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MARSHALL BERMAN
the father of all great things. The basic trouble with American so–
ciety today, he thinks, is that there aren't enough contradictions in it.
"Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and
coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to
reconcile the forces opposing the system.... An overriding interest
in the preservation and improvement of the status quo unites the
former antagonists." The air no longer rings with calls for "qualita–
tive changes." Of course Marcuse is thinking mainly of Labor
vs.
Capital here; and he has some excellent pages on how organized labor
in America has learned to live with, often to love, some of the seamiest
sides of capitalism. (One important case Marcuse does not mention:
the arrangements which many old and powerful unions have made with
management for a limited number of jobs at high wages, while leaving
the technologically displaced, the unorganized, the chronically un–
employed to statistics and the beadle.) It is easy to detect beneath this
lament a deep strain of revolutionary romanticism, a nostalgia for the
barricades; and one's first response may be exasperation-haven't we
had enough of all
that
in this bloody century? But Marcuse's real point
transcends his sentimentalism. He is concerned to bring out the
latent
functions (to use yet another jargon) of revolutionary thought. De–
mands for "total" and "qualitative" change in a social system furnish
a total
perspective
from which the system can be clearly seen and
judged. Without the revolutionary perspective, not even meaningful
reforms can be made, because the most glaring disparities will be taken
for granted as part of the way things are. But the value of revolutionary
thought goes beyond social utility: it is essential
if
the very traditional
values of freedom and individuality are to be fulfilled. Only through
such a medium can men free themselves from their prejudices, transcend
their past and immediate interests, arrive at evaluations and choices
that will be authentically "their own." In creating some distance be–
tween the individual and his society, radical criticism gives him room
to move and to grow.
It is this distance, this vital alienation, that Marcuse feels we
have lost.
In the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of so–
cial change, the critique is thus thrown back on a high level of
abstraction. There is no ground on which theory and practice,
thought and action, can meet.. : . Confronted with the total
character of the achievements of advanced industrial society,
critical theory is left without a rationale for transcending this
society. This vacuum empties the theoretical structure itself.
The most original parts of the book
try
to
reveal this emptiness