Herbert Marcuse Quotes

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.

الحرية الإنسانية لا تقاس تبعاً للإختيار المتاح للفرد، وإنما العامل الحاسم والوحيد في تحديدها هو ما يستطيع الفرد اختياره وما يختاره

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free

The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

As Hegel defines it: "Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us." ... Reason is the negation of the negative. ... Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective.

عندما تخطئ السماوات يقوم الشباب بتصحيح ذلك. وقد جاءت الفرصة فينبغي ألا تضيع!!

The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.

Every sound reason is on the side of law and order in their insistence that the eternity of joy be reserved for the hereafter, and in their endeavor to subordinate the struggle against death and disease to the never-ceasing requirements of national and international security.

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.

Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly,

The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates nature, so that the constrained and constraining matter releases the beautiful and playful forms of animate and inanimate things. No longer striving and no longer desiring ‘for something still to be attained,’ they are free from fear and fetter – and thus free per se. The contemplation of Narcissus repels all other activity in the erotic surrender to beauty, inseparably uniting his own existence with nature.

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.

Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible.

Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.

فلم يعد من مهامها "الثورة" أن تقوم بالتعميق الجذري للتيارات الموجودة فعلا في المجتمع القائم و أن تقوم بتكملة مسار هذه التيارات و لكنها أصبحت نوعا من الايقاظ و الشحذ و التعبئة لتلك الطاقات التي تبدو سلبية بشكل أو بأخر نتيجة لما تتعرض له من الامتصاص و القهر الذي تمارسه عليها تلك القوي المشكلة للتجربة الانسانية

At this stage, the question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude? The

The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.

But with all its truth, the argument cannot answer the time-honored question: who educates the educators, and where is the proof that they are in possession of “the good?

We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.

The world of immediate experience―the world in which we find ourselves living―must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

rational is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression

Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.

For Marcuse, the distinguishing features of a human being are free and creative subjectivity. If in one’s economic and social life one is administered by a technical labor apparatus and conforms to dominant social norms, one is losing one’s potentialities of self-determination and individuality. Alienated from the powers of being-a-self, one-dimensional man thus becomes an object of administration and conformity.

Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a "natural" death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization. They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent "professional agreement" with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of the death instinct -- or, rather, of its social usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning -- surrender and submission. It stifles "utopian" efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat. Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential category: perverting a biological fact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of mankind which they help to perpetuate -- they betray the promise of utopia.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

The high standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations- and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue- which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.

Le persone si riconoscono nelle loro merci; trovano la loro anima nella loro automobile, nel giradischi ad alta fedeltà, nella casa a due piani, nell'attrezzatura della cucina. Lo stesso meccanismo che lega l'individuo alla sua società è mutato, e il controllo sociale è radicato nei nuovi bisogni che esso ha prodotto.

a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. Such a practice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.

Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.

the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.

Pero ahora esencia y apariencia, «es» y «debe», se confrontan entre sí en el conflicto entre fuerzas reales y capacidades en la sociedad.

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts.

The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.

his theory... his view is about the destiny of the human race on this planet. about whether we will ever learn to make sense, or whether we'll just keep making money and madness. it's a real big question.

For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a nonterroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It

Il termine totalitario, infatti, non si applica soltanto ad una organizzazione politica terroristica della società, ma anche ad una organizzazione economico-tecnica, non terroristica, che opera mediante la manipolazione dei bisogni da parte di interessi costituiti. Essa preclude per tal via l'emergere di una opposizione efficace contro l'insieme del sistema. Non soltanto una forma specifica di governo o di dominio partitico producono il totalitarismo, ma pure un sistema specifico di produzione e di distribuzione, sistema che può essere benissimo compatibile con un pluralismo di partiti, di giornali, di poteri controbilanciantisi ecc.

The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan - intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo. ... Can the indiscriminate guaranty of political rights and liberties be repressive? Can such tolerance serve to contain qualitative social change? ... When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. ... Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before– which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before.

The slaves of developed industrial Civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.

Nearby sat a veteran in a wheelchair. He was young, handsome, and athletic, through missing a leg. My daughter went to him and asked, "You're army - right?" He said, "Yes, I am." My daughter hugged him. "Thank you," she said. Tears welled in the man's eyes. "Did you get my card?" she asked. "My school sent you a card. It said, 'Thank you for saving our Earth.'" The guy just about lost it. He said, "You're welcome. Yes, we did get your card. Thank you for doing that." - Michael Sobel, son of Herbert Sobel. Michael talking about his 6 year old daughter meeting veterans.

At the present stage of advanced capitalism, organized labor rightly opposes automation without compensating employment. It insists on the extensive utilization of human labor power in material production, and thus opposes technical progress. However, in doing so, it also opposes the more efficient utilization of capital; it hampers intensified efforts to raise the productivity of labor. In other words, continued arrest of automation may weaken the competitive national and international position of capital, cause a long- range depression, and consequently reactivate the conflict of class interests.

There were many key figures from the Frankfurt School: Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and others. The school began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It is also sometimes called Goethe University, fittingly and frighteningly enough. Karl Marx would have been proud. The Frankfurt School in the 1930s would pick up and relocate to the United States, as its members (most if not all of them Jews) fled Hitler’s atrocious Final Solution.584

At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898–). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–) and Jürgen Habermas (1929–).

For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes those tools miss. (The mere titles of B.F. Skinner's “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” and Herbert Marcuse's “One-Dimensional Man” will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, “But what did the nonscientific approach to man and the world give us?” The answer is: “Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres

[…] en esta totalidad apenas es ya posible la distinción conceptual entre los negocios y la política, el beneficio y el prestigio, las necesidades y la publicidad. Se exporta un “modo de vida”, o se exporta a sí mismo en la dinámica de la totalidad. Con el capital, los ordenadores y el saber-vivir, llegan los restantes “valores”: relaciones libidinosas con la mercancía, con los artefactos motorizados agresivos, con la estética falsa del supermercado.

The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.

Na construção da personalidade, o instinto de destruição manifesta-se com a maior nitidez na formação do superego . Certo, por seu papel defensivo contra os impulsos irrealistas do id, por sua função na conquista duradoura do complexo de Édipo, o superego consolida e protege a unidade do ego, garante o seu desenvolvimento sob o princípio de realidade e, assim, atua a serviço de Eros. Contudo, o superego atinge esses objetivos dirigindo o ego contra o seu id, desviando parte dos instintos de destruição contra uma parte da personalidade destruindo, fragmentando a unidade da personalidade como um todo; assim, atua a serviço do antagonista do instinto de vida. Além disso, essa destrutividade dirigida para dentro constitui o âmago moral da personalidade adulta. A consciência, a mais querida agência moral do indivíduo civilizado, surge-nos impregnada do instinto de morte; o imperativo categórico que o superego impõe continua sendo um imperativo de autodestruição, enquanto constrói a existência social da personalidade. A obra de repressão pertence tanto ao instinto de morte quanto ao instinto de vida. Normalmente, a fusão de ambos é salutar, mas a obstinada severidade do superego ameaça constantemente esse equilíbrio salutar. Quanto mais um homem controla suas tendências agressivas em relação a outros, mais tirânico, isto é, mais agressivo se torna em seu ego-ideal ... mais intensas se tornam as tendências agressivas do seu ego-ideal contra o seu ego. Levada ao extremo, na melancolia, uma pura cultura do instinto de morte pode influir no superego, convertendo este numa espécie de local de reunião para os instintos de morte. Mas esse perigo extremo tem suas raízes na situação normal do ego. Como a ação do ego resulta em uma '... libertação dos instintos agressivos no superego, a sua luta contra a libido expõe-no ao perigo de maus tratos e morte. Ao sofrer os ataques do superego ou talvez ao sucumbir a eles o ego está enfrentando um destino semelhante ao dos protozoários que são destruídos pelos produtos de desintegração que eles próprios criaram.' E Freud acrescenta que do ponto de vista econômico [mental], a moralidade que funciona no superego parece ser um produto similar de desintegração. É nesse contexto que a metapsicologia de Freud se defronta com a dialética fatal da civilização: o próprio progresso da civilização conduz à liberação de forças cada vez mais destrutivas.

Marcuse's own highhanded scorn about those whom he criticizes makes it not inapposite to remark that the arguments which I have been deploying are very elementary ones, familiar to every student with the barest knowledge of logic. The suspicion is thus engendered that not only Marcuse but also Adorno and Horkheimer actually do not know any logic, and it is certainly the case that, if they do know any, all three have taken some pains to conceal their knowledge of the subject which they are professedly criticizing.

The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial areas is not a suitable model of development if the aim is pacification. In view of what this standard has made of Man and Nature, the question must again be asked whether it is worth the sacrifices and the victims made in its defense. The question has ceased to be irresponsible since the “affluent society” has become a society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation, and since the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration. Under these circumstances, liberation from the affluent society does not mean return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth available for distribution, and the end of permanent mobilization would reduce the social need for the denial of satisfactions that are the individual’s own—denials which now find their compensation in the cult of fitness, strength, and regularity.

And by virtue of this relation, the concrete quality seems to represent a negation as well as realization of the universal. Snow is white but not "whiteness"; a girl may be beautiful, even a beauty, but not "beauty"; a country may be free (in comparison with others) because its people have certain liberties, but it is not the very embodiment of freedom. Moreover, the concepts are meaningful only in experienced contrast with their opposites: white with not white, beautiful with not beautiful. Negative statements can sometimes be translated into positive ones: "black" or "grey" for "not white," "ugly" for "not beautiful.

His argument is that the system’s much lauded economic, political, and social freedoms, formerly a source of social progress, lose their progressive function and become subtle instruments of domination which serve to keep individuals in bondage to the system that they strengthen and perpetuate. For example, economic freedom to sell one’s labor power in order to compete on the labor market submits the individual to the slavery of an irrational economic system; political freedom to vote for generally indistinguishable representatives of the same system is but a delusive ratification of a nondemocratic political system; intellectual freedom of expression is ineffectual when the media either co-opt and defuse, or distort and suppress, oppositional ideas, and when the image-makers shape public opinion so that it is hostile or immune to oppositional thought and action. Marcuse

America, the totem of modern democratic culture, was actually “latently” fascist. The absence of a “genuine” fascist movement in America, like the absence of any “genuine” anti-Semitism, was in fact a sign of how far the corruption had spread. As Herbert Marcuse put it somewhat later, “The fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this country.”48

The lost paradises are the only true ones not because, in retrospect, the past joy seems more beautiful than it really was, but because remembrance alone provides the joy without the anxiety over its passing and thus gives it an otherwise impossible duration. Time loses its power when remembrance redeems the past.

Otoritas-otoritas di bidang pendidikan, moral, dan psikologi ribut karena meningkatnya kenakalan remaja; mereka kurang ribut karena pertunjukan angkuh yang mempertontonkan, dalam kata dan perbuatan dan gambar-gambar, misil-misil, roket-roket, bom-bom dengan daya penghancur yang lebih besar – kejahatan orang dewasa dari sebuah peradaban secara keseluruhan.

Las prescripciones para la inhumanidad y la injusticia están siendo administradas por una burocracia racionalmente organizada, que es, sin embargo, invisible en su centro vital. El alma contiene pocos secretos y aspiraciones que no puedan ser discutidos, analizados y encuestados. La soledad, que es la condición esencial que sostenía al individuo contra y más allá de la sociedad, se ha hecho técnicamente imposible. El análisis lógico y lingüístico demuestra que los antiguos problemas metafísicos son problemas ilusorios; la búsqueda del «sentido» de las cosas puede ser reformulada como la búsqueda del sentido de las palabras, y el universo establecido del discurso y la conducta puede proporcionar criterios perfectamente adecuados para la respuesta.

El «principio de placer» absorbe el «principio de realidad», la sexualidad es liberada (o más bien liberalizada) dentro de formas sociales constructivas. (...) En esta sociedad, no todo el tiempo empleado en y con las máquinas es tiempo de trabajo (es decir, esfuerzo desagradable pero necesario) y no toda la energía ahorrada por la máquina es fuerza de trabajo. La mecanización también ha «ahorrado» libido, la energía de los «instintos de la vida», esto es, la ha sacado de sus formas anteriores de realización. (...) Así, disminuyendo lo erótico e intensificado la energía sexual, la realidad tecnológica limita el campo de la sublimación. También reduce la necesidad de sublimación. (...) De este modo, el organismo es precondicionado por la aceptación espontánea de lo que se le ofrece. (...) Se ha dicho a menudo que la civilización industrial avanzada opera con un mayor grado de libertad sexual; «opera» en el sentido que ésta llega a ser un valor de mercado y un elemento de las costumbres sociales. Sin dejar de ser un instrumento de trabajo, se le permite al cuerpo exhibir sus caracteres sexuales en el mundo de todos los días y en las relaciones de trabajo. Este es uno de los logros únicos de la sociedad industrial, hecho posible por la reducción del trabajo físico, sucio y pesado; por la disponibilidad de ropa barata y atractiva (...) Esta socialización no contradice sino complementa la deserotización del ambiente. El sexo se integra al trabajo y las relaciones públicas y de este modo se hace más susceptible a la satisfacción (controlada). El progreso técnico de una vida más cómoda permite la sistemática inclusión de los componentes libidinales en el campo del interés de la producción y el intercambio. (...) La conquista tecnológica y política de los factores trascendentes en la existencia humana, tan característica de la civilización industrial avanzada, se afirma en la esfera instintiva, como satisfacción lograda de un modo que genera sumisión y debilita la racionalidad de la protesta. (...) La pérdida de consciencia debido a las libertades satisfactorias permitidas por una sociedad sin liberad, hace posible una conciencia feliz que facilita la aceptación de los errores de esta sociedad.

El «principio de placer» absorbe el «principio de realidad», la sexualidad es liberada (o más bien liberalizada) dentro de formas sociales constructivas. (...) En esta sociedad, no todo el tiempo empleado en y con las máquinas es tiempo de trabajo (es decir, esfuerzo desagradable pero necesario) y no toda la energía ahorrada por la máquina es fuerza de trabajo. La mecanización también ha «ahorrado» libido, la energía de los «instintos de la vida», esto es, la ha sacado de sus formas anteriores de realización. (...) Así, disminuyendo lo erótico e intensificado la energía sexual, la realidad tecnológica limita el campo de la sublimación. También reduce la necesidad de sublimación. (...) De este modo, el organismo es precondicionado por la aceptación espontánea de lo que se le ofrece. (...) Se ha dicho a menudo que la civilización industrial avanzada opera con un mayor grado de libertad sexual; «opera» en el sentido que ésta llega a ser un valor de mercado y un elemento de las costumbres sociales. Sin dejar de ser un instrumento de trabajo, se le permite al cuerpo exhibir sus caracteres sexuales en el mundo de todos los días y en las relaciones de trabajo. Este es uno de los logros únicos de la sociedad industrial, hecho posible por la reducción del trabajo físico, sucio y pesado; por la disponibilidad de ropa barata y atractiva (...) Esta socialización no contradice sino complementa la deserotización del ambiente. El sexo se integra al trabajo y las relaciones públicas y de este modo se hace más susceptible a la satisfacción (controlada). El progreso técnico de una vida más cómoda permite la sistemática inclusión de los componentes libidinales en el campo del interés de la producción y el intercambio. (...) La conquista tecnológica y política de los factores trascendentes en la existencia humana, tan característica de la civilización industrial avanzada, se afirma en la esfera instintiva, como satisfacción lograda de un modo que genera sumisión y debilita la racionalidad de la protesta. (...) La pérdida de consciencia debido a las libertades satisfactorias permitidas por una sociedad sin liberad, hace posible una conciencia feliz que facilita la aceptación de los errores de esta sociedad. (...) La desublimación institucionalizada parece ser así un aspecto de la «conquista de la trascendencia» lograda por la sociedad unidimensional. Del mismo modo que esta sociedad tiende a reducir e incluso a absorber la oposición (¡la diferencia cualitativa!) en el campo de la política y de la alta cultura, lo hace en la esfera instintiva. El resultado es una atrofia de los órganos mentales adecuados para comprender las contradicciones y las alternativas y, en la única dimensión permanente de la racionalidad tecnológica, la conciencia feliz llega a prevalecer.

Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.

He makes me think of that song by that gawky white girl with the long legs and the itty-bitty titties,” Wavonne says as Marcus approaches. “Somethin’ about ‘I knew you were trouble when you walked in’ or some shit.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

Imagination succumbs to the general degradation of phantasy. To free it for the construction of a more beautiful and happier world remains the prerogative of children and fools.

El tópico sobre la «banalidad del mal» se ha revelado como carente de sentido: el mal se muestra en la desnudez de su monstruosidad como contradicción total a la esencia de la palabra y de la acción humanas.

La sociedad existente logrará contener a las fuerzas revolucionarias mientras consiga producir cada vez más «mantequilla y cañones» y burlar a la población con la ayuda de nuevas formas de control total.

Las capacidades (intelectuales y materiales) de la sociedad contemporánea son inmensamente mayores que nunca; lo que significa que la amplitud de la dominación de la sociedad sobre el individuo es inmensamente mayor que nunca.

La sociedad contemporánea parece ser capaz de contener el cambio social, un cambio cualitativo que estableciera instituciones esencialmente diferentes, una nueva dirección del proceso productivo, nuevas formas de existencia humana.

el análisis crítico sigue insistiendo en que la necesidad de un cambio cualitativo es más urgente que nunca.

Los hombres deben llegar a verla y encontrar su camino desde la falsa hacia la verdadera conciencia, desde su interés inmediato al real.

La productividad y el crecimiento potencial de este sistema estabilizan la sociedad y contienen el progreso técnico dentro del marco de la dominación. La razón tecnológica se ha hecho razón política.

La solución, según el autor, es «despertar y organizar la solidaridad en tanto que necesidad biológica para mantenerse unidos contra la brutalidad y la explotación humanas».

la realidad constituye un estadio más avanzado de la alienación. Ésta se ha vuelto enteramente objetiva; el sujeto alienado es devorado por su existencia alienada.

Una sociedad que parece cada día más capaz de satisfacer las necesidades de los individuos por medio de la forma en que está organizada, priva a la independencia de pensamiento, a la autonomía y al derecho de oposición política de su función crítica básica.

La intensidad, la satisfacción y hasta el carácter de las necesidades humanas, más allá del nivel biológico, han sido siempre precondicionadas

El rasgo distintivo de la sociedad industrial avanzada es la sofocación efectiva de aquellas necesidades que requieren ser liberadas —liberadas también de aquello que es tolerable, ventajoso y cómodo— mientras que sostiene y absuelve el poder destructivo y la función represiva de la sociedad opulenta.

la automatización. Sugerí que la automatización que se extiende es algo más que un crecimiento cuantitativo de la mecanización: es un cambio en el carácter de las fuerzas productivas básicas.

El robo del tiempo de trabajo ajeno, en el que la riqueza [social] descansa hoy, aparece entonces como una base miserable comparada con la nueva base que la misma industria en gran escala ha creado.

La completa automatización en el reino de la necesidad abrirá la dimensión del tiempo libre, como aquel en el que la existencia privada y social del hombre se constituirá a sí misma. Ésta será la trascendencia histórica hacia una nueva civilización.

En realidad, la sociedad debe crear primero los requisitos materiales de la libertad para todos sus miembros, antes de poder ser una sociedad libre; debe crear primero la riqueza antes de ser capaz de distribuirla de acuerdo con las necesidades libremente desarrolladas del individuo;

La esclavización del hombre por los instrumentos de su trabajo se mantiene en una forma altamente racionalizada, muy eficaz y prometedora.