Category Archives: New Utopia

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Few intellectuals have been so closely identified with a social movement as Herbert Marcuse was with the transatlantic New Left in the late 1960s. In 1966, the yearOne-Dimensional Manwas issued in paperback, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) included the book in their political education curriculum, alongside the works of C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, Paul A. Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Following its translation into German and Italian the next year, it quickly became recognized as a primary ideological source for young radicals in Europe, according to Hubert J. Erb in theAustin Statesmenin 1967. In the upheavals that rocked universities during the first half of 1968, Marcuse, the prophet of the New Left, was suddenly everywhere. Students in Berlin held a banner proclaiming Marx, Mao, Marcuse! an alliterative slogan more elaborately formulated by demonstrators in Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword! Although dismissed by most liberal critics and increasingly denounced by a motley chorus of conservatives, left sectarians, and Soviet apparatchiks,One-Dimensional Man maintained its position as the bible of the New Left through the end of the decade, providing, as American commentator Allen Graubard noted in 1968, a special philosophical vocabulary that graced New Left journals as if it were part of ordinary language.

This article aims to introduce and critically reevaluateOne-Dimensional Manfor todays socialists. We begin with the books enthusiastic reception within the New Left, capturing why and how it resonated with a generation of young activists in the 1960s. Marcuses resolute moral and political opposition to the destructive direction of late capitalist society helped resuscitate the sense that the status quo was unsustainable and change was urgent. Unfortunately, however, some of the books weakest aspects such as its offering as alternatives to the status quo various paths (cultural radicalism, new subjects of history, ultraleftism) that proved to be dead ends were often its greatest draws for its New Left readers, something Marcuse himself understood and resisted.

In important ways, the New Left missed core aspects of Marcuses critical project that are worth retrieving for today. We turn to reconstructing and evaluating Marcuses moral and materialist analysis of late capitalism. We lay out the philosophical basis for his critique and his insistence on the breadth and depth of the moral commitments to freedom, equality, happiness, reason, and peace undergirding socialist politics. We then examine Marcuses materialist social theory, which raised critical questions about the gap between socialist theory and social conditions in the affluent society that resonate in our own moment. Our interpretation emphasizes the overlooked degree to which the classical Marxism of the Second International provides the underpinnings ofOne-Dimensional Man. Marcuses materialist analyses of working-class integration through consumerism, a rising standard of living, and the culture industry aimed to explain capitalisms unexpected resilience and absorptive capacities.

It would ultimately be left both to Marcuses contemporaries Ralph Miliband and Andr Gorz and to todays socialists to draw out the political implications of Marcuses questions and method and to formulate a socialist strategy adequate to the advanced capitalist world. Though he insisted that the basic premises of Marxist social theory remained correct a distinct and underappreciated quality of the book a sense of futility with the theorys practical implications in the present, as well as fidelity to a vision of social change as total historical rupture, drew Marcuse to paint an imaginative but inadequate picture of his moment as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels proverbial night in which all cows are black, void of possibilities for radical social transformation.

There are, we suggest, two souls of Herbert Marcuse on the one hand, the critical and materialist; on the other, the moralistic and defeatist each with its own significance for todays activists. We close by suggesting thatOne-Dimensional Mans decline from its previous stardom may offer todays Left a chance to learn from its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings regarding commodified liberation, while leaving firmly in the past its political Manichaeism and culturalist despair.

Hebert Marcuse, a German-Jewish philosopher, lived a turbulent but scholarly life that hardly seemed to set him up to become a household name and father to a mass movement. He grew up in Berlin, and though he was politicized by the abortive German Revolution of 191819, he soon went to Freiburg to study philosophy under Martin Heidegger. (Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers council during the revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.) Blocked in mainstream German academic circles with the rise of Nazism, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) and, in the late 1930s, emigrated to the United States to teach at Columbia University. During World War II, Marcuse worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helping to guide the war effort against the Nazis. He eventually returned to teaching, first at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego, where he became a bte noire of the Right, facing the condemnation of then governor Ronald Reagan.

Among Marcuses major writings, his first book published in English,Reason and Revolution(1941), remains one of the best interpretations of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and an expression of the engaged philosophy that he would continue to champion throughout his career. His other most important works were:Eros and Civilization (1955), a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud that aimed to historicize modern psychology, investigate the psychic sources of domination, and articulate a utopia of fulfillment and sexual liberation; The Aesthetic Dimension(1978), which argued for the centrality of art, imagination, and sensuality to human emancipation; and, of course,One-Dimensional Man(published in 1964, but substantially finished in the late 50s), which is the subject of this article.

Indeed, it may seem especially surprising thatOne-Dimensional Man, widely regarded as abstruse and pessimistic in the extreme, should have become so deeply insinuated in the discourse of a mass movement. While Marcuse promised, in his preface, that his argument would vacillate between two contradictory hypotheses that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future and that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society One-Dimensional Manwas virtually silent on the second point, ultimately presenting a critical theory of society with no liberating tendencies capable of translating it into reality. Reviewers charged Marcuse with overlooking the obvious social ferment in American society at a time of escalating civil rights and antiwar militancy. Others excoriated Marcuse for characterizing the welfare state as a container of radical energies rather than an achievement by and for the working class. Although remarking that qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without, Marcuse even expressed skepticism toward the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. This great refusal to name possibilities in the present, this maddening tendency to see all apparent opposition as always already absorbed into and reinforcing the system, followed from the traditional materialist framework of Marcuses analysis, on the one hand, and the Luxemburgian quest for a total negation of the existing order a social force capable of breaking out of this whole on the other.

Ultimately, it is the depth of Marcuses quest for revolutionary rupture, and his insistence on its necessity, that accounts for the impact ofOne-Dimensional Manon the youth of affluent nations. Even if the book suggested that such a rupture was nowhere on the horizon, its account of the domination and repression subtly pervading advanced capitalist society confirmed the unarticulated observations of many newly politicized activists who were, moreover, enchanted by Marcuses expansive conception of liberation and his willingness to speculate about a utopian future. While the books departures from orthodox Marxism caused less shrewd critics to conclude that he had retreated into the realm of Hegelian idealism, the Marxologist George Lichtheim correctly recognizedOne-Dimensional Man, upon its release, as the introduction of Western Marxism to an American audience. To Lichtheim, the book was a portent of things to come, and, indeed, the few hopeful passages in the book seemed to anticipate the social unrest coming from exactly the groups Marcuse identified as those who form the human base of the social pyramid the outsiders and the poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions. Thus did Marcuses elegy for the revolutionary working class intensify an ongoing search for new subjects of world-historical transformation, despite his explicit warnings that no such subject existed.

It is sometimes said of Marcuse that the students who follow him havent the slightest idea what he means, theWashington Post observed in 1968. Initial reviewers cautioned, This is not an easy book, noting its difficult syntax and disquieting aporetic conclusions. The ambiguities ofOne-Dimensional Man are legion. Does Marcuses argument depend, as Alasdair MacIntyre charged, on a crude and unargued technological determinism? Is his technological order in fact a political-economic system or not? Does he describe class exploitation, or universal enslavement to the apparatus of domination? While oblique references to the particular interests that organize the apparatus evince a class analysis, much of the language in the book including its very title aligns with conventional mid-century humanistic discourse. Indeed, while it was possible for one reviewer to describe the book as decidedlynotjust one more journalistic work on the alienation of modern man, R.D. Laing, writing in the New Left Review, drew the opposite conclusion. Anticipating much of the books reception, Laing channeled what he took to be the lament at its core: Will man be able to re-invent himself in the face of this new form of dehumanization?

To Marcuses New Left interpreters, at least one point was unequivocal: the working classes were bought off, a conservative force, leaving, three SDS theorists wrote in 1965, virtually no legitimate places from which to launch a total opposition movement. Invoking Marcuse against calls like Bayard Rustins for a coalition politics anchored in the trade union movement, these activists looked beyond purportedly oppositional groups that had succumbed to the lures of parliamentarism and the welfare state, calling instead for a thoroughly democratic revolution led by the most oppressed those least captured by existing institutions. But while they looked to the urban poor (as opposed to the working class), by 1968, the search for a revolutionary subject that was carried out under the sign ofOne-Dimensional Man just as often led to college students, disaffected intellectuals, and the new working class of salaried technicians and professionals. Within SDS, opponents of the workerist proposals put forward by the Progressive Labor faction drew heavily on the ideas of Herbert Marcuse to support an approach to organizing groups outside the traditional, narrow industrial working class. In Europe, students cited Marcuse on behalf of their view of the university as a nexus of revolutionary power. For his part, Marcuse at times seemed to encourage this reading. When asked about the radical forces in the world in July 1968, he placed the intelligentsia, particularly the students at the top of the list, followed only by minorities in the ghetto. They alone not the working class resisted incorporation.

This turn away from the labor movement accompanied other shifts in perspective: from exploitation to alienation, and from class to consciousness, as the source of radical opposition. As one popular underground newspaper,Berkeley Barb, summarized the argument of One-Dimensional Manin May 1968, Only those groups on theoutside of automation and progress the unemployed, the blacks and minorities, the students think. Late-1960s enthusiasts of cultural revolution, such as Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, enlisted Marcuse in their Romantic attacks on consumerism and technology, dispensing with the materialist underpinnings of his analysis and, as Russell Jacoby noted, conflating his critique of instrumental reason with a subjectivist abandonment of reason itself. By a sleight of hand, Roszak cited Marcuse in order to unmask Marxism as the mirror image of bourgeois industrialism, guilty of the same soulless hyperrationality as the society it ostensibly opposes. For Reich, meanwhile, the totalizing ideology-critique inOne-Dimensional Man had demonstrated that the source of domination is not in the social relations of production but in consciousness, attitude, and lifestyle. Nobody wants inadequate housing and medical care only the machine, he explained:

Nobody wants war except the machine. And even businessmen, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in America. They are all fellow sufferers.

While it is true that Marcuse could hardly be held responsible for these depoliticized corruptions of his ideas, it is telling that he felt compelled to respond to them more than once.

In fact, Marcuses drift away fromOne-Dimensional Manbegan almost from the moment it landed on bookshelves, as he attempted, in one historians words, to break out of the theoretical box he had placed himself in with that book. Writing in theInternational Socialist Journal in 1965, he declared, The contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger, thereby guarding against the impression that advanced capitalism had achieved permanent stability. Speaking to leftist students in Berlin the following year, he waxed enthusiastic about the militant Liberation movements in the developing countries and picking up a theme that would become dominant for the rest of the decade the alienated youth of the affluent nations. By 1967, he had come to view the counterculture as representing a total rupture with the ideology of advanced capitalism, a force heralding a total trans-valuation of values, a new anthropology and the development of needs that the existing political and economic system could not satisfy. The student uprisings of 1968 reinforced Marcuses growing conviction that the only viable social revolution which stands today is the Youth and that the New Left today is the only hope we have. So profoundly did this belief in these groups emancipatory potential shift Marcuses social theory that his 1969 bookAn Essay on Liberationwas initially to be titled Beyond One-Dimensional Man. In the 1970s, even as he worried over the turn to the right (counterrevolution) in US politics, he would embrace ecology and especially the womens movement perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have as pointing the way to a qualitative break with capitalist society.

In the final analysis, however, Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory. The student movement, the hippie counterculture, the radical intelligentsia these werecatalystgroups with a preparatory function. Their task was not revolution, but radical enlightenment; lacking a mass character, they could at best move the broader population from false to oppositional consciousness. Their signal achievement was having called into question the prevailing structure of needs and freed imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason. Marcuse applauded the New Left but cautiously warned his readers not to overrate its significance. The rebellions in Paris in May 1968, while encouraging as a mass action, were not a revolution, and the American campus revolts of that season in no way changed the fact that the situation in the United States was not even pre-revolutionary. Even at his most utopian, Marcuse inserted escape clauses like the following:

By itself, this opposition cannot be regarded as agent of radical change; it can become such an agent only if it is sustained by a working class which is no longer the prisoner of its own integration and of a bureaucratic trade-union and party apparatus supporting this integration.

Although he insisted that the traditional idea of the revolution and the traditional strategy of the revolution had been surpassed by the development of . . . society, Marcuse confessed in 1968, In spite of everything that has been said, I still cannot imagine a revolution without the working class.

By the end of the 1960s, it was clear to Marcuse that while the Great Refusal he had predicted in the conclusion toOne-Dimensional Manhad materialized, it was bound to remain a mere gesture even a reactionary confusion of personal with social liberation if it could not reawaken the working class from its slumber. And yet he was extremely pessimistic about the development of revolutionary class consciousness in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). For this reason, he strongly condemned New Left intellectuals who sneered at the student movement and retreated into vulgar Marxism, declaring in 1970:

To a great extent it was the student movement in the United States which mobilized the opposition against the war in Vietnam. . . . That goes far beyond personal interest in fact, it is basically in contradiction to it and strikes at the heart of American imperialism. God knows it is not the fault of the students that the working class didnt participate. . . . Nothing is more un-bourgeois than the American student movement, while nothing is more bourgeois than the American worker.

Statements like this one hastened the death of late-1960s Marcuse-mania. Already in 1968, he was booed by students at the Free University of Berlin for inadequately affirming their excitement about the supposed fusion of Third World and proletarian revolutionary forces. A Revolution is waiting to be made, one disappointed former admirer complained, and he offers us California metaphysics. A study of campus bookstores conducted in late 1969 found thatOne-Dimensional Manhad been surpassed in sales by the works of Black Power militants, such as Eldridge CleaversSoul on IceandThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, and a string of paeans to cultural radicalism (RoszaksThe Making of a Counter Culture, Abbie HoffmansRevolution for the Hell of It, and LaingsThe Politics of Experience). Marcuses defense of the university, his willingness to condemn violence, his concerns about the anti-intellectualism that had infected the New Left, and his calls for organizational discipline in the years that followed further diminished his standing. Although more than 1,600 people turned out to see him speak at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 1971, many in the audience were dismayed by his failure to discuss the joyful possibilities of youth culture. I have always rejected the role of a father or grandfather of the movement, he told Psychology Today. I am not its spiritual adviser.

So, what exactly was Marcuses theory, as laid out inOne-Dimensional Man? How much was it a product of and subject to the limits of its time? What remains from the work? We will focus specifically on the social theory of the work, on which Marcuses ideology-critique of culture and philosophy rested, which was the books greatest influence and is most relevant for left-wing readers today.

One-Dimensional Man, most of all, is a resolute, unsparing, and honest depiction of a monstrous society, set for destruction, whose possibilities for change seemed far dwarfed by the forces of the status quo. The society Marcuse analyzed had more than enough technological ability to be decent and humane; instead, it teetered on the edge of destruction, preserved deep injustices, and relied on mass quiescence engineered by systematic manipulation. It was a sick, insane society that passed itself off as reasonable and orderly.

Marcuses call to radicalism rested on three main diagnoses of mid-century capitalism that have only shown signs of intensifying as the ruling class has tightened control:

One-Dimensional Man, then, offers the case for the continuing relevance of the Marxist critique of capitalism. But what about the theorys understanding of collective action and social change? If social change is so urgent, why is society characterized by such a muted opposition?One-Dimensional Mananswered by attempting to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse is insistent that an adequate explanation for working-class quiescence will have to be a materialist one. Something deep must have changed in the economy and society for mass consciousness to shift as it has. It is difficult to understand what that thing is, since the mid-century United States was surely still capitalist, characterized by the same injustices and systemic dynamics. Moreover, Marcuse treats as his point of departure what we might call the basic strategic formula of classical Marxism (broadly, from Marx and Friedrich Engels through the Second International and ending with the last attempts of international revolution of the early Third International), as the only rational theory for comprehensive social change.

That formula, more or less, runs as follows:

working-class majority + party + crisis = socialist revolution

The emerging working-class majority has particular structural advantages for exercising power, with their numbers, their concentration and accompanying capacity to organize, and the power of their strikes to shut down production and touch the powerful where it most hurts. These workers saw their basic survival, let alone their thriving, as fundamentally threatened by capitalism, and they had the power to tear it down. They needed to be organized into a political party, in order to intervene on the level of the state, to develop a consciousness that things could be different, and to formulate a strategy for how to get there. (Of course, precisely these kinds of mass working-class parties had developed all over the advanced capitalist world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Finally, the persistence (and possibly radicalization) of generalized capitalist crisis would afford opportunities for dramatic revolutionary change, in which a class-conscious party would lead the majority toward a new, truly democratic order. (This theory sometimes goes by the name of Kautskyism, after its authoritative expositor, Karl Kautsky, inThe Class Struggle(1892), The Road to Power (1909), and other works.)

Marcuse argued that the conclusion of the Marxist theory of social transformation still uniquely followed from the premises, but that those premises no longer applied to the world in any obvious way. Some sinister combination of defeat and partial victory had paralyzed politics.

The interesting task ofOne-Dimensional Man is that, though it accepts both the necessity of fundamental social change especially given the severity of the threat of nuclear war and the irrational destructiveness of the social order and the classical Marxist formula of how to get there, it argues that social change has undermined the latter without providing any alternative. (This was a common problem for many heterodox [ex-]Marxists at the time.) Its a work that admits to beingstuck in a way that was both intellectually forthright and so unsatisfying that Marcuse himself and especially his epigones would search for easy ways out to escape the dilemma.

Beyond describing these matters and giving force to the kind of impossible frustration they must cause in anyone who reflected on the matter, Marcuse also laid out a hypothesis as tohowthis had happened. Marcuse argues that it was precisely the accomplishments of the working class and their institutions in the face of the last crisis that were standing in the way of the further, necessary change. There is perhaps no more powerful analysis of the capacity of capitalist society to absorb opposition and commodify liberation thanOne-Dimensional Man. Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.Another way he had of expressing this was the intertwining of the perfection of the means of production and the means of destruction, pithily summarized in the juxtaposition of the welfare and warfare state. Social democracy was, in this view, the enemy of democratic socialism.

One of the main achievements of the working-class movement was its cutting off the logic of immiseration characteristic of the rise of capitalism and creating the power to extract profound concessions from capital in the form of high wages and the welfare state. (It should be noted that Marcuse seems at times to severely overestimate capitals ability and willingness to accede to these demands in the text.) This increased standard of living, Marcuse insisted, was a real achievement, and was not to be denied as the basis for any real conception of human freedom.

However, this achievement had, for Marcuse, a fundamentally depoliticizing effect in several ways. First, the rising standard of living itself produced a cooling effect. Revolution occurs when, among other things, a subordinate class sees the existing order as absolutely opposed to its life. People revolt for want of bread give them bread, and they dont revolt. By giving the working class something to lose besides its chains, and by eliminating total immiseration for the vast majority in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism had made systemic change less likely.

Consumerism, the form in which this rising standard of living is realized, also, Marcuse argues, blunts working-class politics. This is, first of all, for material reasons. Consumption is atomized, so that the modes of life that once brought working-class people together now help to drive them apart. Working-class popular culture is replaced by a commoditized mass culture. There is, too, an ideological analogue. The systems demonstrated ability to increase consumption is used to sideline any questions around lifes quality and meaning, the destructive externalities and militaristic uses of the production process, and the increasing concentration of control.

This changing standard of living was also based in changes in the labor process itself that, Marcuse argued, blunted opposition. Marcuse speaks of the mechanization of the production process increasingly relieving work of backbreaking destructiveness, as well as an increase in white-collar work and administration. These diminish the strength of the opposition of the worker to the capitalist and also diminish the leverage of workers. Again, these changes have an ideological analogue: the machine seems to play a role in production independent of any particular capitalist it appears merely as the product of reason itself, and thus relatively uncontestable.

Finally, there was an overt trade-off between the satisfaction of needs and autonomy. (This is the best way to understand his characterization of false needs versus true needs.) The labor movement more or less gave up contestation over the prerogatives of management, ceding control of the production process; in exchange, it got greater wages and benefits. Marcuse saw this trade-off on the factory floor as the microcosm of a larger social transformation. Privacy and the freedom to criticize were being hemmed in on all sides. But the offer of greater prosperity and security quashed opposition. This is the basis for Marcuses use of the word totalitarian to refer to liberal-democratic capitalist societies just as much as Nazi or Soviet ones.

Advanced capitalist society delivers the goods to the majority, making questioning and attempting to change the irrational system itself seem totally unreasonable.In some ways, Marcuse simply updated for the advanced industrial world the criticism of Juvenal against the bread and circuses of Rome. Even as capitalism increased the power of the ruling class, exposed individuals to systematic and many-sided manipulation, and condemned the vast majority to alienated work and a still-significant minority to poverty, it also offered a two-car garage and spectacular entertainment. The most powerful and hard-to-counter ideology of the period was built on that basis things are the way they are because technology and prosperity say so.

Thus, Marcuse provides a materialist theory of working-class integration through the rise in the standard of living (capitalism delivers the goods), the changing structure of occupations, and the atomization of the class through consumption. (Indeed, in classic Marxian fashion, it is the workers themselves who produce their own integration and subjugation. That is, it is ultimately their labor, their social action, and even now their consumption that reproduces the conditions of their own comfortable and bland unfreedom.) On top of these mechanisms are built a cultural totality that increasingly invades individual experience. Capitalist mass culture, due to its corporate structure, fundamentally sifts out information necessary for working-class people to get a bearing on how society works and overwhelms the individual with distractions and entertainment. Socialization through mass institutions such as the media reinforces the obstacles toward social change that shifts in capitalist production and the partial victories of social democracy erected.

Some of Marcuses insights have become common sense on the Left. For instance, that corporate media systematically narrows the scope of political contestation is the raison dtre for todays growing left media ecosystem, both independent and through established channels. We know that it is part of our fundamental task to expose how opposition parties are anything but when it comes to the sanctity of profits, the blind faith in technologys ability to solve social problems, and militarism.

There are other insights that seem fresh and alive and worth recovering in light of some of the theoretical problems todays socialists face. The reorientation of the Left around a program of class-struggle social democracy has allowed it to finally grow and engage with political reality. Marcuse at his best made normative, analytic, and strategic contributions that are worth revisiting in this context.

Let us begin with the normative. One of the freshest aspects ofOne-Dimensional Mantoday is its attempt to wed the critique of inequality with critiques of unfreedom, systemic irrationality, and destructiveness. Todays Left has rightly restored obscene inequality and redistribution to the center of its politics, thereby broadening its base and concentrating its efforts. Still, Marcuse pushes us to remain expansive in our indictment of capitalism by discussing forthrightly aspects of the good life that it denies most individuals. Our societys degradation of the natural world, everyday cruelty and meanness, trivial intellectual culture, boredom, depression, and puritanical preening are not incidental to our criticism but form a core plank of it. Politics and philosophy ought to clarify, not deny, the ordinary ways in which people express their happiness and dissatisfaction. This is a deeply sick society that denies important and ordinary goods to most human beings liberty, love, satisfaction, security, peace and it is rational to rebel against it.

Moreover, in cases where the normative and the practical-political are in some tension, we should admit the difficulty rather than elide it. It can be too easy to neglect the most fundamental issues of our, as Noam Chomsky puts it, race to the precipice nuclear weapons and climate change because they are related in only mediated, complex ways to economic interests. There is a temptation to either engage in empty moral gestures or push the problem aside to a later day. But the difficulty in formulating a concrete strategy around these issues is no excuse. Serious moral thinking and serious political economy must be joined.

Second, Marcuse offers analytic resources for considering what should be the central problem of the day: the separation of the working class from radical consciousness. Much like in the period of the New Left, the Left in the advanced capitalist world is still relatively isolated among the highly educated, despite wide popular appeals of a left-wing economic program. Marcuse both foregrounds the centrality of this question for any radical political strategy and offers a materialist method for analyzing the problem. He began with an analysis of changing class composition to understand the limits of oppositional politics with a narrow base since, however much he welcomed the New Left, he insisted that no fundamental transformation would occur without overcoming obstacles to working-class radicalism. He then offered an intriguing and still relevant hypothesis: that capitalist consumerism integrates through atomizing the neighborhoods, leisure, and general experience of working-class people. The intellectual task for todays Left is to size up the sources of working-class atomization at work and at home, and to approach these obstacles as organizers.

And while hardly an immediate problem, Marcuses analysis of how partial victory can paralyze oppositional forces, and how a high level of capitalist development turned out to mean a low level of revolutionary potential, are absolutely essential for the Lefts long-term strategic perspective. It bears repeating that todays Left should begin with the analysis of a relatively stable capitalism due to the near elimination of starvation in the advanced capitalist world and the spread of democratic and activist states. Furthermore, the Left should be ready for both severe defeat and partial incorporation. Are there ways that the Left can anticipate these plausible paths and prepare for them? Already, the increasing will to organize on the Left remarkably well-developed since the Occupy Wall Street days is a good sign, as organization is essential for maintaining continuity between high and low points of struggle. The rise of member-based organizations with vibrant internal cultures is again a promising development. Most of all, the Left needs to fight for structural reforms that increase the capacity to mobilize in the future and to find ways to plausibly resist the urge to demobilize with victories.

Yet Marcuse also articulated a form of defeatism that has plagued the Left of the advanced capitalist world. Marcuses liberatory and socialist message was largely abandoned and repressed with the defeats of the New Left, but his doubts as to thepossibilityof majoritarian left politics became the common sense of the New Left and the elite liberalism that would follow.

Critics of the strain of gloomy mid-century social theory Marcuse exemplifies often point to how wildly inaccurate the portrait of a fundamentally static world turned out to be. High growth rates, proportional wage growth, high unionization, and more were hardly permanent. But Marcuse was certainly not alone in failing to accurately predict how far we could fall backward. Some variation on the theory of state capitalism was widely held at the time. Everyone missed the possibility of a strong revanchist turn to a seemingly permanently discredited laissez-faire liberalism.

More problematic is Marcuses obfuscation of class theory. On the one hand, Marcuse depicts a society ruled by the few, which the vast majority has an interest in changing. As we mentioned, he continually returned to the necessity for working-class action in order to change society. On the other hand, when describing the various mediations that interpose themselves between this basic sociological analysis and late capitalism, he frequently presumes what he ought to prove that working-class people have been not only effectively adjusted to but have even happily embraced their position in late capitalism. He presumes that the modal consciousness in advanced capitalist society is working-class consent rather than resignation. This has significant consequences for the theory and for organizing. Resignation is a different habit of mind to break through for organizers, which requires different tools than how one might approach the converted.

Some of Marcuses contemporaries noted the illicit presumption of working-class enthusiasm for the social order of the day and its quietist implications. InOne-Dimensional Man, Marcuse cites a pamphlet by the Trotskyist Marxist-humanists on automation and speedup in Detroit, among other studies on the mechanization of the production process and the bonding of workers to the machine. Yet Raya Dunayevskaya, in her review ofOne-Dimensional Manin theActivist, would write that Marcuse leaves out entirely the central point of the pamphlet, thedivision between the rank and file and the labor leadership in their attitudes toward Automation. Marcuse supplemented references to this pamphlet with many references to bourgeois studies which maintain the exact opposite; Marcuse has [failed] to hear this powerful oppositional voice at the point of production itself, and instead chosen to listen to authors who claim that workers have been incorporated; he is wrong to adhere to the view that the new forms of control have indeed succeeded in containing workers revolt. Even as Marcuse plausibly pointed to the change in workers situations as being enough to present fundamental problems for a theory of social change golden chains are less likely to produce revolutionaries he less plausibly claimed that the overall reaction to this situation mostly eliminated tension, dissatisfaction, and opposition rooted in the production process, between workers and their bosses. Though he would insist that the underlying conflict of interests remained, the gap between imputed and actual interests threatened to become an abyss.

This provided a basis for New Left activists inspired by his works to reach the conclusion he refused to countenance, that there could be a socialist politics that somehow occurred independent of working-class radicalization. The cultural turn, with its overvaluation of interventions into culture and the discourse and the increasing orientation to middle-class concerns that this implied was both a plausible implication of Marcuses pessimism about integration and at the same time a conclusion he had to refuse given the critical theory of capitalist society. The theory also seemed to countenance a never-ending search for actors who were too marginalized to be incorporated into the system, less because of the moral importance of the flourishing of every human being than the conceit that, there, one might find the real revolutionaries. Both these trends are in no way immune to the commodification of opposition characteristic of late capitalist politics that Marcuse himself analyzed.

Moreover, Marcuses presumption about the form of political change necessary does not seem to have been subjected to the same critical consideration he insisted on applying to the working class. This vision of revolution is nobly related to the barricades of Marcuses youth in the betrayed German Revolution. Yet it is also rather all-or-nothing. The intransigent anti-capitalist consciousness that demanded the narrow debate of the period be burst open also threatened to lead to a kind of apolitical idealism.

This is, again, not unique to Marcuse the severity of the chasm between the Second and Third International was real enough to facilitate the rise of Nazism. And Marcuse was severely critical of the parties or sects of the Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals. But the weakness of the vision of social change in the idea of the Great Refusal is related to Marcuses dismissive criticism of the parliamentary participation of the Italian and French communist parties (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI and Parti communiste franaism, PCF) and silence on the civil rights movement. Marcuse had little hope that participation in liberal democratic politics or the achievement of significant reforms could meaningfully shift the dynamics of the system overall (and the totality of the system is what mattered, in the final analysis). He only saw how they served to further integrate the working class into an increasingly powerful system, handicapping opposition before it could really get off the ground.

This led generally to anovervaluationof subjective radicalism and anundervaluationof objective transformation. The hope Marcuse placed in the New Left was that their cultural subversion, aesthetic sense, demand for a less narrow and repressed life, and expanded sense of need could flow over into demand for a transformation of the basic structures of social life, especially the economy. et he seemed to have very little hope that mass politics focused on redistribution could overflowitsboundaries in the other direction.

Yet this was hardly the only conclusion one might reach from his premises. Starting from the premises that the working class of the advanced capitalist world was not likely to lead an insurrection, especially given its higher standard of living, while all the same it continued to suffer from alienation, exploitation, inadequate public investment, and diminished democracy, other theorists looked to develop a political strategy on these grounds that did not presume the same subjective integration that Marcuse did. Andr Gorz in France, influenced by the Left of the trade union movement in Italy, introduced in hisStrategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal the idea of non-reformist reforms aggressive measures that took on capitals prerogatives, built the capacity of labor, and addressed the wide range of needs that were unmet by advanced capitalist societies as a path forward for the Left. Ralph Miliband in Britain would underscore the importance of this idea for a socialist strategy adequate to the fact that no advanced capitalist state had ever collapsed and that revolutionary dictatorships had hardly proved fertile ground for socialist democracies. Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington in the United States insisted that mass politics oriented toward (removing conservative obstacles to) expanding a hobbled American social democracy could spill over into fundamental system change. These theorists suggested that the causal arrow could, and indeed must, move the other way, from political action to a deepening of revolutionary consciousness.

We have said that there are two souls of critical theory in Herbert Marcuse. On the one hand, there are roots of what has become a sort of common sense among some of todays liberals (however little they would be able to trace this to the Frankfurt School): the replacement of interest-based politics by ethics, self-expression, and identity; of class organization by cultural contestation; of majoritarian aspiration by elite pose. This is the long-standing tendency on the Left to flee the dilemmas of organizing a working-class majority in the advanced capitalist world, which is understandable but not tenable. On the other, there is the attempt to preserve and develop a socialist strategy adequate to the transformations of contemporary society mass politics, the welfare state, the further application of technology to production, and mass media. Indefatigably critical, morally expansive, and analytically materialist, it forthrightly analyzes, and then seeks to overcome, new obstacles to organizing a working-class majority to press for a transition to a new society.

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What Herbert Marcuse Got Right and Wrong - Jacobin magazine

ENDLESS CINEMATIC REMAKES and sequels, nostalgic TV shows like Stranger Things, music that sounds like it was made 40 years ago but just came out yesterday, social media accounts devoted to 80s iconography these cultural staples signal our collective desire to grab onto comforting, seemingly stable aspects of the past in the face of a vertiginously perpetual present and a future that feels precarious. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner explores how we might look back not in order to freeze-frame a false, glossed-over past, but to envision other futures.

In his previous book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech (2020), Tanner explored digital utopianism and nostalgia for a pre-digital era as two related conditions of our time. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, when old prejudices are starting again to percolate into the present, he argued, Big Techs algorithms resist any attempt to exit the feedback loop of amnesia. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Tanner deepens this exploration of the politics of progress, citing ways in which nostalgia circulates in our culture both innocuously and destructively, from retro-themed consumer goods to social media meme accounts to political slogans like Donald Trumps promise to Make America Great Again.

Like all complicated emotions and most things that make us human, nostalgia is a contradictory and slippery phenomenon. Paradoxically, ideologies of progress actually proliferate cultural nostalgia: Tanner illuminates the sneaky ways our very human need to look back and yearn for a time before this one (imaginary or not) gets exploited, mutated, and used against us by Big Tech. Mixing personal history and anecdote with political theory, Tanner wonders how we might learn to live productively with nostalgia:

For too long, nostalgia has gotten a bad rap. Thats primarily because its been spread by political leaders to win votes and commodified by corporations to sell products. The attributes we commonly associate with nostalgia kitsch, backwardness, gross sentimentality are really just the products of its exploitation. Its often maligned due to its association with conservatism, but nostalgia isnt essentially reactionary or backwards. Its just been weaponized more frequently to carry out questionable, at times undemocratic, missions.

Its all fucking nostalgia. Its the only way they can get through the day, says Bod, a character in Derek Jarmans 1978 film, Jubilee, as someone inscribes the word LOVE on her back with a knife while someone else kisses a television while watching a punk band perform. This short scene, set around the time the punks affirmed No Future, features a pyromaniac who wants to burn the past and foretells our current temporal crisis. Nostalgia, a word whose etymological roots are to return home and pain or suffering, can be both destructive and productive, paralytic and radical a way to get through the day, to find a hold in a rootless-feeling whir of clicks and scrolls. Nostalgia can sneakily pave over the past, yet it also contains the emotional force necessary to rupture the paved-over present of neoliberal capitalism, making space for other visions of the future through flashbacks and painful desires for change.

Social media algorithms are also nostalgorithms, Tanner tells us, looping back slices of the past along with more of whatever weve previously been engaged with. The question becomes: How can we envision a future when glossy pasts repeat on feedback loops? Newness exists, but its not frontloaded. As Tanner writes, [A] future predicted by algorithms will remain stuck in the past. Things repeat, says Tanner, because decision-making is being outsourced to algorithms that rely on past data to predict the future. But predictive algorithms dont really predict anything, they just make certain pasts repeatedly go viral. While the past is thus mutated, the future seems foreclosed. We get stuck in a strange loop thats getting smaller all the time:

Part of the reason why memes and discourses have such short lives is because social media prompts users to constantly historicize the present, to archive events immediately after they happen by freezing them in posts online, thus closing the gap between experience and its memory. With social media, you can yearn for yesterday literally. Frozen into data, posts and content can be called up at whim, instead of merely forgotten. Before the age of Big Tech, nostalgic cycles were wider.

Gaps between what we experience and the memory of that experience are crucial. These gaps provide temporal grounding and perspective. Forgetting and loss happen in these gaps, pieces of the experience fall away in the dissolves that are part of human memory. What does it mean to be human during increasingly technological times? To be confronted by the technologies weve made, which now make us? To locate spaces of recollection and loss in times of digital recall when, as Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life (2014), loss itself is lost?

In the dystopian landscape of the 1982 film Blade Runner, humans use technology to enslave rather than liberate. The importance of memory is central to android Roy Battys famous monologue, delivered as he dies: hes mourning those memories that will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Memorys messy processes of accrual and loss, dissolution and return, and the duration necessary for those processes to work, help us to mark time. As Tanner shows, this closing of the gap between experience and memory is disorienting, knocking time out of joint in a sea of data, constant calculation, and flexibility/precarity. [M]emory is not what is recalled; it is rather that which returns, writes David Rodowick in Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (1997). As humans, we need wide and unfilled gaps to mourn the past and find traction in the present, where memories might return rather than reappear instantly.

Big Techs algorithms, combined with the whizzing and fragmented way we experience history and time under digitized late capitalism, result in turbo-speed loops of nostalgia. We can be nostalgic for a year ago, for yesterday, for any number of glossed-over pasts that pop up on our feed. In a present that can feel rootless, teeming with hyperlinks and economic and emotional precarity, we turn to the past for stability, rootedness. This turning-back isnt the problem, says Tanner; its more an issue of how. Throughout the book, he draws on the two kinds of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym identifies in The Future of Nostalgia (2001): reflective nostalgia, which is generally more harmless, looks back at a moment in time and yearns, while restorative nostalgia, often destructively deployed in political and entertainment spheres, aims to recreate a moment in history. Continually highlighting nostalgias ungraspable fluidity, Tanner notes that even Boym claims her categories are not absolute and that reflective and restorative nostalgias may overlap or bleed into each other. Emotions are messy.

In a section entitled You Are Now Entering Nowhere, Tanner describes Georgia State Route 316, which funnels commuters who live in Atlanta and work at the university into the small city of Athens. On Route 316, as with so many other non-places, [t]heres no way to really know where you are. According to Marc Aug, non-places are transit points and temporary abodes that proliferate under late capitalism: malls, screens, airports, train stations. Tanner cites social media as a kind of virtual non-place, pointing out that, whether were zooming down a nondescript highway or scrolling through Instagram, we may yearn for whats been smoothed over by capital, for whats been deracinated by constant movement, clicking, and scrolling.

In her 1990 essay On Art and Artists, Kathy Acker wrote that Culture is one way by which a community attempts to bring its past up out of senselessness and to find in dream and imagination possibilities for action. When culture isnt this, theres something wrong in the community, the society. In Tanners book, this diagnosis might also be a cure. Writing that nostalgia can inspire social change in ways other emotions cannot, Tanner compellingly proposes a radical nostalgia that can perhaps create space for what Acker says a healthy culture must do. Radical nostalgia might act as a stop cord, halting what Walter Benjamin called the storm of progress in order to widen the gap between experience and memory so that we can envision something new.

It makes sense, Tanner reminds us, that we yearn to escape to the past or the woods or wherever in anesthetizing times when humans get reduced to data. Perhaps the pain/suffering portion of nostalgias etymological roots is instructive here. In his 2020 book The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han argues that our society values information over knowledge, but information lacks the negativity of transformation and radical change only arrives through pain: Without pain, it is impossible to produce that kind of knowledge which radically breaks with the past. [] The negativity of pain is constitutive of thought. Pain is what distinguishes thinking from calculating.

Nostalgia cant be cured, as Tanner reminds us. So, we have to live with its pains and yearnings, which point to our human lack a lack that cannot be filled with content, consumer goods, or information. Indeed, to relate to the lack and break from the past, we need to regard the wreckage, to experience pain so that we can think and feel the incommensurability of nostalgia and other complex emotions, unhooking them from anesthetizing market forces. Like Mark Fisher, who argued for a new politics of mental health organized around the concept of public space against capitalisms tendency toward the privatisation of stress, Tanners book importantly invites a political and collective concept of nostalgia.

Because nostalgia has, as Tanner writes, the emotional power to conjure up the potentials of the past that are constantly being paved over by capital, it can serve as a kind of reawakening. As he points out, progressive politics have long been associated with looking forward, conservative politics with looking back. This is an outdated and false binary. There are many ways to look back/forward. Under neoliberal capitalism, with its pervasive ideologies of promise, progress, and optimization, radical nostalgia might help us to imagine a more habitable present.

Radical comes from the Latin for root. To pull from the root, to get to the source of a problem, requires time and commitment. We have a right to our roots, which nurture us and keep us grounded, Tanner writes. However, capitalism tears up these roots and then tells the rootless that staying put will hinder their ability to compete for a job. Indeed, late capitalisms atomized economy of entrepreneurialism, which extols the virtues of flexibility and mobility, is also an economy of precarity that fetishizes nimbleness and side hustles. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul, wrote Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (1949). Might we find rootedness in the puncture of radical nostalgia, opening up possibilities for the negative space of thought, as opposed to the mere accrual of information, data, and false promises?

In the books moving conclusion, Tanner notes that, as humans, we are irreducible to data, variables, and parameters, even though worshippers of technology like to think otherwise. When we try to fit a complex emotion such as nostalgia into calculable or clear-cut categories free of contradiction, we delete thought. Tracking nostalgia as an emotion, as well as the myriad ways in which that emotion gets mobilized and mutated by conservative and progressive forces, Tanner offers an illuminating examination of our now. What would happen if we were to refuse both technological utopianism and conservative, restorative nostalgia? To refuse both a calculative nostalgia that marginalizes past, present, and future and slick promise-oriented narratives that claim wholeness? To exit the loop and embrace the lack?

Emmalea Russois a writer living at the Jersey shore. Her booksareG(2018) andWave Archive(2019). Her recent writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and SF MOMAs Open Space. She is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and she edits Asphalte Magazine.

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Imagining a More Habitable Present: On Grafton Tanner's The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia - lareviewofbooks

Despite its pathetic fatuity, the assault on the Capitol vividly highlighted the depths of alienation that afflicted tens of millions of citizens. To a striking degree, Americans had become distrustful people, with scant confidence in their institutions and waning trust in each other. As those grievously disaffected malcontents continued to stew in their resentments, delusions and disappointments, they sought ever more aggressive challenges to the norms, values and institutions that had sustained the republic for more than two centuries. A tribal political culture had emerged, polarizing the electorate and paralyzing the political system.

And even as the federal governments successful promotion of unprecedentedly rapid vaccine development impressively demonstrated the awesome capacity of the modern state to marshal financial, human and scientific resources at scales and velocities once unimaginable when political will could be mustered and focused vaccine refusers no less impressively demonstrated the degree to which plain old irrationality could torpedo even the most beneficially enlightened policies.

Meanwhile, as Americans continued to squander their dwindling stock of social capital, and struggled to sustain an effective government of, by and for the people, on the other side of the planet, an ascendant China, repressive but remarkably resilient, was relentlessly demonstrating the efficacy of a radically different kind of social and political order.

Two societies, two systems of governance, two visions of the world ahead. Which would prevail as the 21st century unspooled was a question that lay uncomfortably and urgently in the lap of the future.

Claire Bond Potter is professor of historical studies at The New School for Social Research and co-executive editor at Public Seminar.

In 2021, Americans learned that schools were critical to a United States economic infrastructure that was underprepared and unready for a national crisis. Every school onsite or online became both a public health project and a political target. School board meetings became politicized and angry, and elections to those bodies suddenly became hot contests. As the nations instructors, students, parents and school administrators navigated in-person Covid-19 protocols and emergency online learning, school boards, librarians, administrators and teachers were bombarded with revived demands, often driven by political operatives, that subversive teaching materials about race, gender and sexuality be purged from classrooms.

What did Americans learn? When parents became remote or essential workers, they were also expected to be teachers aides, revealing that underfunded schools were a critical component of an equally underfunded, and understaffed, American childcare system. When students appeared in class erratically, often on mobile phones, the country learned it had vast internet deserts, affecting millions of Americans ability to fully participate in society. It learned that many public school students, and presumably their parents, were so loosely attached to the educational system that an estimated 3 million simply disappeared. When teachers, already exhausted from 2020, quit or retired in record numbers (Florida, a state hammered by both Covid-19 and the culture wars, saw vacancies increase by more than 67 percent), the nation learned that school personnel were frontline workers, too. In 2021, Americans learned that what used to be the best school system in the world had bent and broken under a cultural and public health crisis and that it was crucial infrastructure that had to be systematically rebuilt.

Catherine Ceniza Choy is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book Asian American Histories of the United States (2022) and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

The racial and medical scapegoating of immigrant and U.S.-born Asian Americans, the fastest-growing group of all racial and ethnic groups in the early 21st century, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic persisted in 2021. According to the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center, between March 19, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021, nearly 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experienced verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault and/or civil rights violations. Although Filipino nurses comprised just 4 percent of the U.S. nursing workforce, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of Covid-19 cases and deaths among nurses. Tragically, Asian American contributions to health care did not make them immune to coronavirus-related harassment and violence. Age-old stereotypes of Asians as disease carriers, perpetual foreigners and exotic objects were tenacious and deadly. These hate incidents and the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, which resulted in eight lives lost, six of whom were Asian American women, challenged cherished notions of the American dream and its promise of equality and upward social mobility. Asian Americans reckoned with contemporary anti-Asian violence and its longer history by organizing to raise awareness of their over 150-year-old presence and unrecognized contributions. Activists relied on existing Asian American advocacy organizations as well as created new ones. Artists and scholars documented loss, grief and survival so that we would never forget.

David W. Blight is Sterling professor of history at Yale and the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Behold, I have put my words in your mouth to pluck up and to breakDown, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Jeremiah 1:9-10

The year 2021 was remembered most vividly by its first month, in which a sitting president and his allies, including within Congress, attempted a coup against the United States government by trying to overturn an election and install the defeated Donald J. Trump instead of the duly elected Joseph R. Biden. The unprecedented, violent insurrection of Jan. 6 prompted the second impeachment, and eventual partisan acquittal, of Trump. In the long run, however, the coup began to succeed by failing, morphing into a potent Lost Cause ideology that millions clung to as a victory narrative a victory over liberalism and pluralism. A right-wing authoritarianism, increasingly prone to violence, craved a hopeless utopia without multiculturalism and rooted securely in local or state control.

2021 would be remembered as the year of a calming yet stymied Biden presidency, hamstrung by the Covid pandemic, by the withdrawal from Afghanistan and by divisions in his own party embodied in a senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who saved his patriotism for his own state. The Biden presidency was also thwarted by a virulent new neo-fascism embedded in a Republican party openly devoted to voter suppression, racism, states rights, tax cuts, investment portfolio enhancement and one of modern historys most pathetic yet successful Big Lies. The stolen election of 2020, Trumpisms most potent lie, thrived by sheer dint of its repeated uttering on Fox News. Political polarization, between completely separate information systems organized along ideological lines, morphed by the end of 2021 into what many commentators began to label as a new kind of civil war. Americans steadily lost hold of the very meaning of a nation, a composite of many peoples, cultures, and regions that all give up something dear to build and preserve the whole.

2021 was not the single moment of apocalyptic breakup of the 21st-century American experiment in democracy but the prelude to less visible yet routine coups against the constitutional republic. 2021 revealed the dysfunctional elements of the U.S. Constitutional system, especially the undemocratic U.S. Senate, the Second Amendment, the absurd electoral college and a fatefully politicized Supreme Court serving for life and driven by righteous right-wing ideologies. That Republicans practiced voter suppression so openly led to violent clashes during elections. Advocates of universal suffrage embraced going to jail and other civil disobedience to fight voter restrictions.

The left fought back in the wake of 2021 with the tools they had. The House of Representatives Jan. 6 investigation exposed the crimes against the state and the Constitution by former President Trump and his allies, although only handfuls were ever prosecuted and jailed after the right-wing took back control of Congress in 2022.

Year after year book prizes and artistic and journalistic awards would go to those who served as Jeremiahs, showing the people the future of their republic, always teetering on the brink of political and environmental collapse. The post-Trump era would produce great history, drama, art and literature as the nation atrophied and at times exploded in the streets. Mass shootings increasingly gave to classical tragedy a new American meaning. Across the turbulent world ravaged by pandemic and climate change, America was increasingly considered a failing democracy and often referred to in countries where liberal democracy survived as The United States of Guns. The Trumpian Lost Cause built its monuments in laws and stories and well-funded networks of communication, while liberalism fought with reason and logic against a foe with too many guns.

Brenda E. Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton chair in Womens History at St. Johns College, University of Oxford.

2021 was a year filled with hope of return to a normal way of life that had been stripped bare by a global pandemic that, by New Years Day of 2021, had killed at least three million, more than a tenth of that number of lost lives in the U.S. Just a few weeks before the end of 2020, the first American had received the Covid-19 vaccine. There was (or seemed to be) some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel thanks to rapid development of multiple vaccines that proved largely effective in curtailing deaths of those who contracted the illness. By April, some 200 million vaccinations had been given and Americans were optimistically returning to work, school, houses of worship and more. The economy, too, experienced a recovery, with unemployment falling over the year to just over 4 percent.

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How Will the History Books Remember 2021? - POLITICO

The Great White Way was darker on Christmas Eve as two Broadway productions permanently closed due to surging COVID-19 cases.

The shows Waitress and Thoughts of a Colored Man said on Friday that their productions would not reopen after performing their final shows earlier this week, according to Playbill.

Sara Bareilles Waitress returned to Broadway in September and was expected to run through next month, but its limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre was also thwarted by cases of the virus among its cast and company, the outlet said.

The Tony-nominated hit was known for being the first Broadway musical composed, written, directed, and choreographed by women. It played 1,544 performances since 2016.

Thoughts a Keenan Scott II play which explored a day in the life of seven black Brooklyn men had 79 performances at the Golden Theatre, but was besieged by COVID cases among its cast members. Its final show was Wednesday.

While this is not the outcome we had hoped for, being part of this historic season on Broadway has been the greatest privilege of our lives, producers Brian Moreland, Ron Simons, Diana DiMenna, Kandi Burruss, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Samira Wiley said in a statement, according to the Playbill.

The theatre industrys great return is about so much more than the success or failure of any single production. As a community, we remain undeterred, unflinching, and unstoppable. We have never been prouder to be theatre makers than at this very moment.

David Byrnes American Utopia, Come From Away, MJ The Musical, The Lion King, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Dear Evan Hanson, Hamilton and Aladdin were among the other productions that announced additional canceled shows on Friday.

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'Thoughts of a Colored Man' and 'Waitress' go dark on Broadway amid Omicron - New York Post

MIAMI, Dec. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Maritime Management LLC, based here, has reported that a ship under the company's management, the M/T Tropic Breeze, was struck last night at 22:03 p.m. by the super yacht M/Y Utopia IV approximately 15 miles NNW of New Providence Island, The Bahamas. The 160-foot tanker was traveling on its proper watch en route to Great Stirrup Cay when it was rear-ended by the 207-foot super yacht. The catastrophic force of the collision pierced the stern of the tanker causing the tanker to sink to the ocean floor at an estimated depth of 2000 feet.

Fortunately,the crew of the Tropic Breeze were uninjured, have been rescued and safely returned to a company-owned facility on shore.

The tanker's cargo included all non-persistent materials LPG, Marine Gas and automotive gas all of which are lighter than water and will evaporate if exposed to surface air. The Tropic Breeze, sailing under the flag of Belize was recently inspectedin December of this year and was found by the authorities to be fully compliant with all national and international safety and vessel integrity standards.

Due to the depth of the ocean at the location of the sinking, it has been determined that the tanker cannot be safely salvaged.

Relevant Bahamian authorities have been notified and Maritime Management continues to work with local and international maritime authorities and marine experts to ensure best outcomes with minimal environmental impact.

Maritime Management has expressed its sincere gratitude to Bahamian authorities for their support and assistance throughout this incident and are particularly grateful to the crew of the M/Y Mara who responded to the Tropic Breeze's distress call and rescued all seven crew members on board the sinking tanker.

Media Contact:Sean FitzgeraldWitt O'Brien's[emailprotected]

SOURCE Maritime Management LLC

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M/T Tropic Breeze Struck by Mega Yacht Utopia IV and Sinks Off the Coast of New Providence Island - PRNewswire

Blockchain and crypto assets have made tremendous strides in 2021 in virtually every way. The current year did not necessarily get off to an amazing start for the global crypto asset space. Nonetheless, the digital assets managed to make a mark.

Moreover, NFTs and stablecoins left a mark as well. Now as 2021 comes to a close: it is the time for lists, predictions and forecasts for 2022.Forbes released some insights to discuss these projections.

The global market for non-fungible tokens hit $22bn (16.5bn) this year as the craze for collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars turned digital images into major investment assets.

NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item upon someone, even if that item can be easily copied. Ownership is recorded on a digital, decentralized ledger known as a blockchain. But, this buzz might fade away. The article notes,

NFTs will become boring. This might strike some readers as a bit of a reach, especially since there is so much that is misunderstood by the mainstream marketplace in terms of how non-fungible tokens (NFTs) operate and are valued.

Not as scintillating as watching NFTs prices vacillate, but blockchain enabled ownership appears to be the future of NFTs for mainstream adoption.

Mainstream use of stablecoins is picking up, with the market growing from $5 billion in December 2019 to more than $158 billion in December 2021. One reason for this growth is stablecoins inherent advantages over current financial technologies.

For instance, stablecoins can be transferred instantaneously to anyone around the world with little to no transaction cost.A similar sentiment was projected in this article.

As the calendar flips to 2022, and as geopolitics continues to influence and partially direct the crypto-asset conversation, the rise of stablecoins is a trend that cannot be ignored.

Ergo, stablecoins are expected to become mainstream.

These are here to stay as noted in the article.

With the adoption of crypto-asset payments by major organizations such as PayPal, Visa, and Mastercardduring 2021, the trend toward crypto-assets being used for transactional purposes seems to be a permanent one.

Love cryptocurrencies or hate the very idea of them, theyre becoming more mainstream by the day. Cryptocurrencies have surged so much that their total value has crossed more than $2.5 trillion. Thereby, rivaling the worlds most valuable company such as Apple.

At this size, its simply too big for the financial establishment to ignore.Bitcoin the largest crytpocurrency could see the most anticipated triple figures next year. During this year, BTC did exhibit some of its historical volatility. Thereby ranging from lows around $30,000 to all-time-highs of nearly $70,000. This is why, the said article asserted,

Setting aside market volatility, and seeking to remain as objective as possible, the case for $100,000 bitcoin seems to have support points.

Rising inflation, the continued monetary easing around the world and the proliferation of crypto assets all support this claim.

Theres a buzzword that tech, crypto and venture-capital types have become infatuated with lately. Conversations are now peppered with it. Web3. Right now, the idea of the entire Internet reinventing itself may sound like some far-away digital utopia.

But Web3 is the new buzz and generating lots of new money, particularly from crypto investors.

The report stated,

If 2021 was the year that Web3 became a buzzword, 2022 will be the year that the values behind Web3 start to make a lasting impact on the way we operate as a society.

Furthermore, the expected prominence of Web3 has been widely acknowledged.

Web3 projects tend to be more inclusive and supportive. Given the nature of shared ownership, peoples success is closely tied to the quality of contributors in their network. This dynamic creates a more collaborative work environment, shared Julia Lipton, founder of Awesome People Ventures.

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NFTs, stablecoins, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies: How it's going, what it will be like in 2022 - AMBCrypto

Travis Scott continues to receive plenty of public backlash for his deadly Astroworld Festival which occurred last night. Despite all of the noise though, the Houston superstar continues to give back to communities, especially in his hometown.

According to TMZ, Travis and his Cactus Jack Foundation are distributing over 2,000 toys to 2,000 children in the Houston area. These are children who come from families who have difficult times in being able to meet Christmas needs for the holiday.

Six Houston housing authority areas will be visited in total, before Christmas arrives. Among the type of toys that have been handed out so far are dolls, golf sets and keyboards. The items were all lined up at tents which displayed signs for the Cactus Jack Foundation.

In addition to Travis good deeds with his Christmas giveaways for the children, he is also trying to help fix the Astroworld Fest issues. He has since been offering to cover burial costs for the families of the deceased, but several of those have since denied the offers.

Travis went on to speak with Charlamagne Tha God in his first interview since the tragedies, and emphasized that he wants to help the healing process in any way he can. He also added that he didnt intend for anyone to be harmed that night, on November 5.

As artists, you trust professionals for when things happen that people can leave safely. And this night was just like a regular show, it felt like to me, as far as the energy. People didnt show up there just to be harmful. People just showed up to have a good time and something unfortunate happened and we just need to figure out what that was.

In the aftermath of the Astroworld Fest injuries and deaths, Travis removed Utopia from his Instagram bio. This is the title of his upcoming fifth studio album.

Prior to Astroworld Fest, Travis didnt provide an official release date for Utopia. On the day of the festival though, he did put out two new singles in Mafia and Escape Plan. Even with Travis getting canceled on social media, both songs were able to debut in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Travis Scott dropped a 2 song pack with songs titled Escape Plan and Mafia pic.twitter.com/RlCTCvXHsx

Flame.Travy (@FlameTravis3) November 5, 2021

In the midst of the Astroworld Festival madness, Travis is also preparing to get ready to become a father again. Back in August, it was announced that he and his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner are expecting baby number two.

This pregnancy news went on to be confirmed by Kylie on Instagram, in a hype video. The two currently have a 3-year-old daughter, Stormi. As of now, it still hasnt publicly been revealed regarding what the gender of the second child will be.

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Travis Scott Hosts Holiday Toy Giveaways In Hometown Of Houston - The Blast

After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine as well as their own

The Amazon founders relentless quest for customer ecstasy made him one of the worlds richest people and now hes looking to the unlimited resources of space. Is he the genius our age of consumerism deserves?

Although femicide is a recognised crime in Mexico, when a woman disappears, the authorities are notoriously slow to act. But there is someone who will take on their case

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And finally: In case youre curious, these were our Top 10 most read pieces of 2021 and these were the 10 most read pieces from our archive.

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The best of the long read in 2021 - The Guardian

LONDON: There is probably no chart position more fought over than the Christmas number one. This year, it looks like LadBaby will steal their fourth chart win in a row a new record if successful with a song featuring Elton John and Ed Sheeran. But what does it really take to propel a song to the coveted spot during another COVID Christmas? And what makes for good Christmas music the kind that we want to consume throughout the festive season?

We know Christmas music when we hear it, but it's not always obvious what features (if any) it needs to have to pass the yuletide test. Plenty of explicitly Christmas-themed songs will have certain musical characteristics, even though they're always optional. These include a major key, an accessible pitch range and a moderate tempo, making them both easier to sing and easier on the ear.

Certain sounds, too, like sleigh bells, the celeste, the glockenspiel, and a choir also signal the holiday. For over a month, this music is ubiquitous: people do not necessarily pay for or try to hear it, but it's there anyway, like acoustic wallpaper.

The fact that it's hard to escape Christmas music might account for the eye-rolling that greets it every year. It's understandable that we might recoil from the sound of yet more Slade and sleigh bells in the context of overflowing car parks and endless queues.

Sometimes the music's idealised qualities can even instil melancholy. Hearing a romanticised version of family and togetherness can provoke a keener sense of their absence, and lock out listeners who cannot join in the reindeer games.

The artificial or fantastical side to the music can be even more off-putting given the commercialised climate in which these sentiments are shared.

The very idea of chasing the top spot on the chart appears in some ways disconnected from the true meaning of Christmas. It suggests competitive zeal and commercial reward rather than communal values and selflessness. This tension might be one reason why several performers have hitched their chart bid to charitable causes.

A festive chart rebellion

Yet for all the ways it is easy to tire of Christmas songs' excesses, to many people it matters what music we should value at this time of year. People notice the music's political and ideological trajectory and can mount a rebellion when they feel that the falseness has gone too far.

Look no further than the successful campaign in 2009 to install 'Rage Against the Machine's Killing In The Name' at the top of the UK chart and prevent yet another X Factor single from being number one. It was everything Christmas songs are not, or at least not supposed to be (although there is certainly some form of protest, albeit of a less revolutionary kind, in John Lennon's 'Happy Xmas and Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas').

It indicated that some people care whether the number one position goes to another schmaltzy ballad. I suspect listeners did not need an excuse to rebel against X Factor's then-monopoly, but the fact that the campaign happened at Christmas suggests that the rebels found a cause.

The power of popThis upset, however, is a departure from the norm. One has only to look at the list of Christmas number ones to see on the one hand their variety, but on the other, how they gravitate towards a particular type of popular music.

In trying to define pop, the rock writer Simon Frith considered it to be what is left when one strips away rock, country and the other venerable popular genres.

The leftover category of pop, loosely defined, is designed to appeal to everyone: often family-orientated, musically conservative, professionally produced, unobtrusive, and a conduit for clich and commonplace emotional states like love, loss, jealousy. How Frith characterises this residual class of music resonates strongly with typical Christmas music.

As he also points out, such music, despite its purported banality, can be put to affecting use. Its participatory quality and way of gathering memories and associations lend themselves to ritual and strong personal resonances.

These factors, among others, might help explain why we gravitate towards such music at this time of year. Looking at the influence of Victorian Britain on modern Christmas celebrations, the musicologist Sheila Whiteley highlights the importance of family (both literal and the wider idea), as well as a utopia of shared values.

Perhaps this sense of sharedness pushes the significance of Christmas week's number one beyond that of whatever is at the top of the charts at any other time of the year.

The number one place is the result of a popularity contest among music fans. While the metrics have changed across the decades, the principle of success has not. Chart positions represent a ranking arrived at nationally, suggesting a consensus, even if you were not among those who supported the winner.

Perhaps something is appealing in the perception that people without necessarily meaning to have sent something to the top of a public list, indicating that many others enjoy it. It hints at the social and communal.

Perhaps the specific holiday also multiplies these factors and makes them that bit more important. It appears to represent consensus at a time when animosities and hostilities are to be set aside (in theory at least) and when a social rapprochement descends like light snow for a couple of days.

In particular, our need for a sense of togetherness cannot be underestimated amid COVID restrictions and reduced social interaction. The feeling of common consent, tacit agreement and shared sensibilities appeals more keenly when people perceive its absence elsewhere.

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Is it the 'festive spirit' or there's more to Christmas hits that we can't stop listening to? - Economic Times

In what easily qualifies as one of the flat-out coolest things to ever happen on Broadway, David Bryne brings his American Utopia back to Broadway, the same as it ever was. Get American Utopia tickets now.

Byrne, who established himself firmly in the coolness mainstream as the lead singer of the Talking Heads, gets the shows title from his recent album of the same name. However, American Utopia on Broadway is not be a mere concert but rather a full-blown theatrical spectacle.

How Annie-B Parson Teamed Up with David Byrne to Reinvent Broadway

American Utopia dancers on pioneering a new approach to movement on Broadway

With the help of production consultant Alex Timbers (who certainly knows a thing or two about spectacle since he directed Broadways Moulin Rouge! The Musical) as well as choreographer and musical stager Annie-B Parson, this form-bending experience features a dozen onstage musicians, and tunes from Byrnes vast songbook as well as some surprises from outside of it. Beyond that, details are scarce and the visionary performer would like to keep it that way. Im not going to tell you what I think its about, Byrne tells The New York Times. Thats for you to see.

Get tickets to American Utopia in New York on TodayTix.

The show is recommended for all ages.

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David Byrne's American Utopia on Broadway Tickets | New ...