By Jessica Thompson
Whenever I’m forced to tell someone what I do for a living, I begrudgingly tell them that I teach Philosophy in a few San Diego county community colleges. I almost inevitably get the following names thrown at me: “Oh yeah…Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche…” Every now and then I’ll get an Aristotle, Confucius, or Buddha thrown in there. But there is one name that I never, ever get, even though he was a philosophical rock star for a few years in the sixties: Herbert Marcuse.
I find this curious in San Diego particularly and in California more generally. Marcuse was a beloved professor of philosophy at UCSD, and counted Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and Lowell Bergman amongst his students. He lived in La Jolla, having moved there just a short time after Scripps director Roger Revelle offered the La Jolla Real Estate Brokers Association an ultimatum: end the illegal “Gentlemen’s Agreement” that prevented Jews from buying there or UCSD could forget about having a world-class faculty (Marcuse, like Jonas Salk, was Jewish). Marcuse was also a major pain in the ass for then-California governor Ronald Reagan and pretty much any conservative organization of the day. In fact, the American Legion, possibly in cahoots with the John Birch Society, tried to buy out his contract with UCSD in 1968 in an effort to curtail his “subversive” impact upon the community.
Despite the tremendous adversity he faced here, Marcuse loved San Diego: something about the dialectical opposition between its highly conservative inhabitants and its paradisiacal environment seemed to provide him with a daily concrete reminder of the tension between what is actual and what is possible.
Marcuse’s work exhibits a commitment to a relentless critique of life under advanced industrial society, capitalism, and escalating technological advancement. He sustained this focus throughout his career, but with shifting emphases over the course of his life. His early works were an attempt to respond to the “crisis of Marxism” of the late 19th and 20th centuries by constructing an existentialist Marxism that synthesized key ideas from his mentor Heidegger’s Being and Time like authenticity, temporality, and historicality with classic Marxist concepts of alienation, reification, commodity fetishism, and historical materialism. Essentially, Marcuse concentrated on analyzing the characteristics and constitution of individual selves under capitalism – the subjective side of the equation he found lacking in Marxist orthodoxy.
In his middle period, he stepped away from this attempt, and his work with the Frankfurt School swung toward the objective side of the equation – the analysis of the political, economic, and social conditions that stymie authentic individuality and intercept the development of a working-class consciousness and hence any revolutionary potential. And in his later period, Marcuse displayed a reinvigorated and refurbished return to the subjective by calling for an overhaul of the blunted sensibilities and colonized consciousnesses of the individual under advanced capitalism. Pacified and neutralized by creature comforts and illusions of autonomy and choice, the people of the working class were no longer the agents of revolution, but the agents of their own servitude. For Marcuse, the only hope lay in the margins: Third World nations, the racially oppressed, and disenfranchised groups like artists, poets, and students. It was they, he argued, who were best positioned to cultivate a new sort of aesthetic sensibility that would then instinctively revolt against the violence, degradation, exploitation, stupidity, and waste that surrounded them.
It’s no wonder that these ideas resonated deeply within the student movements of the 60s. And unlike many “ivory tower” philosophers, Marcuse didn’t sequester himself from the concrete historical circumstances of his time and place. He spoke at the 1968 May Events in both Paris and Berlin, where students and young workers led a series of vigorous and sometimes violent demonstrations and occupations and even organized a general strike with the powerful trade unions of France (the order was followed 100%, by the way). He was a relentless and vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and of racism in America and beyond, and he was a tireless supporter of the women’s movement. His utopian visions of a liberated culture and his involvement in student protests were so inspirational to these young revolutionaries that he was labeled “The Father of the New Left” by the press. And boy did he cause a ruckus here at UCSD.
Marcuse joined the UCSD faculty in 1965 after teaching at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and Yale. He encountered students who were sickened by Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations, and increasingly obvious economic and social injustices. Through his writings and lectures, he provided these countercultural students with the logical underpinnings they were searching for to explain and organize their angst, restlessness, and discontent. He gave them an etiology of their disease, and they loved him for it.
His popularity drew the attention of The Copley Press, who took regular pleasure in vilifying Marcuse and stoking fear and acrimony within the San Diego community, the state, and the country at large. These attacks escalated when he was falsely accused of inviting “Red” Rudy Dutschke to UCSD to help agitate the growing student movement. The San Diego Union labeled him a “dangerous man” who had no business fomenting revolution on the taxpayers’ dime, not to mention against the country that had given him asylum from the Nazis.
In July of 1968 he received death threats from the Klan, and someone impersonating his wife Inge ordered Pacific Telephone to terminate his service. Sufficiently frightened, the Marcuses fled San Diego to first stay with friends in Carmel Valley and, from there, depart to Europe. When asked about the death threats by an Italian reporter, Marcuse said:
The attack on me is only a part of a concerted attack on the university as such. You know this [San Diego] is one of the most reactionary communities in the United States, and they don’t want a free university. They don’t want a university that tolerates radical opinion.
In 1970, UCSD Chancellor William J. McGill refused to renew Marcuse’s yearly contract on the grounds that he was past the newly mandated and decidedly arbitrary retirement age of 70. Most saw this move as a concession to mounting political pressure and a de facto firing.
In forthcoming essays, I’ll attempt to use a few of Marcuse’s theories to illuminate some current phenomena that I struggle to understand, connect to, or that frankly just frighten me. This may be a misguided project from the beginning; Marcuse himself continually stressed that theory is always a product of a particular time and place and must first be historically appropriated to the current age in order to be useful or insightful. We’ll see if I’ve got the chops for that, but as a “jumping-off place,” this seems like a good way to start. And I’ll use this quote from Marcuse’s UCSD lecture on the May Events of 1968 as one of my guiding principles for these investigations:
Unless these [new] institutions are controlled by a new type of [hu]man, with really new values, and without the hypocritical morality and the repressive and competitive values of the established society, no real change will have taken place and all we will have done is to replace one form of domination by another.
Jessica Thompson teaches Philosophy at several San Diego community colleges and is also on the executive board of the AFT Guild 1931.