Herbert Marcuse and the Great Refusal

What happens when a civilisation that practices this new sensibility meets a civilisation that practices domination? If you make males less aggressive for instance or create a more feminine society, you eventually lose it all when faced with a masculine power.

Imagine that you are a compassionate society that could do much better but also much worse. You choose to lead the way and dismantle your army. Your less compassionate neighbour sees that and invades you. They place administrators to run this new puppet state and reestablish an army. You've lost all the ground you had gained but you're not back to square one. Now you're under the yoke of a violent power that doesn't share your idea of compassion.

This the problem with the Left, with pacifists, with the compassionate, with the feminists. Their policies do not predict success, they predict subjugation by a more aggressive or competitive power.

The world would probably be better off if the Frankfurt school staff had remained in Germany instead of escaping to America. Arrogant, reductive, Marxist bullxhit

That sheep argument is simplistic and weak....many of arguments here are. They ignore nuance in service of the authors bias.

great stuff, but found it kind of funny that you could say hegemony correctly but moderninity got me chuckling

I think you're perceiving capitalism in and of itself too negatively. It's based in nature more than you think. It's an extension of how we already are, It's not a result of the system.

Great videos. I feel like your giving me a PHD level education in Philosophy. I binged the channel and hit subscribe and the notifications. 🙃🤗

Brilliant, yes, the deliberated dumbing down of America, the World is working brilliantly Evil - sad that this so blatantly raw happening now more than ever

How is comunism any better ? It's basically all the same rhetoric, there's also a dictator at the top, both communism , capitalism , heiarchies, polical parties and career plolitians, the end goals are all the same, a few at the top hold power over the majority. Russell Brand who always claimed to be a Liberal , is now saying he do longer idetifies with any left or right politics, he advocates for freedom, equality, fairness and justice for everyone.

Please don’t listen to Jordan Peterson about Marx and Marxists. He is an honorable man but he simply doesn’t understand that subject. Marx was not a statist. Socialism was never identified with a totalitarian state until 1917 and the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Of course, the question is, who is producing the products people are consuming. Uyghur slaves in Chinese labor camps. That's who. The whole consumer society is immoral. US Treasury bonds are collateralizing your future earnings. You are literally in bondage to the central bank global government. That's slavery. It's immoral. Refuse. No is the most powerful word in language. Refusal exterminates slavery.

So ... a guy who flees Europe when the going gets tough, ensconces himself in academia (with salaries paid by US state institutions), spouts revolution to the young and naive, condemning American "totalitarianism." Meanwhile, back in Europe, full-blown Communist regimes ruthlessly destroy entire generations. Well ... that's very much like helping a little old lady cross the street while behind you is a burning house with children crying for help. Oh, yeah, just the kind of guy we want to guide us intellectually and morally. Get real.

It's true that Marcuse was scum, of course. But where he differed from the other parasite, Marx was that Marcuse recognised that under capitalism workers could improve their position through hard work and talent, with a bit of risk. While under socialism, of course poverty and oppression are inescapable features.
So rather than a worker revolution, Marcuse focused on students who had never earned their living and were afraid of the responsibility for their position.
This payed off spectacularly.

lol do you people ever think critically about the critical theory you read? People vote more conservative as they get older because they no longer buy the specious idealistic notions of their youth. How does self interest perpetuate racist ideology? You've not once critically thought about critical theory, you've accepted unthinking everything you read.

I'm sure you're an intelligent dude who is acting in good faith here. However... you mispronounce: Marcuse, Modernity... and several other words all throughout the video which... along with using words such as, "ginormous," in the title section... just makes you look not intelligent and not acting in good faith. The internet has given the most powerful tool on Earth to the common man. Please do 20-30 more minutes of research before you drop right into adding the "moody piano" and all the Ken Burns'esque effects. If you spend more time on editing and uploading the video than you did in the research and scriptwriting phase, you are doing it wrong. Because... even if your ideas are incredible... you present yourself as an authority. You clearly are not. This is dangerous and becoming more dangerous by the day.

Thanks for this :) Keep up the great work!

One thing Marxists get wrong is their take on social determinism. People create societies,first and foremost. The decision to get up in the morning is a product of your own personality as much as it is the product of any external force. It is determined by what you want. This is a values based decision. If you want to receive material rewards,then you engage in material actions. External forces may inform your decisions,but they do not force you,at least without something of your inner life manifesting in the process.
Things like racial Animus or bigotry are just as much the result of personal experience as the result of some abstract philosophy.
Mind you,those experiences may be the result of hearing about the experiences of others as the result of your own lived experience,but they are the result of experience. It is the result of the perception of these experiences.

HM seems dated and tired.
(He is no longer available in our bookshops.)

<3

Marcuse. is a series of destructive ideas...
He enjoyed all expanding upon the failures of the enlightenment. Rousseau, Satre, and Marx. Working from a zero day man philosphy, he demanded man exist without nature.

Yes his comments on characteristcs and his comments upon behaviour are excellent contributions, but not within the binary he demanded or implied. it is a spectrum, a dilution beyond/laying of sets.

Sooo... you're a communist. Thanks for warning us.

You own the means of production and this banal tripe is what you produce. Unfortunate. Extremely biased and myopic, I hope you find a higher calling in your life and use the power you do have for more significant ends. Yes, I looked at the world this way when I was an undergrad too...

EDIT: I will add, so as not to sound like a complete ass, that your videos are well done and summaries of thinkers/ideas solid. However, your real world examples and conclusion poor.

Best of luck to you my friend.

A man ahead of his time.

I will look more into Rick Roderick. Thank you!

Marcuse a horrible vile person

This really lacks objectivity. When you are narrating, you speak as though what these philosophers wrote was accurate and reflected reality, when in fact, a lot of it was their subjective view, which in the case of Marcuse, was incredibly destructive to society, which we have seen in the past few years. Destroying society, capital, wealth, to produce what? More poverty?

This is well written!

Psychoanalysis of Marcuse and his ilk might be revealing. There seems to be a set of people who crave the mantle of being the instruments of systemic change and thereby attain a god-like status. The great refusal seems to rely on the great blinkering. To critique a system by focussing on failings is a critique without substance. In addition, the alternative being put forward has not been fully revealed and does not attract any scrutiny. It's also unsettling that most philosophers who seek to 'unchain' the working class have never been part of the working class, and yet seek to refute the working classes' support of liberal societies. The musical lament is quite distracting and overdone.

the thing is post modern perspectives are pretty rampant in america anyway, people just dont understand what postmodernism is like you said.

Stupid generalisation (8.40 in), the radical left is not equal to whole boomer generation, now days voting conservative, it is the part of that generation that was not in the 68-left movements, voting conservative. The radical left movement was a minority those days, they was not bought up later, many still remain leftists
.

Red Bull is my personality

The social and spiritual revolution of the 60s was stifled by the onslaught of neoliberalism (rebranded fascism) privatization, replacing fiscal policy investment in the public sector with private bank-issued credit cards and predatory loans. Then propagandizing normal gov't funding with scary socialism and communism. 

The people didn't change, aside from the financial stress of downsizing and capital flight. The electoral process was divorced from economic policy. People no longer had a voice in matters. All the progress made to improve quality of life.. civil, labor, food safety, consumer safety, environmental protections, have been rescinded these past 50 years. 

Billionaires have assumed global governance now. People like Peter Thiel, Technocracy advocate behind JD Vance, when asked what the #1 thing he would change to improve the world, said "Raise the age for Social Security". Companies like Boeing cannot self-regulate and inspect properly. The private sector is far worse than governments ever were, yet dismantling the nation-state, erasing borders, is underway.

He was a demagogue and a charlatan. Interesting thing is he worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Service) the forerunner of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
That speaks volumes !

Marxism and Christianity compete for control of the masses. Both rely on total indoctrination to a doctrine of absolutism. Christianity is older. Because of that, it assumes it is a virtuous and rightful system. But proportionately, they caused far more death and suffering than Marxism accomplished in the 20th century.

Anderson Susan Thompson Elizabeth Jackson George

Youse communistic types believe in "the revolution" like born again xtians believe in the rapture.

Wonderful video

"The general law of the capital in the world not choice."........ " The way of the world that humanity made is not true, but perhaps the way the world made for humanity is true"...🫵😉

Should I un-alive myself? Why or why not? I’m just an NPC.

I’m alone. I’m an alcoholic an addict, depressed and angry. I’m 47 lost my family, have no friends, just the internet. I have doctors prescribing me adderall, antidepressants. I take kratom, live in a motel, make just enough money to get by. Why should I carry on? My life has no purpose. Can anyone hear me? What happened to community? What happened to God? I feel like the poster child of what postmodernism was meant to create. I’m White, over 6ft, handsome, intelligent, masculine. But I don’t think I belong here anymore.

Yes, the world is dominated by power. What do promotions and house sizes have to do with it?

Climate change is a great example of individual rationality failing catastrophically. I'm not even talking about american republicans but actual sane nations acknowledging the horrible reality of climate change and being unable to do anything because individual countries are acting in their short-sighted self-interest and cannot co-operate effectively enough.

I agree that Marcus is a great thinker, but I don't think Marcus said anything presented here except that America is a new kind of totalitarianism. The rest is just using him as marionette for the ideas of weaker thinking. This is the whole problem with the Frankfurt school, they recruited a generation of midwits who can't pass the torch of greatness, it's a weird failure unique to them, almost every other great group of mind's knew intuitively how to pass their tradition, it's liknon-traditionalists can't be recruited, even to anti establishment traditions. Paradoxically you need tradition to destroy an establishment.

nothing to do with the book or the theory

I find your retrospect here on Marcuse' 'Eros & Civilization' incredibly moving and even brought tears to my eyes. I haven't read that yet, but I did read Dimensional Man about 2 years and it really put into perspective what truly plagues us in the 21st Century', but CRUCIALLY on the macro-level that enables one to grasp the totality of society & us pop rather than tons of these micro-level discourse we hear that is hyper-focued on symptoms...

It is little wonder why the likes of James Lindsey and other reactionary, anto-intellectual grifters that seem to be hell-bent on trashing everyone from Kant to Marcuse, especially young people who are increasingly averse to reading in the first place...

They just want a buncha alienated, atomized, and hateful young males that think "Cultural Marxists" like Marcuse are a threat, let alone ever even a thing.... and the tragedy is this sort of written works would help us all to truly understand the conditions we are subjected to deep within our psyche and it's relation to our socio-economic reality.

It's not a mistake that the right has slandered and smeared Marcuse for decades, especially recently with the fake culture war agitating. They want 1-dimensional men that hate intellectuals, "wokeness", etc. and just do all the tough work the masters benefit from and consume.

An honest reading & understanding of Marcuse could seriously help so many, particularly young men, in these strange, hyperreal, alienating times.... And enable a radical shift to a new, far better sensibility that doesn't have shitty problems like inceldom and mass shootings. 😢

Consider subscribing or dropping a like on the video if you really enjoyed this. This is such a small channel, and small things such as that truly helps in big ways. Takes a ton to get that algorithm on our side.