I have written several articles Racism and Slavery. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on Racism and Slavery.

Like I did with my article on Saul Alinsky, I will start this article on Herbert Marcuse and discuss his history and his training.

Early years

Herbert Marcuse was born July 19, 1898, in Berlin, to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky. His family was Jewish. In 1916 he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers’ Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. In 1924 he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician.

He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic.

With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. He went almost at once into exile with them, first briefly in Geneva, then in the United States. Unlike some others, Marcuse did not return to Germany after the war. When he visited Frankfurt in 1956, the young Jürgen Habermas was surprised that he was a key member of the Institute.

In 1933, Marcuse published his first major review, of Karl Marx‘s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In this review, Marcuse revised the interpretation of Marxism, from the standpoint of the works of the early Marx.

Emigration to the United States

After leaving Germany for Switzerland in May 1933, Marcuse emigrated to the United States in June 1934, where he became a citizen in 1940. Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. In 1940 he published Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

While a member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse developed a model for critical social theory, created a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, described the relationships between philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism, and provided an analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the institute.

World War II

During World War II, Marcuse first worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Directed by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, the Research and Analysis (R & A) Branch was the largest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it employed over twelve hundred, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad. In many respects, it was the site where post-World War II American social science was born, with protégés of some of the most esteemed American university professors, as well as numerous European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks.

These men comprised the “theoretical brain trust” of the American war machine, which, according to its founder, William J. Donovan, would function as a “final clearinghouse” for the secret services. Although this group did not determine war strategy or tactics, it would be able to assemble, organize, analyze, and filter the immense flow of military information directed toward Washington, thanks to the unique capacity of the gathered specialists to interpret the relevant sources.

In March 1943, Marcuse joined fellow Frankfurt School scholar Franz Neumann in R & A’s Central European Section as senior analyst; there he rapidly established himself as “the leading analyst on Germany”.

After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, becoming an intelligence analyst of Nazism. A compilation of Marcuse’s reports was published in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. He retired after the death of his first wife in 1951.

Post-war

In 1952, Marcuse began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard University. Marcuse worked at Brandeis University from 1954 to 1965, then at the University of California San Diego from 1965 to 1970. It was during his time at Brandeis that he wrote his most famous work, One-Dimensional Man (1964).

Marcuse was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the New Left movement. In his “Introduction” to One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse wrote, “I should like to emphasize the vital importance of the work of C. Wright Mills.”

In the post-war period, Marcuse rejected the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with labor, instead claiming, according to Leszek Kołakowski, that since “all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant.” He regarded the realization of man’s erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others.

Marcuse’s critiques of capitalist society resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests and his essay “Repressive Tolerance“, Marcuse soon became known in the media as “Father of the New Left.” Contending that the students of the sixties were not waiting for the publication of his work to act, Marcuse brushed the media’s branding of him as “Father of the New Left” aside lightly, saying “It would have been better to call me not the father, but the grandfather, of the New Left.” His work strongly influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Western Bloc in the late 1960s and 1970s. He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher André Gorz.

Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident Rudolf Bahro (author of Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus [trans., The Alternative in Eastern Europe]), discussing in a 1979 essay Bahro’s theories of “change from within.”^[22]

The New Left and radical politics

Many radical scholars and activists were influenced by Marcuse, such as Norman O. Brown, Angela Davis, Charles J. Moore, Abbie Hoffman, Rudi Dutschke, and Robert M. Young. Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist-humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, fellow German emigre Paul Mattick, both of whom subjected One-Dimensional Man to a Marxist critique, and Noam Chomsky, who knew and liked Marcuse “but thought very little of his work.” Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance“, in which he claimed capitalist democracies can have totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives. Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not permit support for “repression”, since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as “inauthentic”. Instead, he advocates a form of tolerance that is intolerant of repressive political movements:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people. This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

Marcuse later expressed his radical ideas through three pieces of writing. He wrote An Essay on Liberation in 1969, in which he celebrated liberation movements such as those in Vietnam, which inspired many radicals. In 1972 he wrote Counterrevolution and Revolt, which argues that the hopes of the 1960s were facing a counterrevolution from the right.

After Brandeis denied the renewal of his teaching contract in 1965, Marcuse taught at the University of California San Diego. In 1968, California Governor Ronald Reagan and other conservatives objected to his reappointment, but the university decided to let his contract run until 1970. He devoted the rest of his life to teaching, writing and giving lectures around the world. His efforts brought him attention from the media, which claimed that he openly advocated violence, although he often clarified that only “violence of defense” could be appropriate, not “violence of aggression”. He continued to promote Marxian theory, with some of his students helping to spread his ideas. He published his final work The Aesthetic Dimension in 1979 on the role of art in the process of what he termed “emancipation” from bourgeois society.

Marriages

Herbert Marcuse and his first wife, Sophie Marcuse, in their New York apartment

Marcuse married three times. His first wife was mathematician Sophie Wertheim (1901–1951), with whom he had a son, Peter (born 1928). Herbert’s second marriage was to Inge Neumann (1914–1973), the widow of his close friend Franz Neumann. His third wife was Erica Sherover (1938–1988), a former graduate student forty years his junior, whom he married in 1976.

His son Peter Marcuse is professor emeritus of urban planning at Columbia University. His granddaughter is the novelist Irene Marcuse and his grandson, Harold Marcuse, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Death

On July 29, 1979, ten days after his eighty-first birthday, Marcuse died after suffering a stroke during a visit to Germany. He had spoken at the Frankfurt Römerberggespräche, and was on his way to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas.Grave in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery, Berlin, where Marcuse’s ashes were buried in 2003

In 2003, after his ashes were rediscovered in the United States, they were buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery in Berlin.

Philosophy and views

Marcuse’s concept repressive desublimation, which has become well-known, refers to his argument that postwar mass culture, with its profusion of sexual provocations, serves to reinforce political repression. If people are preoccupied with inauthentic sexual stimulation, their political energy will be “desublimated”; instead of acting constructively to change the world, they remain repressed and uncritical. Marcuse advanced the prewar thinking of critical theory toward a critical account of the “one-dimensional” nature of bourgeois life in Europe and America. His thinking could, therefore, also be considered an advance of the concerns of earlier liberal critics such as David Riesman.

Two aspects of Marcuse’s work are of particular importance, first, his use of language more familiar from the critique of Soviet or Nazi regimes to characterize developments in the advanced industrial world; and second, his grounding of critical theory in a particular use of psychoanalytic thought. 

Marcuse’s early “Heideggerian Marxism”

During his years in Freiburg, Marcuse wrote a series of essays that explored the possibility of synthesizing Marxism and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, as begun in the latter’s work Being and Time (1927). This early interest in Heidegger followed Marcuse’s demand for “concrete philosophy,” which, he declared in 1928, “concerns itself with the truth of contemporaneous human existence.” These words were directed against the neo-Kantianism of the mainstream, and against both the revisionist and orthodox Marxist alternatives, in which the subjectivity of the individual played little role. Though Marcuse quickly distanced himself from Heidegger following Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism, thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas have suggested that an understanding of Marcuse’s later thinking demands an appreciation of his early Heideggerian influence.

Marcuse and capitalism

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx’s main concepts: Objectification, which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans; that by producing objects of a certain character, laborers became alienated and this ultimately dehumanized them into functional objects themselves.

Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society), humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people’s minds and bodies. Affluent mass technological societies, he argues, are totally controlled and manipulated. In societies based upon mass production and mass distribution, the individual worker has become merely a consumer of its commodities and entire commodified way of life. Modern capitalism has created false needs and false consciousness geared to consumption of commodities: it locks one-dimensional man into the one-dimensional society which produced the need for people to recognize themselves in their commodities.

The very mechanism that ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs that it has produced. Most important of all, the pressure of consumerism has led to the total integration of the working class into the capitalist system. Its political parties and trade unions have become thoroughly bureaucratized and the power of negative thinking or critical reflection has rapidly declined. The working class is no longer a potentially subversive force capable of bringing about revolutionary change. As a result, rather than looking to the workers as the revolutionary vanguard, Marcuse put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. These were the people whose standards of living demanded the ending of intolerable conditions and institutions and whose resistance to one-dimensional society would not be diverted by the system. Their opposition was revolutionary even if their consciousness was not.

Criticism

Leszek Kołakowski described Marcuse’s views as essentially anti-Marxist, in that they ignored Marx’s critique of Hegel and discarded the historical theory of class struggle entirely in favor of an inverted Freudian reading of human history where all social rules could and should be discarded to create a “New World of Happiness.” Kołakowski concluded that Marcuse’s ideal society “is to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group who have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.”

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asserted that Marcuse falsely assumed consumers were completely passive, uncritically responding to corporate advertising. MacIntyre frankly opposed Marcuse. “It will be my crucial contention in this book,” MacIntyre stated, “that almost all of Marcuse’s key positions are false.” For example, Marcuse was not an orthodox Marxist. Like many of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse wrote of “critical theory” not of “Marxism” and MacIntyre notes a similarity in this to the Right Hegelians, whom Marx attacked. Hence, MacIntyre proposed that Marcuse be regarded as “a pre-Marxist thinker”. According to MacIntyre, Marcuse’s assumptions about advanced industrial society were wrong in whole and in part. “Marcuse,” concluded MacIntyre, “invokes the great names of freedom and reason while betraying their substance at every important point.”

Legacy

Herbert Marcuse appealed to students of the New Left through his emphasis on the power of critical thought and his vision of total human emancipation and a non-repressive civilization. He supported students he felt were subject to the pressures of a commodifying system, and has been regarded as an inspirational intellectual leader. He is also considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s. The legacy of the 1960s, of which Marcuse was a vital part, lives on, and the great refusal is still practiced by oppositional groups and individuals. 

MEET THE FOUNDER OF MODERN AMERICAN MARXISM—HERBERT MARCUSE

What does every Marxist radical in America since the 1960s have in common?

They either studied under or were mentored by teachers of the obtuse philosophy of the man they call, “The father of the New Left.” 

From Sixties radicals Jerry Rubin (The Chicago 7 riots) and Angela Davis (Black Panthers) to Abbie Hoffman (Weathermen)—the lineage is clear.  This little known professor in Southern California founded American Marxism.

As much as James Madison, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson contributed to the founding of the world’s most successful form of government, this man may deserve the most credit for its undoing.

But I’ll bet a ruble to a rupee you’ve never heard of him.

And that is not an accident

German born Herbert Marcuse was a student of Marxist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in the 1920s.  Heidegger would later become a Nazi Collaborator.

For those unfortunate enough to have been forced to read this bugger’s nonsense—as I was in the 1970s—it is utter gobbley-gook. 

For the closest example, do you remember the scene in Ocean’s Twelve, where “Matsui” makes unintelligible riddles with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in a bar and they nod and say ‘Ahh’ knowingly, as if they understand the un-unintelligible babble as some sort of deep wisdom.

Matt Damon’s character wants so badly to be ‘in’ that he tries his hand at joining the conversation—as a generation of students did in the 60s and 70s with Herbert Marcuse—and now they teach Marxism at every level from PhD. down to kindergarten, rather than just admitting it is nonsense.

(National) Socialist demon, Adolf Hitler, hired Heidegger as ‘propagandist’ Rector of The University of Freiburg (where Herbert Marcuse was his student). 

Heidegger’s ‘philosophy’ was so disjointed and meaningless that Hermann Göring’s officers described his spoutings, as ‘gibberish’ (per leftwing Wikipedia, so I’m not alone in my opinion). 

But that is what the National Socialists wanted.  Gibberish packaged as wisdom makes people feel inferior if they do not ‘understand’ or get it.

His blousy spouts have no meaning or purpose—as he states is the goal of his philosophy—to have no meaning or purpose.

Got it?  Live life with no purpose—simply ‘be’ while shunning all morality and religion—and you’re good to go.

Well, in my world, you’re not.

As the leader of the Black Lives Matter takeover of downtown Portland, Oregon, Marxist Marcusian, Jaiden Grayson told reporter, Ami Horowitz, “You cannot rebuild until you break it all the way down.”

 “And then what?” asked Horowitz.

“Again, you’re asking a question that cannot be answered,”—and here comes the scary part.

After they completely destroy America and everything it stands for, she says, “The unravelling that happens to that system is also exactly what will fuel black minds in black bodies that will recreate a new world.”

“Recreate” is the key word, as what they state as their goal is not a ‘new world’.  It’s one that has been tried and failed in 25 nations over the past century and a half at the expense of 160 million lives—so far.

When this Marcusian art of destruction is complete, the canvas is still empty—which is perhaps why today’s totalitarians consider Marcuse’s blending of Marxism and the unintelligible drivel of Heidegger, as Socialist genius.

Both Heidegger and Marcuse were Matsui on steroids—but it’s not a just a stupid word game this time

The whole Western World is buying their nonsense—not just the radical misfits turned out by America’s elitist universities.

And don’t think for a moment this new American form of Marxism is going to stay within that nation’s borders.

This tiny minority of amoral Black Gender Bender Marxists living in mostly white nations, violently beat the crap out of innocent Whites and burned their own neighbourhoods all over the Western world—not just Democrat Marxist strongholds in the United States.

There were 4,100 BLM protests worldwide, including 30 in Australia (see the world map here for a shocker)

The founders of Black Lives Matter in both the U.S. and Canada are all female Islamists who describe themselves as “Black Queer Activists”  and “Trained Marxists” without tying themselves to any gender, so calling them Gender Bender Marxists is based on their words, not mine.

And as Richardson Post readers know from a recent article Black Lives Matter is a fund-raising front for the U.S. Democrat Party.

All money goes through a money-laundering outfit, ActBlue, which was founded by two anti-American academics, Matt Debergalis and Benjamin Rahn.

These Black Lives Matter Marxists were initially financed by none other than George Soros along with Dubai-based Muslim Brotherhood funders.

Amazing how Marxism can bring Muslims and Marxist Jews together to destroy their mutual enemy—Western Civilisation—isn’t it?

The apologists for this criminal conduct and their ‘fact-checkers’ claim that

 “donations to Black Lives Matter do not go directly to the Democrat National Committee”—though that’s not what was ever said by me or anyone else to my knowledge—but it’s a very slick switch up to hide the truth.

By admission during the Obama years, funds from Islamic organisations in Dubai, and monies from Communist China—as well as from a host of anti-American radicals like George Soros—came in to ActBlue and sat for 60 days (per their own website).

After this short waiting period, those same funds appear to have been ‘distributed’ to Democrat candidates and progressive causes—for a 3.95% fee, of course.

If that’s not textbook money laundering—of funds not even allowed in politics, I might add—then I don’t know what would be, but these cats are as safe as if they were in the arms of Jesus because they’re Democrat Marxists.

As the world has seen, Democrat Marxists can even stage a coup against a duly elected president of the United States, and not a one of them spends as much as an evening in the pokey for it.  They’re above the law.

And maybe that’s what needs to change

President Trump used his Twitter megaphone this week to let folks know he’s had quite enough. 

He asked how many Americans thought it was time to deport the funder of all this violence and madness—George Soros.

“[Re-Tweet] IF GEORGE SOROS SHOULD BE DEPORTED!” the President wrote—and 71,700 Americans did just that.  They retweeted it—before the post went missing at the hand of the Twitter Nazis.

The President has also had quite enough of delays within his FBI and Department of Justice which has yet to indict a single one of the coup plotters.

These swamp critters came dangerously close to taking him down via a frame up using a knowingly false dossier and spying on him and his team.

These actions constitute a federal crime pursuant to 18 USC Sections 241 & 242.

They were authorised by the previous President Obama and Vice President, Biden.

The world really doesn’t have any alternative but to re-elect President Trump.  

The alternative—Joe Biden—is a Xi Jinping-owned Marxist, bought and paid for with a $1.5 Billion dollar bribe to the Biden family.

But it would certainly be heart-warming to see the coup cabal (including Biden, who was part of the Oval Office plot—frog-walked out of government buildings (and CNN where many of them now work) to face their just rewards.

It’s time for someone to pay the piper—or America may well be lost to Herbert Marcuse’s radicals of the New Left.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa

His work is considered to be the root of neo-Marxism, which is a backward philosophy that is manifesting itself in backward ways.

Defining Fascism

Defining fascism is no simple task. In 2016, Merriam-Webster noted it was the most-searched term in its online dictionary. There’s a reason for this: nobody really knows what fascism is.

Even among academics, there is little consensus.

“Scholars of fascism do not agree on what fascism means,” The Atlantic noted, “nor, for that matter, do fascist scholars.”

On one point, however, scholars are united. A key component of fascism, one found in virtually every definition, is the idea that it involves suppression of political opposition and the use of “redemptive violence” against ideological rivals to expand influence and power. Since Antifa routinely use violence and intimidation to prevent political opponents from assembling and publicly defend these tactics as a means to their ends, their fascist tendencies are self-evident.

To most, this connection is clear. To Antifa and some leftist scholars, it is not. The intellectual basis for those who reject Antifa’s fascist connection can be found in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, whose work is considered to be the root of neo-Marxist philosophy.

Marcuse Is of No Use

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.

Born in Berlin in 1898, he was drafted into the German Army in 1916 at age 18 and later participated in the Spartacist uprising. Following the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, where he would continue to study (and write a paper with Martin Heidegger on Hegel) before arriving at the Institute of Social Research in 1933.

While at the Institute of Social Research—better known today as the Frankfurt School—Marcuse would publish several works on Marx that would abandon the Marxist focus on labor and class struggle and develop the controversial philosophy of critical theory.

Critical theory is defined as “a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

This might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.”

In an article for Quillette, Uri Harris describes critical theory as follows:

By identifying the distorting effects power had on society’s beliefs and values, [the founders of critical theory] believed they could achieve a more accurate picture of the world. And when people saw things as they really were, they would liberate themselves. “Theory,” they suggested, always serves the interests of certain people; traditional theory, because it is uncritical towards power, automatically serves the powerful, while critical theory, because it unmasks these interests, serves the powerless.

Critical Theory in Practice

Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful.

He calls tolerance in conditions of inequality “repressive” and argues that it inhibits the political agenda and suppresses the less powerful.

To account for this, Marcuse calls for a “liberating tolerance” that represses the strong and empowers the weak. He explained that a liberating tolerance “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

The problem is that if you view the world through the obfuscated lens of conflict, then you see little other than power dynamics, and the only way to restore power imbalances is to use force. This essentially means that the weak (“the Left”) can do no wrong because they are virtuous, and the powerful (“the Right”) are oppressive no matter what they do, due to their perceived position of dominance.

This is the logic behind Marcuse’s assertion that “what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.”

Marcuse openly admits that his liberating tolerance might seem “apparently undemocratic” but justifies using “repression and indoctrination” to advance the agenda of a “subversive majority.”

This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior.

It becomes apparent that if one is an adherent of Marcuesean philosophy, then one could easily justify using fascist tactics in the name of fighting fascism.

In Antifa’s Marcusean calculus, they must use intolerance, aggression, coercion, and intimidation in order to subvert—in their estimation—the oppressive patriarchal capitalist society. Since they’re at an inherent disadvantage in terms of power, then open dialogue and debate will do them no good.

The only way they can turn the tables of power is to use force and threats of force, which are completely justified by the ends they achieve. It’s a twisted philosophy that is manifesting itself in twisted ways. One example of this is Antifa launching feces and urine filled balloons at riot police during a Portland protest in order to advance a list of demands addressed to local policing policies.

The Cycle Repeats

There is, of course, one thing Marcuse failed to address. If the oppressed are virtuous and use “repression and indoctrination” to turn the table of power against their oppressors, do they not become the oppressors themselves?

That is to say, if Antifa are truly representatives of the downtrodden and they use force to gain back their power, don’t they become the same type of evil they once fought? Restoring power means that the oppressed become the oppressor and that leads to nothing but an infinite power struggle, a Marxist conception in its own right.

Marcuse, Antifa, and other neo-Marxists should heed Freidrich Nietzsche’s words: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

This is the root of the modern anti-fascist ideology, and understanding the philosophical foundations illuminates why Antifa and others think they have license to behave like fascists in the name of fighting them.

Democracy Is Incompatible with Capitalism

Countries that claim to be democratic today are not. For all of these countries are not ruled by the people but rather are ruled by capital.

The world has never before seen true democracy in action. Countries that claim to be democratic today, and that were supposedly established with democracy as their foundation many years ago, are not, in fact, democracies at all. For all of these countries are not ruled by the people but rather are ruled by capital. They nearly all claim to be democracies, but democracy as a political system is mutually opposed to capitalism as an economic system. Wherever we find capitalist economic systems, what we really have is a totalitarian political system, regardless of how it may be dressed up. That is why you can have capitalism in places that do not claim to be democracies, such as in China, where, arguably, capitalism works even better than in the places it originally emerged (although it must be pointed out that China falsely claims to be communist when it is really capitalist). There is no rule that says that democracy must be tied to capitalism; there is also no requirement that autocracy go hand in hand with socialism. Democracy can only by fully achieved with socialism.

To be fair, as with democracy, we have also never before seen true socialism in action. We have come close before, such as in the short lived Paris Commune (which existed from March 18 to May 28, 1871, before being violently suppressed by the French Army), or the war communism implemented by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1918–1921, which was replaced by the New Economic Policy after the war). In places that are ostensibly socialist, what we always find is a number of conflicting factors that prevent socialism from actually being implemented and advanced; these contradictions are utterly incompatible with socialism and include the consolidation of power by one single person (autocracy) or a small group of people (oligarchy), corruption (plutocracy), and the embrace of mixed privatization and economic liberalism.

In addition, all of these places that may have embraced socialism were not well positioned to do so, as they were not yet industrialized and developed economically. Socialism only has the best chance of prevailing when it comes after capitalism and all of the necessary industrialization and high-levels of production that come with it. Instead, all of the places that claim to be socialist skipped the necessary historical step of capitalism and industrialization, which is necessary to ramp up levels of production to be able to sustain the population of an entire society.

Furthermore, many countries that attempted to embrace socialism after 1945 in order to break from the exploitation and oppression of capitalism and colonialism — the two historically have been mutually interdependent — were thwarted in their efforts do to so by the United States, which did everything it could to prevent a socialist revolution from succeeding and flourishing during the Cold War period. The US perceived socialism as a direct threat to its capitalist principles, for if socialism truly succeeded anywhere in the world, it would finally show that there is a better option out there. The US, thus, used its unparalleled political, economic, and military power after World War II to crush the bold, brave, and audacious new initiatives that nascent nations-states sought to undertake, along with the more powerful and established Soviet Union.

Cuba may have come the closest to being a socialist state, but there are two main reasons why Cuba was not able to fully succeed: Fidel Castro made himself ruler of Cuba instead of stepping aside and handing power over to the people, and the US used its might to ensure that Cuba would not get far in its socialist ambitions. Vietnam also came close, under the visionary leadership of Ho Chi Minh who fought for and won independence from French colonial rule, but the US was so afraid of Ho Chi Minh that it ended up launching a long and deadly war (that it ultimately lost) to stop him. By ensuring the failure of all attempts at socialism around the world, the US has been able to bolster its position and hegemony in the world, and coerce its people and those in other countries to go along with its political-economic system.

The Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse has argued that the capitalist societies that claim to be democratic and free are actually totalitarian and unfree. “For ‘totalitarian,’” writes Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, “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.” These vested interests represent the people who gain the most wealth and power from the current political-economic system, and they maintain their hegemonic positions in society by creating and manipulating the needs of the classes below them.

Marcuse differentiates between true and false needs. As he writes:

“‘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.”

The interests that superimpose these false needs upon individuals are not put in place through democratic means. Not many people would vote to perpetuate a system in which misery, injustice, toil, and precarity are needed. And few people would elect to have our needs dictated to us by advertisements, the ruling class, our employers, or anyone else.

If we truly had a democratic system, we would vote to replace this system with one that provides for our true, basic needs, including sustenance, housing, healthcare, education, and justice. “The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual,” posits Marcuse, “does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.” The creation of false needs by those in power — by the “vested interests” — and the internalization and reproduction of those needs by the workings class is not democracy but rather totalitarianism; we can only fulfill our true needs through a real democracy.

Historically, democracy emerged in Western Europe and North America as a political structure on top of a capitalist base. Democracy was used as a way to get people to buy into or go along with with capitalism, but it was always a diversion. Following revolutions in England, France, and Germany that overthrew their respective monarchies, the landed classes and bourgeoise in these places took the power of the monarchs but had to develop an ideology that would appeal to the working classes so that they would not rise up and overthrow the the new ruling class.

They called it democracy, and the new ruling class promoted this political system as one that would ensure freedom and liberty for all, especially from the former tyranny of a monarch or despot. The masses ultimately had no choice but to cooperate with this new system imposed upon them by the new ruling class.

And not only were people told that they had a say in the government and rule of the country for the first time, but now that they were no longer bonded to a lord or king in a feudal system, they were on their own as free, autonomous, economic subjects to enjoy the supposedly inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This ideology of democracy, one that is distinctly bourgeois in character and origin, was developed as a way to legitimate this new system of liberalism and make capitalism seem more appealing than what came before it. It allowed an entire population to be dominated in a new way, with their supposed consent for the first time, for they at least democratically chose this new system and all of its inequities, precarity, suffering, and injustice. (For more on this history, see historian Ranajit Guha’s book Domination without Hegemony.)

As Herbert Marcuse appositely points out, “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.” When we have elections, it is never entire bases, (super)structures, systems, and values that are on the ballot. No, instead we are deceptively offered a falseness of choice in which the people whom we elect will change very little, if anything at all, for fear of losing their own power and because many of these people have barely any power at all.

The solution, according to Marcuse, is in what he calls “the great refusal”:

“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. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world’s imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own.”

If we can just raise the consciousness of people blinded by the ideology of bourgeois democracy and liberalism and how they are dominated and exploited by those who benefit from these systems used to defend capitalism, maybe we can move forward and finally get closer to achieving a freer, better, and more just world.

True democracy, and the freedom and liberty which we usually associate with it, cannot coexist in spaces where capitalism simultaneously operates. How free are we if we have to “earn a living,” if we have to do something that can be remunerated “for a living?” If you have an idea or dream you would like to pursue, are you free to do so if you don’t have the capital or money? Are you free if you work some meaningless job just for the pay, as high as it may be, simply in order to have shelter and food and to be able to buy commodities that we are told we need? Does having to separate work from life sound like freedom to you? Are these not signs of a miserable totalitarian system, or are they really “freedoms” bestowed upon us by democracy and capitalism.

With capitalism, what we always have is a totalitarian dictatorship by the bourgeoisie rather than a free democracy that directly benefits the people. Bourgeois democracy will never allow for fundamental change and true freedom. Longstanding issues, many of which were built into capitalism, like class, gender, and racial inequities — which keep a population intentionally divided — will never be resolved by bourgeois democracy. Instead, we need a real democracy, one by the people and for the people (socialism), rather than one by the people for the bourgeoisie (capitalism). Democracy can only be fully achieved when we do away with power altogether, when it is not held by any one persons or group of people, and it is only through a socialist rather than capitalist economic system that we can have a chance at realizing this ideal.

Herbert Marcuse – Grandfather of “Social Justice Warriors” and Notes on Repressive Tolerance

The modern New Left, or as denizens of the internet puts it, “Social Justice Warriors”, are through their behaviors very closely following the views of one philosopher whether they realize it or not. Although some of these people have certainly never heard of or read Herbert Marcuse’s works, they are nonetheless influenced by his ideas. A bit of background about Marcuse is called for to understand where he is coming from. He was born in Berlin in 1898 to a Jewish family and in 1916 he was drafted into the German Army to fight in World War I. Marcuse subsequently participated in the Spartacist Uprising that accompanied the German Revolution of 1918-19, a distinctly communist part of the movement suppressed by the German government and the Freikorps. In the years that followed, he studied philosophy and was a protégé of the famous Martin Heidegger. In 1932, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School, for those not in the know, is prominently taught in the social sciences in many American universities and is Marxist (although not of the Leninist variety), Freudian, and Hegelian in outlook. While Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, as a Marxist of Jewish background Marcuse’s career in Germany came to a halt and he fled the country. He eventually found his way to the United States and in 1940 he became a citizen. Marcuse then worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) where he was involved in crafting anti-Nazi propaganda and then from 1943 to 1945 worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Marcuse subsequently entered into American academia, teaching at Brandeis University and then at UC San Diego. He became greatly known in the 1960s for his academic works that opposed militarism, consumerism, Soviet-style communism, capitalism, and supported sexual revolution (in just about every sense). Interestingly, Marcuse rejected class struggle theory in favor of sexual revolution as being key to liberation since a rising of the proletariat was not panning out, a major departure from traditional Marxism. Thus, he became very popular with the New Left and although he somewhat minimized his own influence, stating that the was the grandfather rather than the father of the New Left, his ideas have in the last seven years grown in popularity among the American left. Although he died in 1979, Marcuse seems more relevant than ever.

Marcuse’s most famous works are Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), and his essay Repressive Tolerance (1965). I have read no more than brief summaries of the first two, but I did read the latter. A real brief description of his books, and if you are more interested by all means take it upon yourself to read them: Eros and Civilization calls for a utopian society free from sexual repression while One-Dimensional Man critiques both capitalism and Soviet communism as socially repressive and bureaucratic and capitalism for promoting “false needs” through manipulative marketing and thus compromising the ability of people to reason. Marcuse finds a proletarian uprising unlikely as they have been integrated into consumerist society and thus sees potential in societal outsiders for fomenting revolutionary thinking, such as racial minorities and people outside sexual norms, and calls for a “Great Refusal” to consumerist culture as the only way forward. For what I read, I took extensive notes which I have written below. All quotes are from Repressive Tolerance.

Notes on Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”

. The realization of tolerance calls for “intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period – a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice.”

Tolerance, per Marcuse, is to the prevailing order merely a means to an end and not an end in itself.

“Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.”

Marcuse believes that a utopian existence is possible and does not seem to account that fear and misery are human emotions and are therefore subjective and thus impossible to eliminate. I do, however, assume that he is broadly referring to common sources of human suffering such as war, poverty, and disease, which can be mitigated. He also believes that the current regimen of tolerance is compulsory and passive to the authorities, who reciprocate with tolerance to objections to the current system provided said objections exist in an acceptable range for authorities.

Marcuse believes that modern society and government pushes what is “radically evil”. Some of the sins he lists include:

. Publicity and propaganda compromising the ability to reason among people, or what he refers to as “moronization”.

. Militarism…which is foremost in his mind and part of why Marcuse is strongly associated with the New Left.

. Aggressive driving.

. Planned obsolescence.

. Deception in merchandizing.

Regards the acceptance of increasing militarization a greater evil than juvenile delinquency, regarding the militarization itself as delinquency of civilization.

Marcuse seems to think that power in this system flows only one way: top-down. The people down tolerate while the top imposes. He also thinks that people buy publicity and propaganda uncritically, which is a questionable claim broadly and certainly isn’t true for everyone. Many products require a mere fraction of the population buying into marketing campaigns for their prosperous existence to continue.

Marcuse regards political rights as subterfuge for the true nature of the system and that limiting opposition to non-violence is itself repressive. For him, the Smith Act of 1940, which prohibits calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government (a direct response to communist ideology), is certainly an abomination.

Marcuse does not consider tolerance to be a genuine end unless it is universally practiced…as he puts it, “by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims”. I cannot help but note the phrasing, “their victims”, presages the anti-police sentiments that sprung up among certain groups in the 2010s over some well publicized and controversial cases of police killings of unarmed black men.

Marcuse identifies two forms of tolerance currently existing that serve to entrench the system:

“1. The passive toleration of entrenched and established attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is evident…

2. the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to the party of humanity I call this non-partisan tolerance ‘abstract’ or ‘pure’ inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides – but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.”

Cites John Stuart Mill on tolerance, that it was “to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties”, and this applied to people whose views and practices were regarded as barbarian. Marcuse aims to apply this to the political right.

Marcuse’s view rests on some baked-in assumptions that you must hold to be true if you are to buy into it:

. American government and society are oppressive and unjustly discriminatory as a matter of pattern and practice.

. That a lot of people naturally accept what is established uncritically.

. That gradual reforms and changes only serve to reinforce the system and therefore cannot be genuinely good.

. Only revolution can bring about true tolerance.

. That true and false solutions can be found to problems in society through “theory and practice” (praxis) and that what they provide us with, “certainty of a reasonable chance, and with the persuasive force of the negative”, is sufficient justification for suppressing views that are opposite.

The moral certainty of the left exists on a policy course because they perceive a “reasonable chance” of a desired outcome and that the opposite end they know is wrong. This can justify many a questionable policy at best provided such policy has the aim working against a bad end. Those who would question or oppose said means to a good end or at least not a bad end should be regarded as agents of the bad end and must be countered with viewpoint suppression. The notion of any good motives is thereby dismissed out of hand as irrelevant.

“Tolerance of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress in liberation, not because there is no objective truth, and improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions, but because there is an objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind.”

There are several problems with this essay so far: the first is that an assumption exists that there is a “reasonable chance” that we can reach a utopian existence. The second is that for policies of the Left there is at heart the notion of certainty, or, shall we say, hubris. Marcuse seems close to this realization when he cites Mill’s examples of truth that were brutally suppressed in their time, yet dismisses it by stating that the “evaluation is ex post, and his list includes opposites (Savonarola too would have burned Fra Dolcino). Even the ex post evaluation is contestable as to its truth: history corrects the judgment – too late.” This is exactly why it is important to have political tolerance! You don’t 100% know who is going to be right! Neither Savonarola nor Fra Dolcino should have faced church and state mandated suppression. The course of strong tolerance of speech may not be a perfect solution to society’s problems and some bad ideas may prevail in the short run over good ones, but it is the safest course, for with the alternatives we risk suppression of truth to fulfill political aims…or should I say, mandated political correctness?

Marcuse believes that it is certain that the Left has the objectively right answers and he is certain of it as a certain type of Marxist. This essay effectively requires you to be a Marxist of some sort to be on board with his solutions and thus to be in the free speech club that a Marcusean future would bring.

Tolerance toward majorities shift under a Marcusean revolution.

Notes that unless violence and violent subversive organization are pushed dissent is tolerated, and therein lives the false assumption that society is free and that positive change would come about in said system through discussion. This strikes me as a strange argument since many governments throughout the world see no need for such inconveniences as freedom of speech in attaining oppressive ends.

Marcuse holds that there is a premise hidden, and that is that it is “rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, and extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement”.  He finds that any notion of tolerance is a lie if powers in society in conflict are unequal and thus can and do suppress available alternatives. He phrases these conflicts in the Hegelian sense: labor vs. management, producer vs. consumer, intellectual vs. employer. Marcuse complains that neutrality in speech results in a forum in which stupidity and intelligence, falsity and truth, and ignorance and information get equal time. He additionally writes, “This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to ‘the people’ for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.”

Once again, the notion of certainty rears its head and Marcuse seems to think that people should not be given the choice between the “right” and the “wrong” option for fear they will pick the “wrong” option out of ignorance or misinformation. Marcuse ironically sounds close to James Madison and the Federalists in his view about an educated public participating in politics, however he seems to have a distinct idea about what “authentic information” is and what “autonomous thought” would mean. The former term is value-laden and highly subjective (what constitutes authentic?), and the latter seems to mean, given the orientation of his essay, thought produced outside the influences of the current system, ergo the current system must go for a true tolerance-based society to exist.

The public, Marcuse believes, cannot be trusted here if they are under the sway of the powerful and their interests. Certainly, he would feel justified in his view of the stupid and intelligent viewpoints getting equal time had he lived to see the rise in public visibility of InfoWars given the rise of social media and its head, Alex Jones, getting praise from the President of the United States. The problem is that there are solutions that the left has provided for problems that turned out to be pretty disastrous, such as rent control, which now has such a poor reputation among economists given its results that 81% agreed that it does more harm than good as a policy. That is a tough consensus to get in that notoriously divided field. Does this matter to certain big city governments and Marcuse? No, because being for rent control is thought of as working towards a good end, the interest of the oppressed in the form of the tenant, as opposed to the bad end of the interest of the oppressor, in the form of the landlord. To Marcuse, public debate serves an end, and this end is to his view of tolerance. Public debate is not actually an end in itself.

Being of a Marxist mindset, Marcuse assumes that the basis of relationships in society is conflict and not cooperation to mutual ends, hence the Hegelian nature of the thought of the Frankfurt School to which Marcuse subscribed. He holds that neutralizing the news is detrimental to the public good as a neutral presentation is, in his view, more likely to favor what is established and can serve to mute issues in which righteous moral outrage is called for, thus neutral presentation has an establishment bias.

Marcuse clarifies that “totalitarian democracy”, as he puts it, is no doubt a softer system than a dictatorship which sacrifices liberties in the present in the name of the future. He has outlined his problems with the current system, so he proposes some solutions.

Marcuse holds that there should be no barriers to the potential of establishing a “subversive majority” and that removing barriers that consist of repression and indoctrination “may require apparently undemocratic means”. He lists examples of activities that are to be regarded as intolerable:

. Promotion of military engagement and armament, no Cold Warriors or War on Terror people need apply.

. Scientific research into military weapons for the purpose of “deterrence” and human experimentation.

. Chauvinism.

. Race or religion based discrimination.

. Opposing the extension of public services, social security, & medical care.

He denies these are value-preferences, rather that they are rational criteria. At best, they are both. At worst, they are value-preferences masquerading as rational criteria.

Marcuse wishes to counter establishment indoctrination with rigid restrictions on educational practice to open closed minds. This, according to him, can be self-enforced by teachers and students in universities. Marcuse holds that further than this requires a full-scale societal movement that constitutes an upheaval. He states that there is tolerance from consumers and laborers for the repressive practices of enterprise, hence the difficulty of pulling off anything but revolution to pull off complete tolerance. This sounds like another way of saying indoctrination to me. When it comes to speech regulations, I state that the problem is the question of who is to decide what constitutes acceptable speech, and Marcuse has taken it upon himself to be the decider and the decider of who decides. In other words, who shall rule us and set the terms of what is acceptable for debate.

Marcuse writes that the weak are both lectured to about violence and made to suffer it and it gets excused as necessity. I would ask who is considered “weak” in this scenario. Is a violent criminal being apprehended by the police considered weak?

Marcuse holds there is a moral difference between violence from oppressed and violence from oppressors, as violence from the oppressed is defensive and violence from oppressors is aggressive. He holds that the oppressed being exhorted to engage in non-violence and following it furthers the cause of violence. He quotes Sartre, who politically identified as a communist, to back his point: “Understand finally this: if violence were to begin this evening, if neither exploitation nor oppression had ever existed in the world, perhaps concerted non-violence could relieve the conflict. But if the whole governmental system and your non-violent thoughts are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity only serves to place you on the side of the oppressors.” Neutrality, per Marcuse and Sartre, is no option, in fact it makes you the enemy. This brings to my mind former President Bush’s line of being with or against America on terrorism and the negative reception that it met on the left. If they are to buy Marcuse’s arguments, then their objection to Bush is not in the rigidity of the statement, it lies in his perspective.

Marcuse holds that rationality and empiricism can be used to determine true and false and that “the real possibilities of human freedom are relative to the attained stage of civilization. They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage, and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree.” He holds that this requires in modern society the distribution of resources according to need (thus consistent with Marxist principles) and a minimum of “toil” and “injustice”. Now, here’s the real clincher, coming right up:

“…it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.” Marcuse holds that the people capable of making the decisions are those who are, per Mill, in the “maturity of (their) faculties”. Maturity of faculties for him is not a minimum constant of mental and moral capacity, but a sliding scale upwards as civilization moves forth.

Marcuse’s motivation for writing this essay partly lies in his past: as a German leftist he is haunted by the inability of he and his comrades to stop the rise of Hitler, and he reflects on how the speeches of the Nazis were the prelude to violence. Marcuse is of the belief that they could have been stopped through speech suppression, and that such a course would have possibly averted World War II and the Holocaust. He claimed that the present in his time, 1965, constituted “clear and present danger” and that the assumptions underlying a democratic society are not actually present, and thus it logically follows that suspension of right to free speech and free assembly should occur. This is most ironic to me given that quite a lot of movement politically was being made to the left in the time of his writing in the United States with LBJ’s Great Society programs, although Marcuse would probably consider those reforms merely intended to uphold an oppressive capitalist system. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War likely weighed heavier on Marcuse’s mind. The German people themselves, through their government, have bought into this idea given their criminalization of Nazi speech and the displaying of its party’s symbols. Far more questionable, however, is whether this would have actually worked and even Marcuse himself writes of it as only a chance to stop it. The state of German society during the Weimar Republic was ripe for some strong changemaker to rise up, and especially so after the onset of the Great Depression…Marcuse’s lament seems to be that it wasn’t a Marxist changemaker. People in German society would have still held anti-Versailles Treaty feelings and there still would have been anti-Semitic under and overtones. If not Hitler, it would have likely been someone else authoritarian…whether better or worse than him is, like Marcuse’s perception of chance, unknowable.

There is one respect in which I agree with Marcuse: the American government and the American people are not one and the same in spirit or in deed. However, I think it is impossible that such a system can exist when the population exceeds a few hundred and the population becomes diverse in thought and background. I recall reading Hannah Arendt in graduate school and she brought up the Mayflower Compact as an example of how a pure democracy could function, but she didn’t account for how this came to an end: they opted for representative government only a few years into the colony as the population grew. This pure, radical egalitarian democratic utopia that these Frankfurt schoolers seem to think is possible has no chance of succeeding and has a certain chance through action in causing tremendous misery. Different flavors of Marxism have been tried around the world and they have, without fail, produced not merely downturns in economic prosperity and human rights, but utter catastrophes. The Holodomor, Gulag slave labor, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s reduction of his people by a quarter through agrarian socialism, North Vietnamese reeducation camps, etc. Listing these may seem unfair to Bernie Bro types, but the notion that someday this ideology that operates counter to human nature can be gotten right if only the proper people were at the helm and employed “scientific” methods is naïve hubris at best. In the quest to create heaven on Earth, hell follows. Marcuse considered separate and competing powers insufficient to fulfill representation by the people and indeed they are not a perfect measure, but they are the best course for limiting the tyranny that lives in human consciousness and he and I have a fundamental disagreement on the role of democracy in governance.

Overall, it strikes me that Marcuse hides behind “rationality” and “empiricism” for his distinctions of true and false tolerance, but the point that stands out to me is that we don’t know 100% at this time…there may be things we all agree on as a society that turn out to be mistaken.

In Marcuse’s long and seemingly complex essay in fact lies a message most simple: left good by definition, right bad by definition, and behavior from the left must be tolerated while behavior from the right must not. This essay is, in truth, for a target audience, and it isn’t Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary American. It is for Marxists aiming to change a lot of what Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary American think. If you do not hold Marxist viewpoints and assumptions you will not be persuaded by this essay and will view it (rightfully so) as a call for ending your freedom of speech until you are sufficiently indoctrinated into Marcuse’s ideology or at least something close to it on the left.

Unfortunately for people on the right, the idea well for the term that comes easiest to mind for what Marcuse is pushing is poisoned: the term “Cultural Marxism” has Nazi origins and thus is unfortunately precluded from use by people who want to retain respectability while battling this ideology. Jordan Peterson has helpfully suggested another term, “postmodern Neo-Marxism”. The right must be wary of this “postmodern Neo-Marxism”, as it is the militant thinking that lies behind the New Left efforts to silence and push them out of the Overton Window.

This essay brings to my mind two choice quotes, one from a writer and another from a politician:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” – C.S. Lewis

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” – Gerald Ford

Why the Left Hates Western Culture

After the apparent failures of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the failure of Marxism in Western Europe- the area Marx himself predicted a great socialist revolution would occur and prosper- it became clear that the theories of Marx were limited.  In fact, the rise of fascist states in Italy, Spain and especially Germany in the years between the world wars were proving the opposite.

“Concerned” as to why this occurred, a group of Marxist academics formed a loose coalition known as the Frankfurt School.  Besides the economic aspects of Marxism, they determined that there first be a cultural revolution before or in conjunction with an economic revolution.  Their views caught the eye of Hitler and they read the writing on the wall and made it first to Geneva and then Columbia University in New York. One of their adherents, Wilhelm Reich noted:

…that the presence in a society of Christianity, capitalism, and the patriarchal-authoritarian family created a character prone to racial prejudice and German fascism…

In short, anything “Western” was naturally prejudiced.  The solution, therefore, was the eradication of Western civilization and replacing it with a system of “radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state.”  Unfortunately, even though they condemned it, they failed to acknowledge that these previous attempts at state-enforced “equality” ended up with gulags or concentration camps.

Their Critical Theory was nothing but destructive criticism of the main tenets of Western culture.  Chief among these are Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, tradition and morality, sexual restraint, and patriotism.  In other words, conservatism. When these German academics came here in the 1930’s, they looked around and saw America was capitalist, Christian and with patriarchal family structures.  These were the same things they erroneously attributed to laying the cultural foundations for fascism in their native Germany. Therefore, they erroneously believed a fascist Hitler could rise to power here.

It was not until the late 1950’s and especially the 1960’s until these cultural Marxists began to have some sway.  Books by Frankfurt school alum like Theodor Adorno (The Authoritarian Personality), Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving) and Herbert Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) became mandatory reading for every bearded, Che T-shirt-wearing “revolutionary.”  Some of these revolutionaries went full-on Trotsky and attempted to elevate black revolutionaries to positions of leadership. Since their attempt was to upend culture, why not upend race relations?   The idealists of the 1960’s “counter culture” are now in positions of power throughout society to effectuate their desires- destruction of Western heritage.

And what better way to achieve this than through control of language?  Political correctness is nothing more than Marxism- a loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the Western social order and eventually a totalitarian state.  In the hands of the Left, it has become a tool of tyranny to silence and eventually eradicate objections against their aims and designs. It is totalitarian in that it aims for uniformity of thought.  

They have obtained a stranglehold on the media and academia.  In the latter, the techniques are well-documented. They attacked and altered the traditional Western curriculum and replaced it with “multiculturalism.”  Universities now have vaguely worded speech codes that can land someone in trouble for an off-hand over heard joke. Students, especially freshmen, are subjected to “sensitivity training” sessions and told to check their “white privilege.”

The student leaders of the past realized that all the screaming, yelling, protesting and demonstrating did not have lasting power.  Many of them stayed behind in academia. In fact, they and their pupils form the bulk of professors today. Obviously, changing the curriculum was their first goal.  And the purpose of that goal was to radically alter what students learned. What they learned was anything BUT Western civilization. It becomes obvious that political correctness goes hand-in-hand with multiculturalism.

With multiculturalism, no religion is superior.  And no culture is superior. Never mind that such notions fly in the face of objective truths to the contrary.  If nothing is superior then nothing has value. In essence, you have achieved cultural egalitarianism. Everything is a matter of choice by the individual self since there is no higher authority than the self.

A side effect is that neither sex is superior and it should come as no surprise that modern feminism grew out of this counter culture revolution.  Today, it extends to the media’s portrayal of an emasculated male as the ideal. Government-mandated codes of employment behavior are now the norm lest any transgression be labeled “sexual harassment.”  Gender and women’s studies departments have popped up in virtually every major university. Public schools teach more about self-esteem and “self-awareness” than they do the three “R’s” and the decline in academic performance is the result.  A woman’s right to choose now condones the slaughter of thousands of innocent lives annually.

Feminists are allies of the cultural Marxists.  The Frankfurt school theorized that the authoritarian personality was the product of the patriarchal family.  This is no different from the matriarchy espoused by Friedrich Engels. One of the central tenets of cultural Marxism is the breakdown of the traditional family.  Even a partial breakdown of parental authority softens the atmosphere and makes each generation more susceptible to socialism and social change.

Hence, it is white, heterosexual males who are invariably singled out for charges of racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia.  When is the last time you ever saw a woman, minority or homosexual accused or charged with a hate crime? Apparently, only white, heterosexual males have a 100% monopoly on hate.

This school of thought has created the psychic decapitation of any potential national leader who could unify Americans based on a shared religion or culture.  Cultural Marxism aims to keep America fragmented in a state of confusion over shared beliefs and values. This national schizophrenia creates one massive psychopathic ward and can thus be controlled.

Our Founders recognized three basic values- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  More importantly, they ranked them correctly. If the order were switched, then the result is social anarchy and moral chaos.  This is the basis of what modern conservatism is truly up against.

The Source of All Suffering & Oppression is Christianity & Capitalism

In this ongoing Cultural Marxist revolution, those who stand firm on the Word of God and refuse to compromise will be set up for persecution by being labeled haters, intolerant, bigots, and unloving. Cultural Marxists will see this as a victory in their revolution that includes their admitted attack on Biblical morality and their stated goal of setting up true Christians for persecution.

Cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse openly wrote about the need to create a victim coalition of the poor, minorities, immigrants, feminists, and homosexuals. The goal is to declare that these groups are victims and their oppressors are capitalists and Christians. The “coalition of victims” is part of an information operation that brainwashes people into believing that the source of all suffering and oppression is Christianity and capitalism.

Herbert Marcuse in his essay entitled, “Repressive Tolerance” declares that the way to deal with what he calls the intolerance of conservatives and Christians is to be even more intolerant. Marcuse writes:

“I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right…Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”

In order to convince a large percentage of the population to join the persecution of true Christians, a false, dominant church must be enlisted into the information operation of shaming led by the Cultural Marxists. This false church will declare that the true Christians are in fact extremists, fundamentalists, false Christians and deserving of public and then governmental persecution through such methods as hate speech laws.

In order to win this information operation, a false church will attack the morality of the Biblical, New Testament Church. This war will see many battle fronts of which one will be the mainstreaming of the LGBT community within evangelicalism. By setting up this conflict, the Cultural Marxists within evangelicalism will be drawing out the “intolerant Christians” so they might be identified, marginalized, vilified, and if need be, criminalized.

Vladimir Lenin, President of the Soviet Communist Party, also spoke of the need to create a mass coalition that would hate anyone who disagreed with their worldview. Lenin declared:

“We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth…We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

Lenin further declared: “Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascists or Nazi…constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.”

One book that is pushing the Cultural Marxist, LGBT agenda within mainstream evangelicalism is written by Nate Collins. The book is entitled, All But Invisible: Exploring Identity Questions at the Intersection of Faith, Gender and Sexuality.

To know what this book is all about you only need to go to Amazon and read the description: “For many years, the intersection of gay identity and Christian identity in the United States was a virtual no-man’s land. In All But Invisible, author Nate Collins explores the cultural background of this claim and outlines a vision for Christian community in which straight and non-straight people might be reconciled, so they can flourish together in full awareness of their shared humanity.”

Nate Collins, the author of All But Invisible, is talking about bringing the LGBT agenda right into the church and making them a part of the faith community as active church members.

The Apostle Paul declares in 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, “but such were some of you. The description in Amazon goes on to say, “speaking from his own experiences as a gay man in a mixed orientation marriage.”

What is a mixed orientation marriage? Well, he’s married to someone of the opposite sex but he’s still calling himself a gay man. The book description goes on to say, “Collins is committed to helping faith communities include LGBT people in the family life of the church. He writes for believers who have a traditional sexual ethic and provide their renewed vision of gospel flourishing for gay, lesbian and other same sex attracted individuals.”

On the website, “All But Invisible,” we find that Nate Collins, PhD, from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has served as an instructor of New Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Do you want to guess who the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is? None other than Al Mohler, the guy we’ve been warning you about for years.  Al Mohler, until the last few weeks, had Nate Collins, a man that identified as a “gay Christian” “in a mixed orientation marriage,” teaching at his school. Yet people still want to grab Al Mohler and put him on their platform, year-in and year-out, to teach shepherds.

The ‘All But Invisible’ website declares of Collins: “Speaking from his own experience as a gay man, he’s committed to helping faith communities, including the LGBT people.”

Now some say all these people are saying is they want to live celibate lives as Christians and practice sanctification, but they still struggle with temptation. But I ask, why does a Christian want to identify as LGBT? If they are not practicing and they have become Christians, why would they continue to identify as LGBT? I believe the answer is that the LGBT community is working to mainstream the LGBT worldview right into the evangelical community.

Step one will be for them to declare that they are now Christians and celibate but that since they still struggle with same-sex attraction, they are going to call themselves “gay Christians.” Step two is going to be the full-on embracing of the practicing LGBT lifestyle. In fact, Nate Collins had declared:

“We’re going to find ways how the church can make the Christian journey livable for the gay people in our pews. So join me as we journey forward together and find ways to bring the gay people in our congregations out of invisibility so we can walk forward together into our faith communities.”

So Nate wants to bring the LGBT community out of the shadows and walk forward into the New Testament church. Anyone who opposes this will be labeled intolerant, thus furthering the Cultural Marxist goal of setting up Christians and capitalists as the source of all suffering and oppression. Standing for Biblical truth and the qualification for church leadership will now by many be seen as the promotion of intolerance and bigotry.

Greg Coles published his book, Single Gay Christian, with endorsements from two prominent evangelical theologians: D.A. Carson and Ron Sider. Can I hold right there for a second? Do you guys know who D.A. Carson is?

D.A. Carson is one of the Founders and the President of the Gospel Coalition, and for many, is considered to be a conservative evangelical.

So I think they feel like they’ve made quite the headway, and they know it when they write:

“Carson’s endorsement, in particular, stands out for two reasons. First, he’s a premier biblical scholar and theologian, as well as the President of the Gospel Coalition – one of the most respected conservative national Christian organizations in North America; but second, Carson actually refers to Coles as ‘gay’ in his endorsement. To my knowledge, this is the first time a ‘Together For The Gospel’ author has gone on record with using LGBT terminology to refer to a self-identified ‘gay Christian.’”

The Gospel Coalition is not a conservative organization, despite what this guy says. Your organization is not conservative when you’re doing this kind of stuff, and you’re not conservative when you’re founded by Cultural Marxist, theistic evolutionist, social justice, redefining-the-mission-and-purpose-of-the-church kind of guy like Tim Keller; but notice how excited they are.

The Bible is clear that all have sinned. However, as Christians who are redeemed and given a new nature, we don’t bring the baggage of our past life with us and seek to add the word ‘Christian’ to it. The Apostle Paul declares, “as such as were some of you.” 

I am not downplaying the struggles and temptations some people do indeed endure. What I am saying is we can’t add the adjective ‘Christian’ to the former life. As such were some of you; not as such are some of you.

This is nothing more, as I said, than phase one of bringing in the LGBT community into the evangelical church, who they will openly be practicing this lifestyle, and anyone that doesn’t go along with it will be set up as haters, as homophobic, and as bigots.

Nate Collins and Gregory Coles are going to speak at a July 2018 conference called Revoice. According to their website:

“Gather together with other gender and sexual minorities, and those who love them and experience a new kind of gospel community.”

Nate and Greg will be speaking for this Revoice conference and on the Facebook page for Revoice we find this:

“We envision a future Christianity where LGBT people can be open and transparent in their faith communities about their orientation and/or experience of gender dysphoria without feeling inferior to their straight cisgender, brothers and sisters; where churches not only utilize but also celebrate the unique opportunities that lifelong celibate LGBT people have to serve others; where Christian leaders boast about the faith of LGBT people who are living a sacrificial obedience for the sake of the kingdom and where LGBT people are welcomed into families, so they too can experience the joys, challenges and benefits of kinship.”

If they’re celibate, then are they really LGBT? If they’re celibate, aren’t they as such were some of you? But see, here’s how they’re getting their foot in the door, folks. This is the camel’s nose under the tent.

The “Christian gay” campaign is declaring that the church must embrace the LGBT community as full and active members of New Testament churches because they are celibate. However the next step will be accepting “Gay Christians” who are no longer celibate. You see how this is going to work? Because if they’re really celibate, then why are they holding onto the title, LGBT  or ‘gay Christian?’ There is only one reason to hold on to the LGBT title and that is for full and open acceptance of active LGBT activities into active membership, participation, and ultimately leadership in evangelical churches.

Not too long ago Al Mohler publicly apologized for not believing in sexual orientation. Mohler declared:

“One of the things we should not be embarrassed to say is that we are learning. One of the embarrassments that I have to bear is that I have written on some of these issues now for nearly 30 years, and at a couple of points I have to say ‘I got that wrong,’ and we have to go back and correct it, correct it by Scripture…Now early in this controversy, I felt it quite necessary, in order to make clear the gospel, to deny anything like a sexual orientation. And speaking at an event of the National Association of Evangelicals twenty-something years ago, I made that point. I repent of that.”

A few years ago Al Mohler declared the possibility of a “gay gene.” Mohler wrote:

“The discovery of a biological basis for homosexuality would be of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.”

This is the same Mohler who has written an article declaring that communist and terrorist Nelson Mandela is a hero when he wrote:

“When it comes to human rights and human dignity, Nelson Mandela has to be put on the side of the heroes, not only of the 20th century, but of any recent century.”

Some of the most popular men today within evangelicalism are part of the leadership of The Gospel Coalition, which should really be called the ‘Cultural Marxist Gospel Coalition.’ These men include David Platt, Al Mohler, John Piper, Russell Moore, D.A. Carson, Matt Chandler and Tim Keller. Thousands of churches and pastors are fully immersed in the agenda of The Gospel Coalition.

We have free one-hour television programs that look at the theological and worldview error of these men. Thanks to people like you who partner with us in keeping this broadcast network going, you can watch those programs free of charge right now at wvwtv.com.

Just recently, The Gospel Coalition ran an article on their website affirming the idea of mandatory minimum incomes and they hinted at the need for reparations if there is to be true racial reconciliation. In 2016, they ran an article that encouraged pastors to tell their people to vote for Neo-Marxist Hillary Clinton.

I predict Al Mohler and his [Cultural Marxist] Gospel Coalition buddies have become a liability for some of his long standing pastor friends, and soon I think we will see some pastors and evangelical leaders cutting their ties with him. When you see some evangelical leaders making a public break from Al Mohler then ask yourself why now and not a few years ago when thinking Christians saw Mohler for what he is and what he is up to?

Will a decision to break from Mohler or other Gospel Coalition council members be based on Biblical convictions, or pragmatism and profit? I contend it will be the latter. Mohler and many of his Gospel Coalition buddies may finally be too much for the men who have spent years giving him theological cover. They will soon be running away from Mohler and the Gospel Coalition they have so eagerly promoted for years because many of their donors are now fully informed and pulling their financial support of ministries that have been promoting these men that should have been marked out and avoided years ago, as Paul instructed church leaders to do in Acts 20:28-31.

Richard Wurmbrand spent 14 years in a Romanian Communist prison for being a pastor who preached the gospel and opposed communism. When his freedom was purchased, he headed straight for America to warn the churches here what was coming. In 1966, Pastor Wurmbrand told a U.S. Congressional Committee the following:

“Rumanian Communists are very interested in the fact that you have here, in the States, something like 300,000 on their side. They can’t very well win them for communism, but they can win them for a leftwing Christianity which supports communism.”

Today, the communists and Cultural Marxists have co-opted countless pastors and once Biblically sound evangelical organizations to carry out an information operation and promotion of a left-wing Christianity that will support a Neo-Marxism.

MARCUSE: ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN (ANALYSIS)

One Dimensional Man is a work by Herbert Marcuse, German philosopher of the Frankfurt School (which also belonged Habermas, Horkheimer or Adorno). It is a militant work that criticizes the modern become of societies in which capitalism and liberal democracy are the major features. Marcuse’s thesis is that modern society is an artifact of freedom, all the more pernicious it pretends to be a regime of liberty. Marcuse’s project is near Tocqueville’s thesis in Democracy in America.

Modernity and critics

Modern societies are “closed societies” that integrate all aspects of human life, private and public. Democracy of western society and in Marcuse is the best system of domination (Marxist parentage of this review is rather obvious as not to stress). Democracy under the guise of freedom of expression, “stifles the revolutionary forces by new forms of control over.” The protest becomes futile, since the society is non-explosive, since thought is to thank you powers.

Marcuse seems to regret the nineteenth century society based on class antagonisms, the proletariat against bourgeois civil society against state. The twentieth century is thus characterized by a “policy of increasing integration” of the masses once pointedly excluded. Today, they were integrated into the system to protect it.

Totalitarianism and industrial societies

In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.”

Pluralism of democracy is an illusion that seeks to hide that “the specific system of production and distribution has the form of government.” This is the critical power of the individual who defines the degree of democracy in a society. However, according to Marcuse, individual thinking is “drowning in mass communication.” He points and the dual role of media: to inform / entertain and conditioning / indoctrination. Behaviors and thoughts unidimensionnalisent by advertising, the entertainment industry and information. Dimensional thinking is the “dominant system that coordinates all ideas and all objectives with those it produces, which he encloses and rejects those who are irreconcilable.”

Protests, integrated system are more negative, they function to justify the status quo. This denial of criticism is a negation of transcendence, which is a fundamental aspiration of man. The social system is static, in a sense of confinement.

The societyhas in effect creates a kind of pre-established harmony among the conflicting interests of civil society. Marcuse points to the political monism where pluralism is apparent, is a sham.

Even the enemies of institutions and democracy became “normal force inside the system.” The reversal is so historic that initially, it is critical that civil society allows the state to regulate its power, it is today the State flange criticism and weakens.

Even what Marcuse called “high culture” (with accents Nietzschean obviously), otherwise all oppositional elements and transcendent of a society has been incorporated into the established order. Result in forfeiture by the theorist of the Frankfurt School of mass communication, which has commodified cultural fields (music, philosophy, politics, religion, culture … has lost its subversive power.

Conclusion of the analysis:

The power of critical Marcuse is clear: democracies are in his authoritarian regimes that do not say their name. It is the disappearance of thought in material reality which is the center of concern of today’s intellectuals. Marcuse is the merit of reminding us of this truth: Thinking is denying.

Marcuse hated democracy and capitalism, because he thought they were totalitarian in nature and inherently inequitable as well. Which is rich considering what we know of communism today. All systems are imperfect in nature, because they are created and controlled by man. Man by nature is greedy and capable of great evil. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Without proper checks and balances and constant vigilance even capitalism can become corrupt and unwieldy. The press and the court systems were meant to perform these tasks, not be tools of the power elite. Unfortunately this has become the case. You basically have the fox guarding the hen house.

Resources

en.wikipedia, ” Herbert Marcuse,” By Wikipedia editors; fee.org, “Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa: His work is considered to be the root of neo-Marxism, which is a backward philosophy that is manifesting itself in backward ways.” By Tyler Brandt and Jon Miltimore; richardsonpost.com, “MEET THE FOUNDER OF MODERN AMERICAN MARXISM—HERBERT MARCUSE,” By Howell Woltz; medium.com, “Democracy Is Incompatible with Capitalism,” By Riad Kherdeen; fascinatingpolitics.com, “Herbert Marcuse – Grandfather of ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and Notes on Repressive Tolerance;” redstate.com, “Why the Left Hates Western Culture,” By davenj1; worldviewweekend.com, “The Source of All Suffering & Oppression is Christianity & Capitalism,” By Brannon Howse; the-philosophy.com, “MARCUSE: ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN (ANALYSIS);”

Race Relations and Slavery Postings
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/20/reparations-can-go-both-ways/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/16/who-are-the-proud-boys/
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https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/09/is-privilege-based-on-skin-color-and-culture/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/07/black-lives-matter/
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https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/05/28/native-american-indians-in-race-relations-in-the-last-100-plus-years/
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