The growing relevance of Marcuse's dialectic of individual and class

Abstract

I shall here examine aspects of Herbert Marcuse's recent work in the context of a more general examination and critique of con? temporary western Marxism. In this sense, I propose to treat Marcuse as the harbinger of a new perspective in the Marxist tradition, as well as one of the most articulate expositors of the "old" western Marxism, buried once and for all in the decade of the 1960s. My argument is that Marcuse, in spite of his recent descent into aesthetic resignation before an apparently inflexible capitalist totality of domination (paralleling Adorno's own critique in this regard) [ 1 ], illuminates in, for example, his An Essay on Liberation certain current dilemmas of western Marxism, and points the way toward their solution. Most notably, I believe that Marcuse understands the dialectic between individual and class levels of socialist struggle; and that he guides us beyond a monadic, inner-directed socialist aestheticism (in spite of his own personal inability to creatively reappropriate his own late-1960s insights in this respect).