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indictment of civilized sexual morality, as he calls it elsewhere. But he
immediately goes on to say that " untestrained" sexual liberty is no better
than the prolonged abstinence and deprivation formerly imposed by
civilized sexual morality .
It
isn't just that some obstacle is necessary "to
swell the tide of libido to its height ." What Freud perhaps does
not
anticipate is the way in which glamor and sexiness have become themselves
part of the apparatus of domination-the phenomenon aptly characterized
by Marcuse as repressive desublimation .
Birnbaum :
I am trying to think of some way to counter this pessimism. Let's
suppose a kind of neo-Marxist utopia in which the Western and indus–
trialized nations would have agreed to give some considerable share of their
gross national product to underdeveloped societies. Then imagine that the
world disequilibrium in resource and wealth accumulation was righted. A
global sense of justice , or an anticipation of one , would then be at least
possible. The material problems of existence having been solved , the
inhabitants of the advanced societies could then turn in the classic Marxist
sense to the cultivation of the new human personality and new cultural
values. Of course , I've left out something critical to the Marxist argument ,
the reversal or revolution in property relationships and the devising of new
communal institutions for economic production and distribution.
Let 's say we ' re in the middle of the process . Would socialist revolution
in the West give you more occasion to hope , or less? The cultural meaning
ofsocialism , after all , is that it would create the possibility of a new human
personality. Socialism does not claim to be the expression of a new human
identity, to use that contemporary phrase . Socialism would create the
conditions under which a new human identity could develop , or be
developed , more or less self-consciously . If that is
not
true , then I can
understand a great deal of cultural pessimism, including our own .
Lasch:
Maybe the objectives of socialism have to be stated more modestly.
You said Marx thought socialism was the only way to realize bourgeois
values. In our own time it may become the only way of realizing any values
at all. It may have become the only chance for human survival. I think I
could live with your utopia, even if the development of a new identity
remained problematic ; and I do have questions about whether a change in
the form of production invariably means a change in the human psyche .
I'm pessimistic now for two reasons . First , it is unfortunately
impossible to say , except for the purposes of examining the implications of
your neo-Marxist utopia, that we are in the midst of a revolution in property
relationships . If anything, social and economic inequalities , both within the
advanced countries and as between advanced countries and poor ones, are
growing worse all the time . Second, we seem to be undergoing a process of
