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given · worker, the company
may
happen
to
be right. But it is equally
possible to cash it in a radical way, to feel that: "Being a wage-earner
is unmanly, an insult to one's dignity, and that one would get out of it
if he could support himself on his own." As a matter of fact, Eli
Chinoy's very empirical studies of automobile workers have shown
that a great many resent "the system" for just this reason, and remain
in it largely because they can see no viable way out. Empiricism, it
appears, can cut just as sharply against the grain.
Marcuse's view of empiricism may be so constricted because there
is a whole complementary dimension of experience which he doesn't
see at all: the moral life. Fruitful social criticism for him seems limited
to the Marxist dialectic which seeks to "recognize and seize the
liberating potentialities" hidden in an oppressive social system. Now
this may be fine as a paradigm for orthodox labor and socialist critic–
ism in highly developed, thoroughly liberalized societies, if there are
or ever were such things. ("The workers," Marx said, "have no ideals
to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which
old, collapsing bourgeois society is pregnant.") But it doesn't account
for the young people who are risking their lives in Mississippi and else–
where today because they
won't
live in a society shot through with
racial and economic exploitation. Their protest has little to do with
any estimate of the "liberating potentialities" in the American system;
it springs from a flat refusal to stand any longer for systematic in–
justice. They have no head for metaphysics, their style is brusquely
empirical, but their temper is deeply moral. Their ideals are old, tradi–
tional: independence, dignity, self-respect, the life of "free men"-not
so very different from what Jefferson had
in
mind. Yet although they
are not interested in dialectical thought about America's latent potential,
their very actions are proof that such potential exists:
in
a society that
has betrayed the revolution it was based on, nothing could be more
radical than a revival of old morality-it is the return of the repressed.
Yet
to
put down Marcuse's book and pick up the morning paper,
the reader might think he were in a different world. The conflicts that
are stretching American society to the breaking (or remaking) point
find not even an echo in his pages. It is hard to see why. Surely
Waltham isn't
that
far out. Surely, as many brilliant vignettes testify,
he reads the newspapers as carefully as anybody; though he is probably
more reluctant than most of us
to
believe them. Still, when he laments
the inefficacy of "the feeble and ridiculed actions of protest and re–
fusal," we can't help wondering where he's been lately. In a sense this
book belongs less to the sixties than to the fifties, when it was generally
felt that our "affluent society" had solved all the great social problems