Herbert Marcuse: Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man...

Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.

Herbert Marcuse

men world art

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

Herbert Marcuse

ties men people

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

Herbert Marcuse

real lying art

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

Herbert Marcuse

liberty powerful made

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.

Herbert Marcuse

communication attitude mean

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

Herbert Marcuse

people

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

Herbert Marcuse

soul home people

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

Herbert Marcuse

doe philosophy needs

There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

Herbert Marcuse

solitude space silence

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

Herbert Marcuse

law reality art

One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

Herbert Marcuse

information definitions self

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.

Herbert Marcuse

toil choices doe

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

Herbert Marcuse

existence humans earning

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Herbert Marcuse

election historical doe

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

Herbert Marcuse

domination this-society reason

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

Herbert Marcuse

mass-culture plato people

Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.

Herbert Marcuse

entertainment opposites may

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

Herbert Marcuse

ontology logic reality

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

Herbert Marcuse

tolerance movement mean

Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.

Herbert Marcuse

gay struggle natural

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.