The Frankfurt School - Herbert Marcuse & Bryan Magee (1977)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 เม.ย. 2022
- In this program, Herbert Marcuse discusses the Frankfurt School of Marxism and his own philosophical work in an interview with Bryan Magee. This is from a 1977 series on Modern Philosophy called Men of Ideas.
#Philosophy #BryanMagee #Marx
l watched this when it came out, it's now more relevant than ever.
This interview establishes Marcuse as philosopher. His command of English is awesome. People of such stature are rare these days. Thank God he's on tape. Magee did a perfect interview.
He was just a moron high on his own farts.
😂
Ditto that.
A self indulgent Commie narcissist. Oh, but what grand rhetoric! LMAO
Magee: I don't want to get into a political argument, Marcuse: why not? 19:55
The discussion was just ' Superb' There is no other word.
Marcuse proved the ancient Greeks right:
Ugly Face, Ugly Soul.
I can think of one 💩
Thank you so much for these videos.
Im loving this episode..the interviewer does a great job with these subjects and the philosophers
Thank you for posting.
That's an astonishingly good interview!
Thank you! for this jewel of an interview philosophy overdose
Felt privileged to have heard both Mr. Bryan Magee and Herbert Marcuse ! What amazing articulation of complex and difficult relationships of mind and matter at the individual as well as societal level.
We had this type of program through the 70s and 80s on BBC2 from ten o clock on til shut down at about 0100.
Then satellite dishes appeared and this was replaced.
'amazing articulation of complex and difficult relationships of mind and matter at the individual as well as societal level.'
lol. Cringe.
@@catharperfect7036yeah, lol. what a sack of cshit it really is.
"What amazing articulation of complex and difficult relationships of mind and matter at the individual as well as societal level."
-The man articulated his pure evil ideology. You can see his mind poison in our society now.
All I heard was irrational blablablabla
Thanks for this
Magee: "Well the politicians certainly aren't dominated by the great economic powers but anyway..." 21:50
Arguable in 1978. Did not age well.
Marcuse had the better assessment in my view.
Could just make out what sounded like a bit of a laugh from Marcuse after that 😆 wonder if he knew about the Powell memo and the maneuverings to take control of the Supreme Court that really gained steam in the 70s
Oh Look! It's the Devil!
Learned a lot. I enjoyed it a lot - Love these ideas as I was stuck into the Frankfurt school
An example of the importance of abilities of the interviewer. Magee was amazing.
He did a reasonably good job of holding Marcuse to account, but his understandable enmity occasional got the better of him. One of the reasons that Magee’s approach has become so appealing in the age of the superstar “thinker” is his impersonality, but it breaks down here, and it does impede on the discussion.
Magee's attempt to argue with Marcuse revealed the difference in depth of knowledge between a gadfly and a man of true learning. Marcuse ieas an intellectual in the best sense if the word.
@@benmcconaghy3313 That is such a cynical, and spiteful comment, not to mention empirically wrong. McGee might not be a thinker at the level of Marcuse, but he is a philosopher who has done much for the field itself. His book on Schopenhauer is widely considered a seminal work; he's written on Popper, Wagner, the History of Philosophy, and written several great books. In addition, he conducted the most extensive and mindful interview series for television about philosophy ever carried out to this day, introducing wider audiences to major figures, like Marcuse, Quine, Putnam, Chomsky, Williams, Ayer, etc.
To call Magee a "gadfly" is not only petulant, but stupid.
@@markofsaltburn It's quite moderate; he barely allows himself to formulate a couple rejoinders, but lets Marcuse have the last word and moves on with a respectful and jovial tone. I think it is overstating it to say that his demeanor 'breaks down'. Also, why do you say that he has "understandable enmity" against Marcuse, or the Frankfurt school?
@@danielsacilotto3196 You're being too polite to him. I would go further to say that it is an utterly ignorant and stupid comment typical of those who don't have the intellect to understand why McGee like most mainstream analytic philosophers are critical of the Frankfurt School and associated movements, and their activism against reason, rationality, clarity, realism, objectivism, and science (the enlightenment), which these self proclaimed "critics" stupidly caricature as no more than ideologies. Theirs is an intellect based solely on an anti-establishment sentiment combined with a superiority complex (to mask their inferiority complex) that they assume constitutes a genuine capacity for intellect and scholarship. It exemplifies the pinnacle of moral and intellectual arrogance - "don't you dare try challenging me, for I am The Challenger and the real critic, and I have justice and reason on my side"! It's precisely the kind of anti-intellectualism that Marcuse talks about and condemns at the start.
Grateful for yet another great interview by the master Magee. Awesome to hear Herbert Marcuse talking so openly and frankly about the errors and mistakes made by the left after the WWII.
So glad that this interview series survived. I don't agree with any of the "criticisms" or denigrations of Magee posted here. For example to call hin a gadfly!
Very interesting and worth watching.
"In short, the artist experiences a gap between the ideal and the real. This ability to entertain, at least theoretically, an ideal form of existence for humanity, while at the same time living in far less than ideal conditions, produces a sense of alienation in the artist. This alienation becomes the catalyst for social change. This function of art stays with Marcuse and will be developed further as he engages with psychoanalysis and philosophy.
As a dialectical thinker, Marcuse was also able to see both sides of the coin. That is, while art embodied revolutionary potential, it was also produced, interpreted, and distributed in a repressive society. In an oppressive/repressive society the forces of liberation and the forces of domination do not develop in isolation from each other. Instead, they develop in a dialectical relationship where one produces the conditions for the other. This can be seen throughout almost all of Marcuse’s writings and will be pointed out at different points in this essay. The task here is to take a look at how this dialectic of liberation and domination occurs within the context of Marcuse’s aesthetic theory. This should not be taken to mean that there will never be a point in time when human beings are liberated from the forces of domination. This simply means that if an individual group seeks liberation, their analysis or critique of society must come to terms with how things actually work at that moment in that society if any form of liberation is possible. As Marcuse saw it, there is a form of ideology that serves domination and creates the conditions for liberation at the same time. This will be discussed later. Also, there is a form of liberation that lends itself to be co-opted by the forces of domination.
Just as art embodied the potential for liberation and the formation of radical subjectivity, it was also capable of being taken up by systems of domination and used to further or maintain domination. This is the theme of Marcuse’s 1937 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture”. Culture, which is the domain of art, develops in tension with the overall structure of a given society. The values and ideals produced by culture call for the transcending of oppressive social reality."
Word salad
I concur !
@@leomoore3597 you are great I followed you :D
@@mehdicharife2335 if you can't read or understand the ideas of the words, yeah, I suppose it'd look like a word salad lol
Thanks for sharing this! 💜
Thank you
this is awesome
In the cold war background, it's understandable how the host himself is biased against Marxism. It's really ridiculous the host said "the democratically elected politicians in Western countries are certainly not dominated by great economic powers" .
"Inequality, Injustice, cruelty and destructiveness" compared to what?
and so on and so on and so on, it was with Marcuse that Zizek learn his most famous sentence.
The criticism of Marxism - that it fails to take sufficient interest in the individual - seems to be of great importance now. We live in an age of 'identity politics', where the concrete, living human being is reduced to an exemplar of an in-group of some sort ( you know them : white, black, straight, male, female, etc. - the whole menagerie). Following Marxian logic, society is itself reduced to a power struggle between said in-groups for the spoils of what remains of our civilisation. The huge irony is that such a simplistic, divisive and dehumanising analysis plays right into the hands of those whom Marcuse and his pals purported to oppose : the global economic elites and corporations who are quite happy to see a poor white man criticised and accused by a poor black man on the grounds of his whiteness, for example, instead of the two of them uniting against the rich elite! All of this is encouraged and facilitated by social media and the digital economy - itself owned and controlled by global corporations and billionaires. Some revolution.
The idea that contemporary "identity politics" adhere to "Marxian logic" is a grave misinterpretation of both Marx's analysis and Marcuse's. A very basis premise of "Marxian logic" is that categories like race and gender are ideologically superimposed over the actual material reality at hand - which, as you say, is a condition of fundamental conflict between an exploited mass and the ruling minority which encloses the surplus value generated by common labour (a point on which Marx would enthusiastically agree with you!)
Divide and conquer
exactly what wall street did with the "occupy" movement. they took advantege of the protester.s weakness when they saw in the negociations in group fighting and arguing about representation, equality, privilege etc. the left entered in those negociacions belly first, painting a big target on their vulnerabilities. then the elites used those fools as wedges for divide and hired them in pr and hr in their corpos. everything went to shit when the leftists became the tool of the elites. but of course, the left won.t admit that
Could it be that the reason you think Marx is so simple is that you haven't read him? The idea that Marxian exploitation is an ideological cultural designation that can be arbitrarily mapped onto any given identify group with zero connection to the material conditions of the labor process is exactly what Marx was arguing against
Please watch Bryan Magee's discussion on Marxism with Charles Taylor where he corrects this misunderstanding of Marx in the first 30 seconds of the video
I think it's revealing of the difference between 1978 and now (and also revealing of how Marx was on-point about the long-term developement of capitalism) that Magee's points, right around minutes 20 and 21, about how democracy in the West has "tamed" capitalism, did indeed seem, in 1978, like a knock-down argument against Marxian economic history. ... And now seem laughably pollyanna-ish and naive.
All the the categories that Marcuse just mentioned -- the ever-increasing concentration of economic wealth and power, the dominance of the economic over the political, etc -- did indeed seem to have been waning, not growing, from FDR to Carter, but since 1980, since Reagan and Thatcher, have come roaring back.
In addition to that, Marcuse specifically citing the women's liberation movement as a prime ground for furthering actual change in Western capitalist society seems directly on point, in the wake of the Supreme Court trying to destroy Rpe v. Wade, and attack other individual personal rights in the present time. That's as prophetic as it gets, unless you want to add Margaret Atwood or Doris Lessing to the discussion.
"Magee's points, right around minutes 20 and 21, about how democracy in the West has "tamed" capitalism, did indeed seem, in 1978, like a knock-down argument against Marxian economic history. ... And now seem laughably pollyanna-ish and naive."
This is spot on. The post-war consensus lasted 30 years max before capital got tired of its restraints and yearned for to be able to act unilaterally again...with overall disastrous effects for most of the world.
>Marx was on-point about the long-term developement of capitalism)
Hey, moron! Marx had to edit the second edition of _Capital_ because he failed to predict the rise in wages. He also failed to predict the creation of a global capitalist middle class from about 1990 to now. Marx's early anti-capitalism is basically similar to the anti-capitalism of the conservative religionists of his day. Faith in God and intuition of a dialectic are basically similar. Marxism is a mystical rationalization of the unfocused mind. You recall a Marxist/Existentialist philosophy professor who told me, "I want to kill someone, anyone!"
Just stopped the video at 21 mins and would have made this point if you hadn't already. I watched this when it was originally broadcast in 1978 and generally nodded along with Magee's implied disagreement with Marcuse. How much wiser and more prescient Marcuse's position looks (to me) after 45 years.
This is an excellent discussion... particularly relevant in today's CRT, DEI... and the rest of that dross
Considering this was filmed in 1978 the video quality of this interview is superb--like something filmed in the 2000s
1987, not 1978
@@otthoheldringUh, Marcuse died in 1979
@@otthoheldring Why correct people if you are ignorant of the answer?
This is excellent! I have never heard Marcuse himself speak before, only a very unpleasant simplification from some of his New Left interpreters.
The subtitles are wrong or missing in a lot of places. Is there some way I can contribute to them?
19:00 god this is amazing love his answer to the question and Magge is dumbfounded he knows he’s right the great economic powers practically puppeteer politics u wish this could continue
I hate to say it, but... Seems Marcuse's view is closer to where we are in the first quarter of the 21st Century than Magee's....
"To make sense of Marcuse’s position we must ask: what are these intolerable conditions and how are they produced? Philosophical anthropology and radical subjectivity are connected here insofar as the intolerable conditions that must be overcome by revolution or the radical act represent social distortions of the human essence. It is Marx and Hegel who provided Marcuse with a philosophical anthropology that discloses human essence and the social mechanisms by which it is distorted. The key category here is that of “alienation” which cannot be understood without examining the role of labor and objectification.
According to Marcuse, Hegel, and Marx, human beings develop through a self-formative process wherein the external world (nature) is appropriated and transformed according to human needs. Labor is one of the main areas for this self-formative activity. The idea that labor is an essential part of a self-formative process is what distinguishes Marx from the classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo, etc. In classical economics, labor is simply the means by which individuals make provisions for themselves and their families. In these theories labor is not viewed as that activity by which the human subject is constituted. The Marxian view of labor as a self-formative process is what makes possible the Marxian theory of alienation and revolution.
Marcuse argues that in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx shows how the role of labor as a self-realization or self-formative process gets inverted. Instead of having his or her subjectivity affirmed, the individual becomes an object that is now shaped by external, alien forces. Hence, Marx’s theory makes a transition from an examination of the self-formative process of labor to a critique of the forms of alienation caused by the historical facticity of capitalism. Within the historical facticity of capitalism
this fact appears as the total inversion and concealment of what critique had defined as the essence of man and human labor. Labor is not “free activity” or the universal and free self-realization of man, but his enslavement and loss of reality. The worker is not man in the totality of his life-expression, but something unessential [ein Unwesen], the purely physical subject of “abstract” activity. The objects of labor are not expressions and confirmations of the human reality of the worker, but alien things, belonging to someone other than the worker-“commodities.” (Marcuse 2005b: 104)
>Instead of having his or her subjectivity affirmed, the individual becomes an object that is now shaped by external, alien forces.
Hey, moron! Marx thought that the means of production shaped man thru subjective intuition.
Alienation-N.Branden, in _Capitalism_ by Ayn Rand.
@@TeaParty1776 Ayn Rand was a Russian fortuneteller and astrologist.. maybe you’re aware this is usually how crime happens (Alex jones) and it makes sense that law is becoming the dominant force and then of course you understand the deeper relationships between art and law obviously, and then of course you know all children are our children, so ultimately you know, you have to ask yourself: well how practical is human evolution? .. and am I willing to defend that In a society = freedom am I willing to participate in understanding that all communication is formal communication am I willing to approach this collectively? .. everyone’s answer should be yes but it should be dependent on the fact that we are all born with and can treat and can cure and should manage and control and contain all of the diseases we have Especially diseases that make us delusional The Nazis were delusional that’s a good example and then lately men and women alike are delusional about how they are treating their babies and other women and not looking at the deeper biological motivations and implications of that kind of behavior and how much it contributes to crime and endangering law-enforcement ultimately how much it contributes to human extinction A lot of people make the misconception that they can lead a double life and take away the rights of another individual as long as their children have rights it doesn’t work like that that’s not how it works we don’t have time we really need to buckle down and man up to reality.. I think it really is just a tremendous amount of immaturity and entitlement in the face of climate and social crisis
@@quantumfineartsandfossils2152 Can you summarize your wordy chaos?
Yeah for those of you commenting and claiming that I am Herbert Marcuse please please be careful and read and you’ll notice that I’m quoting Herbert Marcuse so these are his words so if you have a problem with what he’s saying you need to go to him OK good luck 👍
I think Magee had a very "naive" view of the political powers, as if they are independent and untouched by the economic sphere. And now we all now that is completely wrong.
Seems like "and so on and so on" is quite a popular spelling among marxists philosophers
Heard Zizek's voice, *sniff*
On the contrary . . .
And so on and so forth
@@S2Cents I hate toxic zizek hrs so entitled and full of shit
It’s the English translation of slavic version ‘ i tak dalej i tak dalej”
Oooph, Magee's bias laid bare. Lovely interview all in all though.
A caution...some of the auto-"translations" are ridiculously awry. Setting that aside, this is a very adeptly conducted interview, with candid and illuminating responses by Marcuse.
34:57 This part of the discussion, concerning the women's liberation movement, and then privileged "catalyst groups" working to "counteract the management and control of consciousness by the established power structure" are especially poignant. Did Marcuse imagine that they, respectively, would come to reinforce patriarchal modes of domination, and to actively exclude, immiserate, and oppress the working class?
This further lesson, that Marcuse did not live to see, is clear, and that is: only the working class (and a few class traitors hopefully) can be trusted with its own class interest.
There are a myriad of identities favoured or dismissed by the ruling class and its mainstream media sycophants, Marx described working class consciousness is the sine qua non of a potential mass movement with the power to overthrow the oligarchs. The only class consciousness functioning in the US (and Canada) is that of the ruling class who will promote anyone bearing any identity if they serve its interests.
I was meaning to give the examples of a man of colour who Malcolm X would have described as a house negro, Obama; and a thoroughly vicious (among many others) woman, Madeline Allbright.
Red Tsar is same as the white Tsar, read actual history sometimes
Surprising how Marcuse remarks about society speak about today situation
He knew exactly what was going down.
If you can assassinate a US president, demolish three towers in New York and still evade suspicion, you got the 21C pretty much wrapped up.
Surprising? This was the seed with which our society has been sown. The cultural Marxists now hold key positions in government institutions and ONGs and have been spreading their toxic ideology with the goal of subverting western society as we know it. This is a very well orchestrated plan
That is because wokeness is rooted in the Frankfurt school. See James Lindsay. Lather, rinse, repeat.
@@ohiomom100 "wokeness" is a contemporary word nor applicable to Frankfurter school at all
@@marcobrambilla2439 wokeness is a fruit of the Frankfurt school. They invented the concept that makes one's life unbearable.
Magee: I come to bury Herbert, Adorno, Karl and Freidrich not to praise them.
Magee does a great job. Remember this is a TV interview. And it is also great there is a critical bent to it, as, there should be in an intellectual discussion, something that we see so little of in these days.
Those were the days! Citizens, not Consumers... 🌈🦉
Sample him at 29:48. and at 38:12. Wunderschön! (A feminist)
You don't HAVE to be consumer in a Capitalist society. Isn't that cool? Nobody is forcing you! 😀
@@youreshouldoflearntgrammer8277you don’t understand how consumption is being m defined
Hitler keep the Frankfurt school social engineering out of Europe and they were sponsored by Columbia University here in the states they just didn’t get up and leave voluntarily. Hitler feared these people and rightly so.
Hitler feared them? No, many of them were Jewish, had they not left they would have been murdered.
Any society that doesn't wish to decay fears these types.
@@catharperfect7036☝️Hitler head
And is just the beginning..... exelente... interview.... more deshumanity....👽🫵👍
Seems like Magee doesn’t care too much for Marcuse, based on his questioning
Yes, it is clear that Magee disagrees with Marcuse, although he doesn't state it explicitly. Nevertheless, I felt that Magee was respectful throughout, and tried his best to put aside his disagreements and flesh out the Frankfurt school's theories as well as possible.
@@lordtains Magee with his B.A. in History and t.v. career gave him so much credibility. Marcuse was in over his head.
Not at all. Professor Marcuse kept his poise throughout the discussion, and I was very impressed at how he didn't try to dodge any of the very direct objections the Mr. Magee was laying out about Marxist theory. They were both very cordial despite coming at the subject from fairly opposite viewpoints. Marcuse was also not throwing too much jargon into his responses, or political rhetoric. Contrast this discussion with the grudge matches and hot takes that you see on American mainstream media, no matter what the topic! High quality discussion..Thanks.
For a reason. Marcuse was a fraud.
@@fastinbulvis2223 How was he a fraud?
When Marcus jealously eyes art for the colonization of packaged political symbolism did anyone forsee that that very spark was in grave danger. And now we have it, free art has been cancelld by the children of the Frankfurt school
21:00 maybe he said: "introduced by Hegel himself" ?
I think it was "Engels himself"
I like Magee but he is hugely out of his depth when talking about politics with such naive assumptions about who controls policy and the economy. Marcuse totally gets who's actually pulling the strings and its not Joe Public.
How is the good Dr. Johnson?
Glad I did not do my Ph.d on Marcuse. In my 70's, I see Vedanta as the Metaphysical Truth. In my 20's, I thought Sartre had it all. How wrong I was.
I'm glad I spoke to people who escaped the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign. 20 million citizens murdered. Socialism always leads to a bloody reign of terror, and yet as charlatans in public education always lie to their students "well, that wasn't real socialism. One of these days we'll get it right, and have the utopia"......(that Marxists always promise but never deliver). How many millions of people does THE STATE decide they get to kill? That's what students should ask every time.
31:37 (aesthetics)
24:49 (Hegel)
He died a year after
7:47
Thank you Marcuse for helping create the insanity we are living in today.
The insanity we live in today is due to liberal capitalism
@@remotefaithAbsolutely not at all.
dito
I love Marcuse, but it must be noted how consistently impressive is Magee .
Marcuse is Satan in human flesh. His repressive tolerance (among many other cancerous ideas) is pure evil. This man came into the US and spread his poison on college campuses. Please explain what you love about Marcuse and how he made the world better.
Ah yes, the beginning of the end
Exactly!
The German accent is not thick enough
Gotta love the gentility of hostility on display here. Note my man has never asked anybody in this series why they don’t just give up on Hume, Locke or Mill, no matter how trenchant the criticism. But Marx can be binned. It is genteel, but it sure as heck isn’t subtle.
It was funny seeing him insist that politicians are uninfluenced by economic powers given the widespread cynicism of today.
The philosophies of Hume, Locke, and Mill didn't result in millions of deaths.
@@johannagel4520 oh, yes they did. What do you know about the history of the British Empire?
@@johannagel4520 Didn’t they? Or do you somehow think the millions who died under the British Empire, its American post-script and so-called Liberalism in general don’t count in the toting up of moral culpability?
@@wlf7184 A facile comparison.
magee's disdain of marxism unfortunately limits this discussion and certainly hasn't aged well
Funny to hear him conflate the development of nuclear energy with dehumanization. 😂
22:04 interviewer gets owned on his narrowminded and completely incorrect liberal world view and he knows it too; his excuse "have to let that pass reluctantly". Brotherman; u got shrekt cuz ur theories dont hold up; trust me im 45 year from the future turns out Herbert was correct and you were about as wrong as one can possibly be; yet your incorrect theory still exists today and THAT is the truly sad part!
10:00
He admits to being stupid, yet is willing to say he knows how society should be structured. Where is Socrates when you need him?
He was killed
Seems like he failed to realise the effects that the falling rate of profit would have on society & the further concentratjon if wealth that would occur. Society was far more ripe for revolution in 1968 and it strikes me that he was on the wring side of history.
"Alienated performances"
Bryan Magee makes Some astonishingly naïve points.
Magee really believes the liberal fairytale?! Ahahahaha!
Nice interview and both polite.
What fairytale do you believe?
There are moments of true “lib brain” coming from Magee here, but let’s take the year into account as important context and not be so harsh on him. There absolutely were reasons to think in 1977 that liberalism and capitalism were succeeding well enough, and to “believe in” Marxism was a joke, and basically just that: “belief”, as in near religious and/or faith in it. Nearly a half century later Marcuse looks much better to us than he may have then (though even then those who understood what he was on about could understand why he’s correct).
Perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher of all time.
Exactly. People did not and still don't understand how his philosophy leads to absolute evil and moral decay.
Go read 'Repressive Tolerance' ... and reassess any praise you have for Marcuse.
Glad someone mentioned this.
It’s amazing to see the source of such a terrible idea sit on a couch and speak as if his claims need no substantiating, as if he understands the human psyche AND it’s environment such that the future is simply known.
What is this work about?
@@mehdicharife2335 “left wing good, right wing bad” is essentially the thesis
Something tells me OP confuses a sentence or two from a Jordan Peterson podcast is sufficient for having read the book itself.
@@thomaskilroy3199 An INCREDIBLY destructive ideology.
Been watching a lot of Magee recently, and not even the representative of Heidegger was as hard to understand.
There appears to actually be no effort at all on Marcuse’s part to make what he’s saying appreciable on an everyday level.
The Marxist jargon is in full effect, and there’s no getting under it.
Then you notice that when Magee asks why you don’t just drop Marxism, Marcuse just says ‘because it’s still right, it predicted what has happened’, and we don’t really get to the specifics of what that means i.e. just how accurately Marxism predicted what is happening, or even what it is factually that ‘is happening’.
He mentions the centralising of wealth and power, but Magee raises a single example of how that might not be what is happening, Marcuse renders it ambiguous, and then they move on.
Nothing is substantiated.
I understand there are time constraints and a mild communication barrier, but it feels like Marcuse glossed over everything that he in fact believes, and most of what the Frankfurt school believed, content to just say they were ‘important’ and ‘brilliant’.
I watched Heidegger and I learned roughly what Heidegger said and believed and why it matters.
I watched Marcuse and I learned that there are people who believe that Marxism can be used with psychology, and that whatever *that* involves there are people doing it and so isn’t that one helluva thing.
Marxism is the only philosophy that I come away from feeling like I’ve been to church instead of the lecture hall.
Thomas, have you read any Marx?
I'm genuinely interested because I didn't think this was particularly jargon-heavy.
Marcuse was a Marxist philosopher, so it's to be expected that he's going to refer to Marxist concepts - but I think he explained his basic idea very clearly: we live in a world of untold material riches, but are still tied to social structures which mean that a large percentage of people are hamstrung by debt and/or forced to live lives defined by survival rather than anything more lofty like wellbeing / creativity / accomplishment.
@iwouldprefernotto ‘We are tied to social structures that [force us to focus on survival instead of better things]’ is in itself a very ambiguous statement.
It’s terms are all baggage-laden and multifaceted and so require a lot of interpreting. Indeed I can think of a lot of non-Marxian ways to argue it as true.
More importantly it’s not really an abstract statement despite how it’s phrased; it’s equal parts empirical and ethical in content.
Stating it merely as an abstract and not explaining it further is like saying ‘two plus two equals a victory’, or ‘the motion of the clouds indicate a tragedy’.
It’s quite a knot of a statement.
When you try to get to grips with a philosopher it is not normally the case that you have to pick up an entire worldview right off the bat, the first principles are generally clearly accessible and context-independent.
But Marxism is very context dependent. Marx worked off a lot of assumptions about capitalism as it manifested in his time, and it shows, for instance, in how he defines class very differently to how most people encounter it naturally today.
Isn’t it fair to say that much of the work of people like Marcuse have done is in abstracting what capitalism really means and trying to make it more context-independent, more timeless in its first principles?
But the fact they retain the Marxist framing means you need to work backwards through a dated framing to arrive at its abstractions.
It fundamentally feels post-hoc.
I’ve never heard Marxism reconstructed out of any new and improved first principles that can be observed close to the bone of the human condition.
That’s the sort of thing I was hoping to hear Marcuse have a stab at, but at this point I get the sense it’s important that that doesn’t get done so that people just interpret him leniently.
You shouldn’t have to have read Marx to understand the gist of Marcuse, or ideally even to understand him fully, no more than you should have to read Kierkegaard to understand Heidegger.
You just have your own bias, or weren't in the mood. Outside of a few basic terms like "class" and "alienation", which EVERYBODY by now OUGHT to be familiar with, I find Marcuse's speech pretty clear. Use the subtitles, for gossake.
@Pavel Axentiev it’s impatience from experience, not bias.
I judge Marxism for this apparent feature, I don’t pre-judge.
Perfect example:
‘Alienation’ is matter of factly a vague term, it accommodates anything that makes a ‘worker’ feel disenfranchised or exploited, from poor wages by their own intuitions, to their vote not making a visible impact on a referendum, to the existential rage at being bayoneted by a gestapo-thug.
It practically stands as a wastebasket term that actually sees more use thanks to its vagueness, because it makes it an empty vessel into which people squeeze their a priori gripes.
Equally so it doesn’t inherently plug into the Marxist deduction game.
You can feel disenfranchised at an entirely humanistic or utilitarian level.
If I swing my golf-club and I don’t get a hole-in-one, you could very well argue that ‘I am unhappy with the results of my efforts’ could be as well stated in terms of ‘feeling alienated from golf’, especially if I’m really considering the whole thing a trial on my patience and abilities, such that I’m considering abandoning golf as a system altogether.
You say I ‘should’ know what the words mean already, but that’s just begging the question. Why is there a new lingo that requires learning?
I’ve read a fair bit of philosophy at this stage, why is Marxism providing a linguistic barrier?
And again, why is it, unique to the Magee interviews I’ve watched so far, that the interviewee didn’t give a crash-course on how to pierce that language barrier?
Every other interviewee has done it.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Your comment is a perfect example of feeling alienated from the interview :D
Then, again, maybe you should put up a revolt. Which you apparently did. Thus, your comments are in themselves an actual proof of the correctness of the Marxist doctine. Just kidding, of course.
I don't even have a particular interest in the subject, just wanted to point out that from my rather minimally informed perspective (a couple of videos here and there, little knowledge of the subj per se) I didn't find the interview to have the faults that you described. Perhaps it's the different emphases that we place.
“Far more attention must be paid to the women’s movement.” Yes.
@xvonpocalypse3435 should have paid more attention to it
Yes, as a destructive movement.
Whats a woman?
Big brain comment section lol
femenine qualities end up beign a machistic views oif what is femenine,well no.
Marcuse was wrong! 😂
"We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control” Hey, philosopher, leave the kids alone!
So this is the guy who shat out the turd we now know as wokism.
☝️comprehension of a fruit fly
I guess so
the seeds of wokeness ....
The seeds of not being an ignorant idiot.
I remember 68 so very well. And what came of it? The nonsense of today: Trump, hedge funds, environmental collapse, and passive university students.
post hoc non est propter hoc
biden, johnson,hancock,truss,sunak.....
>passive university students
From Marxist professors who rationalize the evasion of free will.
Wokeism, chaos, insanity
@@youreshouldoflearntgrammer8277 Focus your mind or modern culture will drivye you bonkerss.
I had to read all of his shallow Marxist rubbish and have never seen him. Good to see that he is as embarrassing in person as his writings.
And now, nearly 50 years on, we can see the truly evil results of this evil man.
A singularly unpleasant person caught entirely in the web of his own ideological construction.
Your powers of persuasion are a gift.
neurolinguistic cults
He looks like he’s part of a certain ethnic group
Jews
Embarrassing anime profile pics
@@youreshouldoflearntgrammer8277 "I'll point out his pfp, that will show him 🤓"
what about them Jews?
@@RingJando satanists who wanna destroy white Christians and the western world