A Marcusean Look at Rationality, Structural Crises, and the Eros Effect
January 27, 2023
"Socialism had begun to sound like its enemy,” says Bryan Magee while interviewing Herbert Marcuse in 1977. Magee is referring to the so-called productivist nature of socialists who strive for a fully efficient, fully developed, fully industrialized, fully modern society. Their socialist utopia is a techno one, where capitalist hegemony need not exist for markets, technological innovation, and instrumental rationality to exist. Advancing technology and rationalizing systems isn’t at all that bad – just don’t rationalize your lifeworlds! Read your Habermas! The modern project lives on! The radical enlightenment lives on!
Okay, let me take this more seriously. Part of me thinks: ‘Come on, don’t be an idiot. How else to deal with 8 billion people? You don’t think some sort of rational state and economic system are necessary to deal with the uber-complexity of society?’ The other part of me, as practically inscribed in my thinking through required graduate studies readings of autonomist and post-Marxist scholarship, says that this is the exact sort of thinking that reifies the status quo social relations of production, and all the problems it creates that I’m supposed to fight against.
In that same 1977 interview, Marcuse argues that, “In an authentic socialist society, [people] could live their life without fear, without being compelled to spend their adult existence in alienated performance.” Marcuse appeared to have a dual project in mind, where on the one hand he is concerned with deconstructing the administrative and rationalistic order of things, and on the other he is concerned with a mass revolutionary overcoming of alienation. Alienation from what? Presumably from one’s humanity (and as a result, one’s freedom), which in a neo-Hegelian Marxist sense requires recognizing oneself in their world through productive activity (molding nature) and social interaction.
One can see how this might lead down the line to certain revolutionaries defining socialism in a way that, as Marcuse notes with disdain, has “almost entirely been focused on a more rational, larger development of the productive forces, on an even higher productivity of labor, [and] on a more rational distribution of support,” rather than on “a society qualitatively different from all preceding societies.”
I want to agree with him, but it is difficult because of the nature in which he is recalling ‘rationality.’ In a discussion on Simon Fraser University’ Below The Radar podcast, Marcusian scholar Andrew Feenberg argues that Marcuse was mainly critiquing the “worldview [that] prevails in Modern Society based on the principles of natural science, and that world view eliminates everything but the facts from the purview of rationality.”
If this is an accurate depiction of Marcuse’s position, then it seems after all that he is not saying something like, ‘all rationality bad’, rather he’s saying that a certain kind of it is bad, a certain kind of obfuscation, limitation, or cooption of it. He was upset that when he looked out at the social world he did not see the many ways/modes/uses of reason beyond dealing with a functionalist use of surface level facts. In a sense, then, he was critiquing anti-intellectualism and calling for deeper theory (for both the socialist/revolutionary organizing and for organizing communities and society at-large). As Feenberg notes, “This leads him to the suggestion that science should be transformed to incorporate more than just the facts, to incorporate the potentialities those facts make possible.”
An appropriate rational, material, empirical-based analysis, for instance, comes when Marcuse argues that, “The organized working class [that is, the existing class for-itself that exists in the form of unions, coalitions, blocs, etc.] no longer has nothing to lose but its chains, but a lot more. And this in turn took place not only on a material but also on a psychological basis.” A more contemporary analysis might put forth something like: It is now more often in most worker’s rational self-interest to not rebel under the present conditions of historically relative security, even if still being exploited and experiencing massive wealth inequality. On top of this, it’s even more in one’s rational self-interest not to rebel when the community organization and mutual aid is not there, something exceedingly difficult to build in the contemporary fragmented society created by certain capitalist market and modernization logics.
But this relative material comfort in our lives (coupled with the market’s other appeasement strategies, such as a never-ending leisure/entertainment industry), this ‘bourgeoisification’ of the so-called postindustrial working class, it does not mean we have gone, or have to go, full capitalist realism.
As Marcuse notes, “Since repression is bound to increase, says Freud, with the progress of civilization, at the same time and parallel to it an aggressive energy, surplus aggressiveness, is going to be mobilized and is going to be released.” Marcuse refers to this as the eros effect. George Katsiaficas provides further articulation of the eros effect in The Global Imagination of 1968. He recalls an American student in the 1970s saying, “My God, everywhere I go on campus, in every building, there are hundreds of people doing things. Organizing, meeting, writing leaflets-it’s incredible.” This is eros effect in action. One is reminded of Elias Canetti’s theorizing on crowds and the energies that flow and develop within them [1]. As Kastiaficas puts it, “The free-flowing meeting was one of those rare moments of optimism and solidarity when imagination ran wild...One activist called for a national student strike. A few minutes later someone called for a general strike. By the end of the meeting, all agreed to organize a nationwide strike" [2].
I see the eros effect happening on multiple levels. There is the level of the local event/situation, where the effect culminates in everyone in the crowd agreeing to strike, then there is the level of word-of-mouth that goes beyond the event’s locality and into the hearts and minds of revolutionaries and potential revolutionaries as far as two continents away. We are told it can be a beautiful thing when it happens, but I have not seen it in my lifetime, these chains of revolutionary escalation based on surplus aggression. And we know that fascist movements can take advantage of the same pent up energies.
Capitalism’s world-historic process has hitherto resulted in structural crises approximately every 40-50 years. In moments of structural crises, reactionary (rightwing) and utopian/futurist (leftwing) anti-establishment movements may gain footholds. Who will capture the opportunity? What representative forces will capture the minds of fragmented laboring masses, and thereby, political-judicial power?
Let me conclude. In an article titled “Still Neoliberalism?”, authors Peck and Theodore ask readers if the authoritarian (neo-fascist, neo-feudal) turn in the 21st century represents a break away from neoliberalism [3]. We might respond, ‘perhaps, but more importantly, it certainly seems a reaction to it if not a transformation of it.’ Such a transformation is much like (1) how early-to-mid 19th century liberalism was a reaction to (the social failures of) feudal monarchism and the socio-economic instability and mass revolutionary fervor it produced, (2) how late 19th to mid-20th century communism, social democracy, welfare statism, and fascism were all reactions to (the social failures of) liberal democracy and mass revolutionary fervor, or lastly, (3) how neoliberalism itself was a counter-revolutionary reaction to the accumulation crisis under social democracy/welfare statism and the mass revolutionary fervor of the 60s/70s. (If not revolutionary fervor to describe these popular energies, at least some sort of populous agitation from intense dissatisfaction).
The point is this: It is as if each 'New Times' represents a new counter-revolutionary hegemony; something to systematically stabilize society and tamper the systemic disorder and mass fervor that came from the failures of the prior conjuncture. In Peck/Theodore’s words, each post-revolutionary stabilization is like a ‘restructuring ethos.’ It doesn’t have to be a counter-revolution though. It doesn’t have to be a restructuration of capitalism by way of fascist, neoliberal, or even social democratic/welfare populism. It can be a real revolution, of a socialist nature.
[1] Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984).
[2] George N. Katsiaficas, Kathleen Cleaver, and Carlos Muñoz. The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018), 289-290.
[3] Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore. “Still Neoliberalism?” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 118(2), 2019, 245-265. doi: 10.1215/00382876-7381122
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