The Cultural Revolution or the Art of Not Living Like a Fascist. Herbert Marcuse's Critique of the Counterrevolution

Abstract

An epoch has come to an end. It marks a rupture in historical development, a change of epoch. Names such as Herbert Marcuse represent what must be attacked and destroyed, what must be eliminated from the world. At the beginning of this new epoch, in the years after 1967/68, there was an awakening in many sectors of capitalist societies. It was a peculiar combination of struggles against a certain bourgeois principle of reality: imagination was to come to power. Herbert Marcuse contributed important texts to the debates of the time and reflected on this phase of an emerging Left and a non-fascist, anti-conformist way of life, while observing a tendency towards preventive counterrevolution in democratic societies. As a Jewish Marxist and émigré, as someone who, with his expertise as a social theorist, had studied and fought fascism and had taken part in the civil rights movement, the revolt, and the New Left, he warned of the threat of a new, second fascism. His later writings sketch this threat and include proposals for a non-fascist way of life.