ideology did not just refer to the ruling ideas. It did do that. But there was something about ideology that was false or distorted or didn't give people the real picture of what was actually going on. I don't know if you wanna respond to that or not. Absolutely, I mean, that's I think the key insight of the Frankfurt School of Obesity Ideology, which basically is the theory of the culture industry. That ideology in contemporary capitalist societies is conveyed by the capital, the culture industry, which brings... Newspapers, magazines, the internet. Right, the movies, radios, television. So it's not just ideas that you get on news or documentaries, but it's entertainment. So individualism is the dominant ideology of capitalist society. Of course, Hollywood films and television, individualism. Yeah, go ahead. Everywhere in the culture. That's a great segue to my next series of questions is, okay, individualism, that's an ideology. I assume you'd agree with that. It's a set of ideas about how we should be in the world, generally speaking. But anyway, so I wanna talk about... Marcuse also talked, especially, not well throughout his work, but particularly in his earlier work about the individual and what he later called the whole individual. So I was wondering if you could say a little bit about why was Marcuse so interested in the individual? What did he mean by that? And what did he mean by the whole individual? Well, I'm glad you brought that question up because the critique of the American ideology of individualism might be taken that they were against the individual. In fact, Marcuse and all the members of the Frankfurt School were for individual emancipation and freedom. This is not something you find in Karl Marx. And they also have a theory, and this is particularly Marcuse, of the full development of the individual. So education is very important. The development of thought, of knowledge, of critical faculties, of freedom of choice, but making choices that are governed by positive values. And for instance, they saw the individual as having a body and being part of nature. So they have to conserve nature. We have to love and cooperate, like Marcuse wrote with other people and not be in competition. One of Marcuse's big books in the 1950s was Eros and Civilization. He brought Freud and subjectivity of the individual, of developing your ability, again, consciousness, raising in the 60s, developing your full subjectivity. Right. Now, I was wondering if we could just say what we mean by subjectivity here. Is it the same as consciousness? Is it different? How does it apply to real people in the real world? Well, this is, again, a Frankfurt School innovation because they root the individual, the body, but also in society. So we're all functioning as individuals in a given society. Right, right. So what is radical? What is subjectivity? What is radical about radical subjectivity? What does that mean? Well, I got this term from Marcuse. One point that we should revert to in terms of Marcuse's key ideas is the notion of the great refusal. Marcuse developed this in terms of an analysis of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King and the people of color of his civil rights movement refused to take racism anymore, refused to take their inequality and oppression, their situation, and organized and struggled to try to realize American democracy. Right, right. So radical subjectivity is the sense, the awareness of the forms of oppression and the forms of struggle you can take in order to liberate yourself from these forms of repression. Right, and I just want to add that we've talked on this show about the term radical, and I gave the example of, well, the term radical comes from the Latin radicalis, which means going to the root of something. Right, and this idea, this sense of radical was very much a part of Karl Marx's understanding, as well as Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, so I just want to add that in. Right, and in fact, Karl Marx, in an 1843 essay wrote that exactly what you said, to be radical is to go to the root, and thus we want to go to the roots of human beings and their forms of repression and the possibilities of liberation, and that was Marcuse's life project, was update Marx, but also to analyze things like subjectivity and eros and liberation and individual ecological issues and issues of love and sexuality that Marx didn't analyze, which Marcuse thought was an important part of human beings and our subjectivities and our existence. Well, I'd love to have you back because we're only scratching the surface here. We got about five minutes left, so I want to segue by reading this quote from Marcuse, it's his book, The Aesthetic Dimension Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, and a lot could be said about this book, it's one of Marcuse's last books, and but here's what I want to read to you. In this passage, he's talking about ideology and the rational subject, the subjectivity of individuals and how that tends to be dissolved under advanced capitalism, and then here's the quote Marcuse is saying, a major prerequisite of revolution is minimized, namely the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves. So, Doug, why for Marcuse is this the case? Why is he saying that radical change needs to be rooted in the individual themselves? Let me connect that with the aesthetic dimension and what Marcuse's vision of art was and the role of art in human liberation and in the development of individuality. Marcuse was a great German in the Bildungs tradition, a great theorist of- Culture, right, Bildungs? Culture and of aesthetics and art, and he believed that art could be an important form of human liberation and development of the individual. So Marcuse wrote the aesthetic dimension that he thought was a dimension of liberation where individuals can liberate themselves through aesthetic education. Now this goes back to German, Marcuse's doctoral dissertation, German artist novel, which about Goethe and Schiller up to Thomas Mann and these novels that wrote about individual liberation of fighting yourself, becoming an individual, et cetera. So Marcuse found this tradition of radical individualism of revolt against society, against society, development of full individuality. He found in German culture and literature, might have loved classical music, you know, Beethoven and Mozart, all of these forms of culture develop the sensibility of individuality, not just the rationality, the intellect, which is important. I mean, Marcuse is obviously in some ways very much of a rationalist as a German idealist. He wanted to integrate mind and body. Mind and body integration, which is why he thought ecology was so important. Okay, great. And one thing I want to point out about the importance of Marcuse, he was, he popularized and struggled in the major political movements of the day. The Civil Rights Movement, that he ends One Dimensional Man was citing. Then the Anti-War Movement, that was the lecture that I heard during the Vietnam War. He was the first to talk about ecology and to affirm the ecological movement that we're in a situation of ecological crisis, which we're exploding today. Yeah, and I want to get back to that very quickly. I just want to mention the women's movement. Thank you. And that was the other important part of Marcuse's analysis of individuals and liberation were gendered individuals. Absolutely. We're in male dominated patriarchal capitalist societies. So, Marcuse was one of the first Marxists to do a critique of patriarchy and to affirm women's liberation at the same time he affirmed ecological liberation, sexual liberation, et cetera. So, gender politics was a very important part of Marcuse. So, Doug, we're almost out of time, but I got to ask you, so what does all of this mean for us in practical terms? We're facing a climate crisis, a climate emergency. How can, in a word, a sentence to do, how can Marcuse help us to both understand the crises we're in, and there's more than one, but let's focus on the environmental crisis to both understand it and how can it empower his ideas, empower us as citizens of Hawaii or the US to make a difference on these issues? I know that's a huge question, but... Well, this is why Marcuse is so important. Not only did he affirm the new left and all these liberation struggles from women's liberation to gay liberation, but also he affirmed the importance of the ecology movement and ecological crisis as one of our biggest problems, which I'm just coming out of the greatest heatwave of years in Los Angeles. And of course, we had in Florida the most destructive hurricane in over 100 years. So we're obviously in a situation of ecological crisis, but Marcuse not only does an analysis of the problem, but he gives you a answer to what the solution is and its movement, its political struggle, its activism. And this also is relevant for gender, race, class, all of the forms of oppression today. Marcuse, so I saw Marcuse as very important when the Occupy movement, the Arab uprising, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, all of these new movements that have appeared in the last decades are in some ways very Marcusean, that they were ones that Marcuse would have affirmed, joined, supported. So that's what our lesson is from Marcuse. We have to support all of these important movements, the ecology movement, the Black, Brown power movement, youth movement, all of the political issues and crises we're facing today. Marcuse told us we have to focus on the most important ones and we have to be activists in the movements that are addressing these problems. So that for me is Marcuse's legacy. Well, what a wonderful note to end on. Thanks so much, Doug. Thanks for joining us today and we'd love to have you back sometime soon. Sure, my pleasure, Michael. This has been Thinking Thanks Through, critical thinking for critical times on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukhoff. Please join us again, two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. Mahalo. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.