The Forgotten Author of Wokeness: Marxist Herbert Marcuse

He Sheds Light on What's Happening Today

As many readers know, I authored a four-part series on the impact of Saul Alinsky, one of the gurus of the New Left who transformed radical organizing with his notorious book, “Rules for Radicals.”

Now, in the aftermath of America’s rejection of elites and wokeness in the 2024 Presidential election and with the dramatic turn of blue-collar workers flocking to Donald Trump, I want to turn to the original author of wokeness and to one of the Left’s most influential advocates: a German-American Marxist revolutionary named Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).  Reading Marcuse can shed a bright light on what’s happening today.

For the most part, Marcuse has been long forgotten. But he was one of the key authors of “critical theory” that forms the foundational basis of today’s wokeness and the cultivation of an elite class to advance it. He promoted his theories as a prolific writer of radical politics. After he immigrated to the United States he held positions at Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940.

One of Marcuse’s most virulent and dangerous legacies was his ardent advocacy for censorship in America, which I describe in detail below. His dark sentiments regrettably influenced a whole generation of progressives who today largely lead our mainstream media, our movie studios, publishing houses, ad agencies and our educational institutions. We now can see Marcuse’s ugly theories and handiwork in real time in America.

Marcuse claimed that one of the first steps toward revolutionary change was that advocates and radicals needed to be intolerant of conservative voices.  And they need to get all Americans to view conservative views as illegitimate.

Sound familiar?

I know a bit about Marcuse because I was a New Left activist and was exposed to Marxist ideas as the roommate with the late Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago 8 defendants.  I became friends with such radicals as Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman.

In the 1970’s, I also participated in a number Marxist-Leninist study groups in Washington, D.C. In fact, I once was in a Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung study group. Yes, they existed!

Thankfully, today I’m much more conservative, but I wish to go back in time so we can understand the blueprint that guides many of today’s movements – movements that to the public probably have appeared to have arisen out of nowhere.

This movement had clear origins and a strategy that’s been percolating for more than 60 years.  It’s vital we understand these origins because it gives us clarity about their goals, objectives and strategy.

Today’s woke movement didn’t begin with Black Lives Matter, Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney, Harvard’s professoriate, or Congress’s “Squad.”  No. It began in the early 1920’s among a group of revolutionary-minded German Marxist intellectuals who tried to devise radical theories and strategies under the rubric of something called the “Frankfurt School.”

These German Marxist intellectuals sought to disrupt and destroy modern democratic societies.  One of its most successful advocates was Marcuse.

And when he emigrated to the United States in 1959, he became  the intellectual father and advocate for the New Left. He celebrated and encouraged the anarchistic Hippy and Yippie movements, promoted the cultural energy of rock and roll and Free Love as well as advocacy for the use of illicit, mind-bending drugs.  He was convinced all these cultural changes would erode the foundations of mid-century America.

The New York Times, in his 1979 obituary noted that Marcuse's most famous student was Angela Davis, an angry Black activist who was a member of the American Communist Party. She ran twice for Vice President as a member of the Communist Party. She appropriately currently serves as the Distinguished Professor Emerita of “Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness” at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

The Times especially noted Marcuse’s affection for the Hippies and Rubin and Hoffman’s violent wing called the Yippies, who sought to create havoc at public demonstrations. As the Times wrote in its obituary, “Dr. Marcuse, looking back at the 1960's, told an interviewer: “You see the heroic period was that of the hippies and Yippies. They did their thing. They did an indispensable job. They were heroes.”

Marcuse had a clear blueprint to advance revolutionary change.  His formula was simple: sow violence, disorder and chaos to advance radical cultural and political change. He was convinced their disruptive actions would contain the seeds of destruction in free societies.

Marcuse was exceptional in that he broke away from traditional Marxists and was known as a “neo-Marxist.” He discarded the common worker or the “proletariat” as the “agent” for revolutionary change. He rejected the traditional Marxist viewpoint that class warfare would be the foundation for their revolution.

In many ways, his turn towards cultural extremism and against the working class now has firmly taken hold within the Democratic Party as seen in the results of the 2024 election. 

Over the past decades, the Democratic Party has increasingly turned its back on blue collar, non-college educated workers and instead showed its preference for elites from the Ivy League along with celebrities, Silicon Valley billionaires and trust fund children. He also cheered on many other potentially disruptive movements including movements led by activists who sought sexual freedoms.

Today, as we now clearly can see, the Democratic Party is dominated by elites and progressive cultural warriors that abhor the working class.  And the working class has found refuge in Donald Trump.

Even major labor unions, such as the Teamsters, have abandoned the Democrats.  It was encapsulated when Teamster President Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in July. 

And where national union leaders endorsed Harris, grass roots union workers established insurgent, pro-Trump organizations that included longshoremen, electrical workers, auto workers, steel workers and other trade unions.  They created their own rebellion in 2024.

The American worker understood the Democratic Party has abandoned them and that the majority of the Democratic Party now represent elites that sneer at the working-class men and women.

Marcuse believed deeply that highly educated middle-class and upper-class kids – not workers - would be a decisive and subversive agent that could lead to revolutionary change, turning whole societies upside down.  He decided the culture wars could destroy modern societies based on free and open democracies. 

In many ways, he has almost succeeded.  Let’s see what he had to say in his own words.

In this first of a series on Marcuse and his philosophy, I want to raise one of his pillars for radical change: censorship of speech and the marginalization of those who oppose social change.

Marcuse clearly preferred censorship as a precondition for his societal change.  To him, this was the bedrock for revolutionary change.  Censorship could be an advantage to revolutionaries, enshrine radical ideas, and delegitimize opposing views. 

Marxist scholars Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss wrote about Marcuse’s advocacy in their 2007 book, “The Essential Marcuse.”

The two authors wrote that Marcuse’s 1965 essay, titled “Repressive Tolerance” was considered “an attack on the ideal of free speech.”   It also was viewed “by many in the New Left as a rationale for interrupting or refusing discussion and debate.”

He vigorously urged both the negation of conservative arguments from the public square along with acceptance of Leftwing arguments as gospel. In his own words, he supported, “Intolerance against movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left.”

The Marxist theorist further claimed that conservative and even “bourgeoise” or middle-class ideas constituted what he called “false consciousness” about the true nature of society. 

He wrote, “false consciousness…must begin with stopping the words and images which fed this consciousness.  To be sure, this is censorship, even pre-censorship,” he concluded. Imagine that he urged not only censorship, but pre-censorship.

Marcuse added in a 1968 postscript that the idea of “tolerance” of opposing views must be denounced, even if it’s promoted by liberals.  “Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy.”

In 2024 we see that many ideas, even words are denounced and erased from our public dialogue.  According to Marcuse, contrarian ideas are not part of America’s “civilizing function.”

In short, criticism of wokeness and of its Leftwing anti-American catechism must not be tolerated. 

Today, it’s difficult to challenge woke ideas about gender, race, crime, academic merit, hiring standards, promotions and yes, about the need for free speech.  You cannot criticize Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.  You can’t challenge the notion that America’s founders were evil or that the founding of our country was based on evil.

So, today, even voices expressed within the Democratic Party by its “centrists” are denounced. Academics lose their jobs because of what they write.  Speeches are shouted down by loud and violent students.  Editors lose their jobs because they permit unpopular opinions. Physicians and nurses lose their jobs because of their medical beliefs. Jewish students are threatened because they support Israel, or because they display a star of David or wear a yarmulka.

So today, we now live in a what I would call a pre-censorship world.  It’s unclear whether the 2024 election will impact on this menacing phenomenon.

Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and founder of Amazon recognized that the erasure of various points of views must change, especially in his new business, the media.  He wrote in an October 28 opinion article, “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

Bezos recognized that most Americans don’t believe in the fairness of current news reporting by the mainstream press, writing, “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”

Eric Nelson, the publisher of Broadside, a conservative publishing house, told Slate’s Laura Miller that today’s “overall culture has changed to be pro-censorship, with the belief that by  limiting our ability to discuss some ideas, it will make those ideas disappear or lose value among the public – which is delusional, and that has been proven over and over again.”

In a New York Times opinion piece, Deborah Harris and Jessica Krasmer-Jacobs, two Jerusalem-based literary agents, wrote about an open letter circulating that called for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications.  Harris and Krasmer-Jacobs wrote, “This attack on culture divides the very people who should be in direct dialogue, reading one another’s books. It cannot be that the solution to the conflict is to read less, not more.”

But of course, to Herbert Marcus and other fellow pro-censorship advocates, silencing their opponents is a revolutionary imperative. “I suggested in ‘Regressive Tolerance,’” he wrote in his 1968 post-script, “the practice of discriminating tolerance…as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left (is) by restraining the liberty of the Right.”

“Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disable,” Marcuse wrote. “As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for ‘the other side,’ I maintain that there are issues where…there is no other side.”

Marcuse flatly stated tolerance for other views must be rejected. “For this struggle,” Marcuse concluded, “I propose the practice of discriminating tolerance.  To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this pettio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society.”

This is the essence of radical, revolutionary movements we see throughout the world.  It is not that progressive movements prefer censorship.  It’s that they understand they can only win if they silence dissenting views. That’s their philosophy.  It’s their lifeblood.  It’s their DNA.

But it’s not America’s lifeblood or our DNA.

More on Marcuse will come in future installments.