456
PAUL DELANY
cry:
"I ain't marching any more." About the same time, the right began
to
display its own brand of moral indignation - and to support it with
far more substantial material and political forces than the left couId
muster. But before these setbacks direat action achieved considerable suc–
cess, and it was then that Marcuse's ideas most influenced younger mili–
tants. His indictment of a monolithic and heartless "power structure,"
his exaltation of intellectuals as a political force, his dismissal of the
working class as corrupt and complacent, and his polemics against of–
ficial Communist parties: all these points seemed to be confirmed by
the New Leftists' actual political experience. Marcuse's tJheses derived
from an analysis of advanced capitalism now so familiar that it needs only
brief exposition.
Though Marcuse still formally identifies himself as a Marxist, he
argues that the classic nineteenth-century class struggle has now given
way to the
integration
of the working class into a monolithic system of
capitalist (or, in the East, bureaucratic) domination; from this it follows
that "the search for specific historical agents of revolutionary change in
the advanced capitalist countries is indeed meaningless." But the system
can still
be
transformed, for continual progress in technology makes it
more and more evident that exploitation and "surplus-repression," im–
posed by capitalism on those it fules, have no rational justification ; thus,
an intellectual gap opens between things as they are, and as they might
be -
if society were organized more rationally.
But how can the transition be made to a regime in which these
utopian social prospects can be fulfilled? This is a notorious crux in
Marcuse's system, given his past skepticism about the likelihood of the
workin;:;- class attempting to seize power. In his most recent work ,
Coun–
ter-Revolution and Revolt,
this skepticism moderates into a grudging
recognition that the working class - defined to include service workers
and technicians - still must play a key role in any transformation of
capitalist society. Marcuse therefore prescribes for the New Left an at–
titude toward the working class similar to that already adopted toward
blacks: each group - intellectuals and workers - should work for similar
ends, but independently. Some time in the future, he hopes, they may
even speak the same language and engage in the same struggle. What–
ever the flaws in this position, it is certainly more sensible than Mar–
cuse's earlier speculations about the need for a "repressively tolerant"
regime of right-thinking intellectuals who would clear the way for a
socialist revolution by reshaping the consciousness of the masses into
conformity with their own.
In all of this, Marcuse revives the tradition of utopian political
thought that derived from the eighteenth-century
philosophes
and was
