Abstract
One of the verities of Marxist orthodoxy is that capitalism is its own gravedigger. In Capital volume three,1 Marx showed that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall leads capital to cut back investment and reduce industrial production. The result is mass layoffs, rotting machinery, and declining wages while capitalists await the revival of economic activity. But lacking resources, the working class and other oppressed strata cannot patiently endure the depression. Unions and other workers’ organizations often mount protests, demanding food, income, and jobs. According to conventional Marxist wisdom, given these measures, the depression does not ordinarily end in revolution or substantive social change. Capital will make some concessions to forestall these events; for decades, these compromises satisfied a considerable portion of the underlying population. However, as each successive crisis deepens, the cost of concessions rises because the level and scale of privatization increases. What is brought to the foreground is both the formal and pragmatic contradiction between labor and capital, and this becomes a sometimes hidden and other times open fight as the force of the determining event in history. And, most importantly, workers become more class-conscious and finally refuse to accept that, inevitably, they must bear the largest burden of the crisis. At a certain point, the contradiction between labor and capital becomes the determining event in history. In other words, given strong, class-conscious mass labor and socialist organizations, the crisis no longer can be ended peacefully; the working class and its allied strata and classes raise the ante.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1962).
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin. 1969).
See Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).
Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and The Theory of Historicity, trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Hebert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1954).
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964).
Georg Lukács, “Reifcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 82–222.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London, Penguin, 1990), chap. 1.
Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Mayer, Karl A. Wittfogel, Paul Honigsheim, Ludwig von Friedeburg, u.a., Studien uber Autorítät und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1936).
Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).
Wilhelm Reich, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971).
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).
Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).
Herbert Marcuse, preface to Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1962), viii.
Copyright information
© 2015 Stanley Aronowitz
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aronowitz, S. (2015). Herbert Marcuse’s Concept of Eros. In: Against Orthodoxy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137387189_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137387189_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43887-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-38718-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)