© 2002 Clifton D. Healy

Herbert Marcuse begins his One-Dimensional Man by asserting two overarching principles: "[H]uman life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living" and "[I]n a given society specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these responsibilities." Schweickart commences his account of Economic Democracy by asserting, "Capitalism is a ruthless, predatory system, and there is a better way." So, his project is "to determine how an advanced industrial economy might be structured to be economically viable, and, at the same time, embody the great ethical ideals of the democratic socialist tradition." In both cases, these writers understand the social and economic transformation of capitalism to happen dialectically, from within. For Marcuse, the dialectical transformation of technological rationality, by socially reworking the values to which technology is ordered, will result in pacified existence. For Schweickart, the transformation of capitalism through successor-system theory and the counterproject, will result in market socialism, or Economic Democracy.

Both men understand that these transformations will not happen easily, nor quickly. Indeed, it will take a concerted effort on the parts of many varied and diverse individuals to accomplish these ends. Success, as it were, hangs on a razor’s edge. Marcuse is hopeful, one might say, despite himself. Having convincingly described the powerful hold that irrational productive and military industrial forces have on society, he yet wants to offer hope, via a historical materialist understanding of human society, that that hold will be broken. Similarly, Schweickart, while acknowledging the control global capitalism has on social structures, wants to offer hope that nonoppressive alternatives to the current state of affairs will lead to the sort of just and free society he espouses and most people would want.

However, I am not quite so hopeful as are these authors. Having described their analyses through the lenses of technological rationality and Economic Democracy respectively, I will explain why I do not think their prognostications are possible, plausible though they may be.

The role of technology, in Marcuse is an overarching one, and thus difficult to summarize. In combination with the social forces of production, it is that within which needs are reified and socialized, and in which language is the act of administration. It also serves the reconstitution and redefinition of what it is to be rational, as it serves to divorce nature (or reality) from inherent ends, and science from ethics. It provides a rationality which closes off the range of discourse, effectively negating the language of protest. Marcuse writes, "Technical progress extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination."

Marcuse, in concert I think with Marx, understands technology to be compromised from the beginnings of capitalist production. That is to say, technology orders social forces toward the ends of capitalist production almost immediately from the emergence of capitalism. Marx himself noted that technological advance had a "logic" of its own. As he notes in Captial technology is that social production in which all members of society are enlisted, their working day increased and their labor intensified. In other words, instead of alleviating the former burdens of labor, technology served to replace them with ever greater burdens. Simply put, as Marx states in Capital, "in its machinery system, Modern Industry has a productive organism that is purely objective, in which the labourer becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material condition of production." Technology subsumes the human within the machine.

Under capitalism, since technology had a much more concentrated base of capital, and therefore of wealth investment, from which to draw its impetus, it led to overproduction. Capitalism, needing to dispose of excess goods, had to reverse the prioritization of needs over technology. Technology became the end of needs and their directive and motive force. Needs were objectified, reified, and utilized to serve the productive and wealth-creating actions of capitalism. This is the repressive desublimation he criticizes. Marcuse is clear to point out that the "social mode of production," and not technology itself, is the "basic historical factor," however, when technology "becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality--a ‘world.’"

Within this world, then, assisted as it is by the reification of need and of the containment of language within the discourse of administration, there develops a certain perspective, a worldview, if you will, which has something of its own logic or rationality. As Marcuse writes:

The point which I am trying to make is that science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man--a link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole. Nature, scientifically comprehended and mastered, reappears in the technical apparatus of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of the individuals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus. Thus the rational hierarchy merges with the social one.

For the individual, then, his social position and relations to others seem to be ruled by scientific, and therefore, objective, principles.

Seen in this way, then, "Advanced industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, inasmuch as today the ideology is in the process of production itself. In a provocative form, this, proposition reveals the political aspects of the prevailing technological rationality. The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces ‘sell’ or impose the social system as a whole." The "rationality" of technology subsumes those alternate "rationalities" which would contradict it. Thus, it is "rational" that one’s needs be determined by the commodities produced in capitalism, in what Marcuse provocatively calls repressive desublimation. It is "rational" that one’s workday not be commensurately decreased as production expands. It is "rational" that one direct productive forces into the manufacture and deployment of military weapons so as to protect ones economic productivity and primacy. It is rational precisely because these enable the wage laborer to fulfill the needs society has directed him to understand are properly human.

Technology, combined with the social forces of production, then, dominates both nature and man. More to the point, even the administrators of the forces of production, are themselves subsumed within the system. There is no other "rationality." There is no other set of needs. What the social forces of production, oriented by the technological mind, have accomplished, is, as Marcuse writes, one-dimensional society, one-dimensional thought, and one-dimensional man.

Though Marcuse has seemingly, in his analysis, closed off the means and mechanisms of protest and revolution, he does attempt to offer some sort of hope. Though the administration of society via technological rationality appears total, there is some hope, within technology itself, that may provide for the liberation of humanity.

He begins by noting that

the historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks--the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values into technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization.

It may be possible, then, if one could describe new ends in technical terms and as technical ends, that one might orient the force of technology toward its creation and not just its operation. That is to say, by changing our understanding of the ends of technological production--as, he later shows, for example, toward the ends of pacified existence--the creation of new technological apparatuses would concomitantly alter the production ends toward which the new creations are oriented.

But to get from here to there is no easy process. The primary hurdle, of course, would be to enable those under the totalizing administration of technological rationality to conceive of new ends in the first place. Marcuse argues that this is, indeed, possible, if difficult. He writes,

Industrial society possesses the instrumentalities for transforming the metaphysical into the physical, the inner into the outer, the adventures of the mind into adventures of technology. . . . But the consummation of technological rationality, while translating ideology into reality, would also transcend the materialistic antithesis to this culture. For the translation of values into needs is the twofold process of (1) material satisfaction (materialization of freedom) and (2) the free development of needs on the basis of satisfaction (non-repressive sublimation)."

Thus, by freeing of human existence from need, through material satisfaction, and further, the free development of those needs on the basis of satisfaction, humanity may come to more concretely, that is to say, more really, exist.

As Marcuse envisions it, technology always retains its dependence on other than technological ends. As we have seen, technology has been wed with the forces of social production with the result that protest is contained and revolution curtailed. But to have that effect, technology needs other than its own ends, it needs, in this context, capitalism and its productive forces. Thus, if technology can be freed from its exploitative features--through the satisfaction of needs--then it will become more dependent on direction of the political effort to achieve a pacified existence. This pacified existence itself would involve a reconstruction of the material base of society which would both enable the creation of "space and time for the development of productivity under self-determined incentives" and entail a "qualitative as well as quantitative reduction of power." As Marcuse puts it, "Liberation of energy from the performances required to sustain destructive prosperity means decreasing the high standard of servitude in order to enable the individuals to develop that rationality which may render possible a pacified existence." So, to "the degree to which the goal of pacification determines the Logos of technics, it alters the relation between technology and its primary object, Nature. Pacification presupposes the mastery of Nature . . . . But there are two kinds of mastery: a repressive and a liberating one. The latter involves the reduction of misery, violence, and cruelty."

In summary, then, within technology’s dialectical structure is the means through which a subversion of the domination of technological rationality may take place. Though current technological domination orders social production to its own ends, i. e., toward ever greater productivity, it may also provide the satisfaction of those needs--presumably human material ones--which will give the space and time necessary for humans to reorder the end of technology, on its own terms, toward the service of human need, rather than to its reification. Within this reordering, humans may be liberated toward a pacified existence.

However, while technology is currently a tool of oppression, and though it may become a tool for liberation, such a dialectical "triumph" is not certain. As Marcuse indicates,

’Pacified existence.’ The phrase conveys poorly enough the intent to sum up, in one guiding idea, the tabooed and ridiculed end of technology, the repressed final cause behind the scientific enterprise. If this final cause were to materialize and become effective, the Logos of technics would open a universe of qualitatively different relations between man and man, and man and nature.

But at this point, a strong caveat must be stated--a warning against all technological fetishism. . . . Technics, as a universe of instrumentalities, may increase the weakness as well as the power of man. At the present stage, he is perhaps more powerless over his own apparatus than he ever was before.

Therefore, to achieve the sort of autonomy Marcuse espouses, conditions must develop in which "the repressed dimensions of experience can come to life again; their liberation demands repression of the heteronomous needs and satisfactions which organize life in this society." But to achieve this sort of reversal of repression, would entail the suppression, for example, of television and advertising. Marcuse writes, "the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society." It would be, he notes, "an unbearable nightmare," if this were to happen. But such an elimination might achieve the disintegration of the current system.

If technological rationality is the connecting thread that runs through Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Economic Democracy is the continuing theme of Schweickart’s After Captialism. Economic Democracy is, for Schweickart, the successor-system, the theoretical model by which he counters the argument negating alternatives to capitalism. His book is admittedly less theoretical than practical in its presentation, though his previous work, Against Capitalism, forms the theoretical foundation to the present work, and After Capitalism certainly provides enough of its own theory..

The first chapter of After Capitalism provides the essential spine of the book’s argument. Here are present the three key terms that will unfold, in practical ways, through the remainder of the book: namely, the counterproject, successor-system and Economic Democracy.

The counterproject can be seen in terms of the reactions against global capitalism. Though it shares, historically, in the roots of economic socialism, the counterproject is a much more recent phenomenon in itself. Schweickart ascribes its public renewal to the events surrounding the economic summit in Seattle in 1999. The counterproject, however, is not yet the sort of mature force it must be to effectively counter capitalism. Made up, as it is, of diverse elements, it nonetheless is a "dialectical synthesis of the great anticapitalist movments of the past" and of a growing common consciousness with regard to the structures of oppression and what possible nonoppressive alternatives should be espoused, politically, socially and economically. The goal for the counterproject is what Schweickart calls "dialectical socialism" which will not simply wipe out capitalism, but will preserve the good of the present social, political and economic structures--among them democracy--while simultaneously resolving the irrationality and evil presently within those structures.

For the counterproject to do so, however, it must construct what Schweickart calls a "successor-system." Certainly, one needs the counterproject as the practical historical change justice and freedom warrant, but to guide that counterproject, a theory, or, here, a theoretical model, must be articulated. The successor-system theory must be able to explicate certain fundamental ideas. First, it must be able to delineate a specific economic model. This model must be something more than a thought experiment, but must be able to be adequately defended to economist and "lay citizen" alike, and be shown to be a viable alternative to capitalism. But it must also make sense of other major economic experiments, to show that that historical trend of the dominant economic models in the last century reveal a development to a "postcapitalist" economic order. The successor-system must also be able to illuminate the economic reforms that have been tried, and to suggest potential viable alternative reforms. The successor-system is not "traditional Marxism" nor is it the whole of counterproject theory (Schweickart mentions various other movements within the counterproject--gender and racial equality, the elimination of homophobia, and ecological and anti-nuclear efforts, among others--illustrating that the counterproject is a much more broad sociopolitical movement, or amalgamation of such movements, and not narrowly focused on economic concerns.) But most importantly, the successor-system focuses on the possibilities here and now, and must be able to articulate a transitional economic model that will bring current economic order from capitalism to its postcapitalist successor-system.

For Schweickart, that successor-system is what he calls Economic Democracy. Economic Democracy critiques capitalism on several important fronts: poverty, unemployment, inequality, democracy, and the environment. He identifies three important marks of capitalism--private ownership of productive means, wage labor, and the market--and then proceeds to show how Economic Democracy mitigates or transforms these marks of capitalism; the third, the market, being the most controversial of his suggestions.

It is not my purpose in this paper to explicate the full economic model of Schweickart’s Economic Democracy. Rather, I wish to trace the dialectical movement he proposes his successor-system theory will accomplish. Schweickart is not, here, advancing a new agenda per se, as compared to previous socialist economic models. Rather, he is firmly anchored in the socialist economic tradition. This can clearly be seen from his remarks regarding historical materialism. As Schweickart understands his model, "Successor-system theory can be viewed as a supplement to Marx’s famous historical materialism. In its general form, historical materialism remains the most plausible theory of history we have." Schweickart defines historical materialism thus:

In broad formulation, historical materialism asserts that the human species is a pragmatic, creative species that refuses to submit passively to the perceived difficulties of material and social life. Through a process of technological and social innovation, often proceeding by means of trial and error, we reshape the world over time to make it more rational, more productive, and more congenial to our capacity for species solidarity.

Scweickart obviously sees human history as progressive, though it may experience setbacks and dead ends.

Notably, Schweickart sees this social transformation through the counterproject happening through dialectical processes already current within capitalism and political democracy. Schweickart, though he engages in a description of what a "radical quick" overthrow of capitalism might look like, understands that the most plausible emergence of Economic Democracy will be within capitalism itself. From persuasion and legislative support for worker cooperatives, to ever-greater social control of investment (in part through ecologically oriented taxation, democratization of the banking system, etc.), to tariff-based fair trade--movements already at work within the counterproject--the reform of capitalism from within by Economic Democracy values will lead to revolution, the transition from capitalism to the successor-system theoretical model. That is to say, utilizing the democratic political values to which appeals are frequently made in our public discourse, and some of the current economic structures, Economic Democracy will effectively transform capitalism from within.

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism as undergirded and guarded by what he calls technological rationality is convincing. The creation of markets to shape and reifiy need toward repressive desublimation seems self-evident in twenty-first century U. S. capitalist economy and its global expansion. Furthermore, the incredibly powerful efficiency to which technology has been ordered for capitalist production seems insurmountable. It apparently almost seems so to Marcuse as well, for his suggestion of the elimination of television and advertising media does not convince one as to its plausible implementation. If one cannot eliminate the indoctrinating effects of the media, it does not seem plausible that the reordering of technical ends by a redefinition of technical values may take place.

One may witness the various media and their formation as entertainment. Some advertisements are almost indistinguishable from "regular" television shows, whether they be in the form if "infomercials" or the obvious product placement which is part of prime time television as well. The media are not geared toward information and education, but rather for entertainment. This is an example of the repressive desublimation. Transformation of the media does not seem likely. Consumers tend toward the pleasurable. "Blockbuster" movies, titillating "true crime docudramas." Advertising has followed that move. Ads are not informational but are emotive and psychological. They fulfill, or promise fulfillment of, certain needs. It is clearly not likely that media and advertising will be eliminated without oppressive political control. One wonders the seriousness with which Marcuse suggested it.

Ultimately, one wonders whether technological rationality can be reformed from within. It is not clear that it is possible to conceive of technology in the service of more pure ends. Rather, it may be possible to conceive of it, one wonders whether its reality is plausible. That is to say, Marcuse has built such a convincing case regarding technological rationality, that one is tempted to project that analysis on to technology itself. Here, one might suggest the analysis of Jacques Ellul. Though Ellul’s analysis is much more broad than technology itself (embracing a way of thinking he calls technique), it shares many of the same understandings as does Marcuse’s thought. All of which is to say that what seems called for is a transformation of thinking itself. If one is bound by technological rationality, how does one conceptualize something else? If efficiency and productivity are the ordering ends of technology, how is it possible to contain such thought that it not inculcate such values throughout society?

Schweickart’s proposal for the transformation of capitalism through existing structures, while attractive from the standpoint of practical implementation, does not seem much more plausible than a radical overthrow of capitalism (or its own self-generated elimination). Schweickart indicates that the means for his model to be implemented is for a reform leftist political party to be elected. For such a party to be elected, the counterproject will have to become more unified, something he indicates in the first chapter. But while the various movements within the counterproject share similar values and criticisms of prevailing injustices, they seem more competitive than cooperative.

Furthermore, one is not clear what possibilities for a leftist reform party there might be. The two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, in pursuit of control of the branches of government, move to the center to attract the most voters. Neither are reformist in any sense of the word. The Green party and other similar parties are systematically shut out of the political process, effectively dampening their message--to the extent that their message can be considered a legitimate expression of the counterproject. More to the point, the core bloc of voters to which they would need to appeal to obtain power are the political center. It is not clear that a leftist political platform, however noble its ends, would appeal to the center. Thus, the pull would be to water down the political message, resulting in something not much like a movement within the counterproject.

One very much wants to be persuaded of the possibilities for the just and free transformations for which Schweickart and Marcuse argue. But in some respects their analyses are too convincing. Schweickart’s conviction of the primary plausibility of historical materialism gives him the dialectical hope that his vision, or one much like it, will come to fruition. Marcuse, too, is convinced that the dialectical transformation he prognosticates will occur, if his forecasting is not quite so practically sophisticated in economic terms as is Schweickart’s. However, if one does not share such convictions with regard to dialectical materialism, one is left convinced by the analysis, but not so similarly convinced by the prospect of the actualization of these visions. These visions, then, remain in the realm of utopia. Useful heuristic devices, to be sure. But none too hopeful.

© 2002 Clifton D. Healy

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