One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1964

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 1, Chapters 1-2

Section 1, Chapters 3-4

Section 2, Chapters 5-7

Section 3, Chapters 8-9

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Section 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 1: “One-Dimensional Society”

Section 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The New Forms of Control”

Marcuse argues that advanced industrial society, which exists in Western capitalist societies, is very different from earlier stages of capitalism. The liberties that we associate with “free” societies—such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, etc.—“yield” to advanced industrial society.

Freedom of thought and speech are what Marcuse calls “critical,” meaning that they are the means by which the status quo is questioned and then changed. What we call freedom of thought and speech are institutionalized, however, and are therefore only part of advanced industrial society in their dissolution and incorporation into that society. While we believe that freedom of speech and thought exist, truly free thought and speech are not imaginable under advanced industrial society, as they cannot be incorporated into the very society they are critical of and thus seek to dismantle.

“Freedom from want” (1), however, is a true possibility under advanced industrial society, which is crucial: this freedom is foundational to other freedoms. Since society appears to be able to satisfy the physical needs of its people, the basic critical function of that society is disappearing. After all, with the rise of the standard of living, not conforming to the very society that promises a longer and better life would be “socially useless.” Thus, people are not concerned about—and generally do not even realize—that their critical freedoms have been sacrificed because their foundational freedom from want is secure.

Another freedom Marcuse discusses is the freedom of enterprise. The freedom of enterprise entails the “freedom” to work or to starve; this is not the kind of “freedom,” however, that expands the human spirit. A true freedom of enterprise would come when the individual no longer has to prove themselves and perform on the market to avoid starvation; the individual would then “be liberated from the world’s work imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities” (2). If the organization of society could truly be directed to the total satisfaction of all basic needs, so that no one had to work to meet those specific needs and work could be more collaborative, then society’s control would not stifle individual and societal freedom but enable it.

The opposite seems to occur so that demands are placed on both labor and “free” time in advanced industrial society. Marcuse argues explicitly that such a culture is totalitarian. It is not appropriate, however, to look back to the freedoms that pre-dated advanced industrial society. Instead, new iterations of freedom can only be considered in “negative” terms, as the negation of the current ideologies. Thus, economic freedom would be freedom from the economy; political freedom would be freedom from the political system in which people have no control; intellectual freedom would be freedom from mass communication. Marcuse insists that freedom requires dismantling rather than revising the system.

The question remains how a people who have been so indoctrinated and who have unknowingly lost these freedoms can ever dismantle such a “comfortable” system and create the conditions of their own freedom. After all, liberation depends on being aware of the conditions of your oppression, and this consciousness is obstructed by genuine needs that require attending to. These conditions are also obscured by advanced industrial society’s manipulative assurances of freedom. With advanced industrial society, people often mistake false needs for genuine needs, assuming that many commodities are necessary when they are not. These false needs also obstruct freedom.

Under the totalitarianism of advanced industrial society, supposed freedom becomes the means of the individual and community’s domination. The freedom to choose goods and services, for example, is not freedom if these “choices” sustain this alienation. What looks like choice, then, is “enslavement.”

What appears to be an equalization of classes is also an ideological function of advanced industrial society. Blue-collar workers are no longer recognizable in many contexts as blue-collar (or working class/proletariat workers), which supposedly marks a greater respect for their labor. Instead, however, society simply consumes their status as the proletariat, which is also a consumption of the power of the working class to unionize, for example.

Marcuse argues that it is not only the working class that has been damaged. The psyche and internal self of every person has been invaded by this new technological society, which claims not only specific freedoms but the entire individual, no matter who that individual is, rich or poor. The result is “mimesis,” a total identification of the individual with society. This means that the inner mind, where opposition to the status quo can occur, is also “whittled down.” This loss of the radical power of negative thinking, both communally and individually, ensures the acceptance of society.

Marcuse argues that what might look like daily protest in the form of “alternative” practices of existentialism, Zen, communal living, or other ways of being associated with the “counterculture” have already been assimilated into the status quo (14). Thus, these “alternatives” are a small but essential part of the fabric that maintains, rather than challenges, the oppressive status quo. The fact that they are seen as counter-cultural exudes the manipulative power of the dominant culture to deceive.

Section 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Closing of the Political Universe”

Marcuse examines politics, particularly American politics. He argues that advanced industrial society has a politics that insists on the “productive union” of the Welfare State and the Warfare State. More generally, political life in advanced industrial society insists on a “convergence of opposites” (19).

While the political parties themselves (of which there are only two with any power) are presented and generally received by the public as offering “choices,” their programs are becoming more and more similar. There is only a narrow margin of difference between them and, therefore, little “choice” involved in any engagement with “democracy.” The major parties’ growing indistinguishability is a result of their shared valorization of “unification of opposites” (19). Another example of this unification in the United States is the alliance between big business and organized labor. This unification prevents substantive social change: Labor unions and corporations even lobby together, thus subsuming the power of organized labor to resist the machinery of capitalism. In this scenario, labor unions are no longer opposing but colluding with corporations.

Classical Marxist theory envisions the transition out of capitalism occurring through a political revolution, in which the proletariat destroys the political apparatus but gains ownership of the technological apparatus, “liberating” technology. For Marx, liberation from oppressive political forces occurs within the existing technology. Marcuse, however, argues that technology itself prevents liberation and that there can be no revolution that occurs by way of and within existing technology. The revolution for Marcuse is all or nothing: Both the warfare and welfare state must be abolished. The technological system must be abolished.

More specifically, Marcuse lays out the following four ways that true social change has been contained in advanced industrial society:

1. Mechanization and advanced industrialization reduce the intensity and quantity of physical energy required in manual labor. Work has gotten physically easier, yet this work creates an “inhuman slavery” as a result of the increased speed of production, the control of the machine operators, and the isolation of the workers from each other. The proletariat of early stages of capitalism was a “beast of burden” and the “living denial of his society” (25-26), but in advanced industrial society the worker is so integrated into the technological community that no one sees the enslavement that is occurring. Marcuse argues that in this society, “things swing” rather than oppress, and they “swing” the human mind and even the human soul into conformity.

2. In addition to manual labor becoming easier, the number of people doing this labor (blue-collar workers) decreases, and the number of white-collar workers increases. This decreases the chance for revolution, which lies with the working class, according to Marxist theory. At the same time, society exerts its power beyond working conditions and class formations.

Marcuse acknowledges that the blue-collar worker’s earlier “professional autonomy” was also his “professional enslavement.” At the same time, however, this specific enslavement was also the worker’s specific and professional critical power. With organized labor joining forces with big business, the worker has lost this power and is no longer set off in an occupational group—or other “dimension”—that resists advanced industrial society.

3. These changes in the nature of labor and the technology of production, alongside the “integration” of the working class, in turn change the way the laborer thinks about themselves and their place in society—the working class becomes “integrated” into capitalist society.

4. Ultimately, the working class neither appears to others or to itself as the “living contradiction” to society’s supposed liberation because it is integrated into that society.

Marcuse argues that all, regardless of class, are “slaves.” Specifically, all are “sublimated slaves” (he will discuss sublimation in detail later in the book).

Finally, with increased productivity comes an increased “surplus-product,” which engenders increased consumption. With this “constellation,” the obvious “use-value” of freedom itself diminishes, and there is no reason to insist on self-determination when one’s life is comfortable and “good.” Therefore, any kind of revolutionary energy within society is sublimated into that society, with qualitative, revolutionary change only possible from without society.

Section 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis

Marcuse is a neo-Marxist. This means that he is relying on but also revising Marxist theory. In the 19th century Karl Marx (See: Key Figures) developed what became known as Marxism, a critical theory that argues that capitalism is exploitative and will ultimately be overturned by the working class (or what Marx called the proletariat). The proletariat—the physical laborers who produce goods under capitalism—is the class most keenly aware because they are experiencing capitalism’s exploitation and form the poorest class. Since these workers viscerally experience the exploitation of capitalism, they understand its violence as a system; they thus organically evolve to a conscious critique of capitalism and, subsequently, gather the power to overthrow the system.

The first several chapters, then, present Marcuse’s critique of capitalism and advanced industrial society while also presenting his revisions of Marxist theory. While he agrees with the core of the theory, he wants to breathe new life into it. For example, Marx believes that the human individual could organically flower if the oppressive forces of society were lifted off the backs of humanity. There is an assumption in Marx that humans do not need an outside social structure to flourish; to get society “right” would be to get rid of existing external structures. While Marcuse seems to agree with Marx on this, he nonetheless thinks that Marx is inattentive to the individual and human psychology. Marx almost seems to pity the proletariat, while Marcuse seems genuinely interested in the psychology of the individual worker as a human being.

In contrast to Marx, Marcuse insists that attention must be paid to the human individual as a psychological being. More specifically, Marcuse’s revisions of Marx are deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud (who wrote after Marx died). Freud’s central theory of human psychology proposes that the ego mediates between the superego (societal structures) and the id (the inner human self that has a range of desires, often violent). Marcuse generally agrees with this, except that he believes that the id is not as negative as Freud believes. Marcuse employs a Marxist critique in revising Freud’s theory of the id. He suggests, through a Marxist approach, that Freud believed that the “essence” of human psychology was violent and irrational because he himself was a product of capitalism, a system which operates by way of domination and exploitation.

A second way that Marcuse differs from Marx is in his insistence on a complete break from the technological system, which Marcuse believes is behind The Creation of One-Dimensional Society. Marx is not interested in liberation from technology. Rather than a break from technology, Marx aims for the ownership of the machinery by moving it out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and into the proletariat’s control. With Marx, there is no mistrust of the machinery or technological system itself, as there is with Marcuse. For Marcuse, there can be no liberation from within the technological system. A political revolution requires a technological revolution. In this sense, Marcuse’s vision of revolution requires much more than Marx’s, who thinks that technology can be shifted from one group to another.

While Marcuse applies Freudian psychological theory that was unavailable to Marx, he is also writing during a period of change, during which a once-powerful labor movement is weakening. The power of this movement has been destroyed in its joining forces with, rather than against, corporations. Marcuse’s text also hints at the military escalation that will result in the Vietnam War. At the same time as Lyndon B. Johnson was making proclamations about the Great Society, a welfare program that formally began in 1965, he was preparing ground troops for the war in Vietnam.

Marcuse insists that revolution requires qualitative in addition to quantitative change. This “welfare state” of the Great Society will not liberate people from the qualitative conditions that enslave them. Revolution will not occur with the working class receiving more money or better machinery; rather, the kind of machinery and the kind of work (and the reasons for working) must all qualitatively change. Thus, everything must be destroyed so that it can be remade.

Finally, Marcuse is passionate about explaining why the political revolution that Marx foresaw did not occur. He thinks that this revolution has not occurred because of advanced technology and the societal system it has created, which in turn creates Repressive Desublimation as False Liberation. With this more advanced technology, more work is actually expected because work is less physically difficult. People are not liberated from work, then, but further captured by it.

In addition, while the working class is more comfortable, it is less liberated than it was before, as many in the working class have the external trappings of the bourgeoisie. With a wide distribution of goods accessible to almost everyone, the very rich and the very poor may watch the same TV shows and thus share cultural experiences. This is a dramatic break from the class relations between royalty and peasants or Marx’s antagonistic proletariat-bourgeoisie relation. Thus, the system’s resistance to being knocked down is much more subtle than Marx envisioned. Nonetheless, Marcuse still believes that the solution is to knock the system down so that humans, as well as the natural world, can flourish.