Marcuse and Frankfurt School: Marx more Freud, or oppression more repression
Marcuse had long worked in the trenches of academic philosophy and social theory before reaching fame in the United States in the 1960s. He studied philosophy in Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger, later becoming an assistant to both. His first major publication was an attempt to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenology with Marxism. 1
His powerful loyalty to Marxism combined with his Heideggerian mistrust of the rationalist elements of Marxism led Marcuse to join forces with the nascent Frankfurt School of social thought. The Frankfurt School was a free association of intellectuals, mostly Germans, centered on the Institute for Social Research, led from 1930 onwards by Max Horkheimer.
Horkheimer had also been trained in philosophy, having completed his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Kant in 1923. From that work Horkheimer went directly to the issues of social psychology and practical politics. In the late 20s, while Marcuse was working on his theoretical integration of Marx and Heidegger, Horkheimer was coming to some pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of political change in practice.
Asking to himself the question of why the German proletariat was not revolting, Horkheimer offered a break with the politically relevant points, considering that each was incapable of achieving anything meaningful. 2 Of course, Horkheimer began his analysis with the working classes, dividing them into employees and unemployed. The workers, he noticed, are not so underpaid and seem happy enough. It is the unemployed who are in the worst condition. Their situation is also getting worse, as the mechanization of production increases, unemployment also increases. But the unemployed are also the least educated and least organized class, and this has made it impossible to increase their class consciousness. A clear sign of this is that they hesitate between voting for the Communists, who are blindly following Moscow, and the National Socialists who are, well, a bunch of Nazis. The only other Socialist Party are the Social Democrats, but they are too pragmatic and reformist to be effective.
Thus, Horkheimer came to the conclusion that the situation was desperate for socialism. The employees were too comfortable, the unemployed were too clumsy, the Social Democrats too loose and bland, the Communists too obedient and following authority, and the National Socialists could not argue.
As the way out of the swamp, the Frankfurt School members began to explore the idea of adding a more sophisticated social psychology to the economic and historical logic of Marxism. Traditional Marxism emphasized the inexorable laws of economic development and undermined the contribution of human actors. Bearing in mind that these Marxist laws seemed much more inexorable in the fact that they were not complied with, the Frankfurt School suggested that history depends so much on human actors, and above all on how these human actors understand themselves psychologically and their existential situation, than on the incorporation of a psychology in Marxism, one could expect that it could explain why the revolution had not yet occurred and that suggestions as to what would be needed to make it happen.
Looking for that sophisticated social psychology, the Frankfurt School looked towards Sigmund Freud. Applying his own psychoanalytic theories to social philosophy, in El Malaise En la Cultura (1930), Freud had argued that civilization is an unstable and superficial phenomenon, based on the repression of instinctive energies. Bio-psychologically, human agents are a bunch of aggressive and conflictive instincts, and those instincts are constantly pushing for their immediate satisfaction. Their constant and immediate satisfaction, however, would make social life impossible, so the forces of civilization have evolved to progressively suppress instincts and force their expression in educated, orderly, and rational ways. Civilization is thus an artificial construction covering a boiling mass of irrational energies in it.
The battle between it and culture is continuous and occasionally brutal. To the extent that it wins, society tends towards conflict and chaos; and to the extent that society wins, it is forced into repression. Repression, however, merely forces the energies of it into psychological hiding, where these energies are unconsciously displaced and often forced into irrational channels. That displaced energy, Freud explained, must finally be discharged, and often it bursts emotionally in neurotic form — in the form of hysterics, obsessions, and phobias. 3
The task of the psychoanalyst, therefore, is to track the neurosis backwards through its irrational and unconscious channels to its origin. Patients, however, often interfere with this process: they resist the exposure of unconscious and irrational elements in their psyche and cling to the conscious forms of civilized and rational behavior they have learned. So the psychoanalyst must find a way to circumvent those surface-blocking behaviors, and to remove the conscious lining of urbanity to explore the boiling thing below. Here, Freud suggested, the use of non-rational psychological mechanisms becomes essential — dreams, hypnosis, free association of ideas, failed acts. Such manifestations of irrationality are often clues to the underlying reality, as they slide beyond the patient's conscious defense mechanisms. The well-trained psychoanalyst, consequently, is the one who can see the truth within the irrational.
For the Frankfurt School, Freud offered an admirably suitable psychology for diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism. Capitalism, we knew from Marx, is definitely based on exploitative competition. But modern capitalist society is taking a technocratic form, directing its conflicting energies towards the creation of corporate machines and bureaucracies. These machines and bureaucracies provide the average member of the bourgeoisie with an artificial world of order, control, and zoo comfort — but at a very high cost: people in capitalism are increasingly distant from nature, less spontaneous and creative, less and less aware that they are being controlled by the machines and bureaucracies, both physically and psychologically, and progressively ignorant that the seemingly comfortable world in which they live is the mask of an underlying reality of brutal conflict and competition. 4
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Post-Modernism , Chapter 5, “The Crisis of Socialism”, translation Walter Jerusaleminsky