The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse: Limits and Possibilities of Radical Social Transformation in Advanced Capitalism and Beyond

Abstract

The following paper constitutes a critical approach to Herbert Marcuse's perspective on the limits and possibilities for radical social transformation in advanced capitalism and beyond. In expounding his concept of the objective transformations characteristic of advanced industrial society and its tendency to constitute what he calls a one-dimensional society, I will highlight the impasses of his perspective and develop the genuine moment of immanent critique contained in his theory. In this regard, I will analyze Marcuse's concept of the new quality of social revolt emerging in the revolts of the 1960s and the development of a global preemptive counterrevolution as a condition of the perpetuation of advanced capitalist society in a further phase of its development, a transformation that signals a growing blockage to qualitative social change as a result and condition of possibility of the intrinsic dynamics of advanced capitalism. In proceeding in this way, I hope to account for the important moment of truth of Marcuse's critical theory, but to develop it in the sense of an immanent critique that grounds the possibilities and limits for radical social transformation not in an antagonism between Eros and a repressive civilization, but in the very contradictions of the society of capital and the intrinsic dialectic of developed capitalism.