Abstract
Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (hereafter SM) is an interpretation of both the political phenomenon of Communism in the Soviet Union and its ideological doctrine and departures from classical Marxism. His study combines Marxian ideology critique with political analysis of the Soviet Union, using as sources documents, speeches and party pronouncements, as well as the classical texts of Marxism-Leninism. The interconnection of philosophical and political factors makes Marcuse’s study a complicated and often difficult presentation of a complex and controversial phenomenon; consequently, SM demands a detailed analysis and criticism of Marcuse’s interpretation — a task neglected in most previous discussions of Marcuse’s thought.
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Notes and References
For example, Arnson, Von Marcuse zu Marx, titles his chapter on Soviet Marxism, ‘Marcuses Kritik des Stalinismus’ and argues that ‘Marcuse is the only theorist of the Frankfurt School who has made the attempt of a systematic confrontation with Stalinism’ (p. 177). Palmier, in his Sur Marcuse, describes SM as a ‘passionate polemic against the Stalinist bureaucracy … an analysis without doubt pessimistic of Soviet Marxism and its cruel contradictions’ (pp. 24, 34).
Marcuse writes in the 1961 Vintage Preface: ‘In the Soviet Union, critics accused me of endeavouring “to depreciate and distort communist morality”, to consider “capitalist society as the triumph of individual freedom” and to repeat “the old bourgeois lie about socialism being a rigorous totalitarian system based on universal oppression”’ (SM, p. v). Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, titles his chapter, ‘The book against Soviet Marxism’ and claims that Marcuse’s interpretation is a form of anti-Soviet cold war propaganda that serves the interests of Western capitalistic-imperialism.
Marcuse writes in the 1961 Vintage Preface: ‘In the United States, I am said to treat “Soviet Marxism as a stage in mankind’s struggle toward freedom and socialism”, and to be more unambiguous in my “critical analysis of Western life and society” than in my analysis of the Soviet Union’ (SM, p. v). Marcuse takes these ‘contradictions’ as an indication of his success in freeing himself ‘from Cold War propaganda and in presenting a relatively objective analysis, but I would suggest that these contradictory appraisals of his book mirror the real ambivalences that Marcuse’s interpretation contains. Left-liberal critiques of Soviet Marxism’s apologetic features include a review by L. Stern in Dissent, vol. V, no. 1 (Winter 1958) pp. 88–93, and George Lichtheim’s review in Survey (January-March 1959) reprinted in Collective Essays (New York: The Viking Press, 1974) pp. 337–47. SM received its sharpest critique from the Left from Marcuse’s friend Raya Dunayevskaya, in her review ‘Intellectuals in the Age of State Capitalism’, News and Letters (June–July and August–September 1961). Dunayevskaya claims that Marcuse exaggerates the continuity between Marxism and Stalinism and fails to point out that the ‘Soviets’ — originally organs of workers’ democracy — had been suppressed by a bureaucratic and repressive state that had nothing in common with Marxian socialism. Dunayevskaya deplores Marcuse’s failure to indicate more clearly the differences between Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism and to criticize Stalinism more sharply as a total perversion of revolutionary Marxism. Although Dunayevskaya fails to take note of the critical moments in Marcuse’s analysis — which I shall bring out in this chapter — she quite rightly calls attention to Marcuse’s atypically restrained use of the ‘power of negation’ in his analysis of Soviet Marxism. Throughout this chapter I shall speculate as to why Marcuse’s analysis of Soviet Marxism was not more critical.
Sidney Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond, p. 27.
On the various positions towards the Soviet Union within critical theory during the 1930s and 1940s, see Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganization und politische Erfahrung.
After having defended Communism in The Communists and the Peace in 1952 (New York: Braziller, 1968), Sarte then attacked Stalinism in The Ghost of Stalin after the brutal suppression of the uprisings in Hungary, Poland and East Germany in 1956 (New York; Braziller, 1968). Merleau-Ponty, having defended Communism in Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), attacked Stalinism in 1957 in his Adventures of the Dialectic, which included a polemic against Sartre and other intellectuals who engaged in apologetics for the Soviet Union. On French debates over Communism, see H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path (New York: Delta, 1968).
See Kellner, Karl Korsch, especially the section on Lenin and the Soviet Union, and Korsch’s letter to Brecht, pp. 289f.
On the late Horkheimer’s anti-Communism, see my review article, ‘The Frankfurt School Revisited’. On Wittfogel’s changing stances toward Communism, see G. L. Ulmen, The Science of Society: Toward an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel (The Hague: Mouton, 1978).
On Marcuse’s government service, see 5.3 below and Katz, ‘Praxis and Poiesis’, pp. 111–39.
Interview with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
Arthur Mitzman told me that during his classes at Columbia, Marcuse openly taught Marxism and identified himself as a Marxist. At Harvard, his colleagues perceived him as ‘Marxist-in-residence’. Interview with Sidney Monas, Austin, Texas.
Herbert Marcuse, ‘Introduction’, Soviet Marxism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 1–5
Ibid., pp. 8–12.
Oskar Negt, ‘Marxismus als Legitimationswissenschaft: Zur Genese der stalinistischen Philosophie’, introduction to Abram Deborin-Nikolai Bucharin: Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969).
For the text of Khrushchev’s speech and his recollections concerning its background, see Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970). For Communist responses to Khrushchev’s speech, see Columbia University’s Russian Institute, The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).
See also Isaac Deutscher’s essays, republished in Ironies and History (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), expecially Part One. See Louis Althusser’s remarks on French reactions to Khrushchev’s speech in For Marx (New York: Vintage Books, 1970) pp. 10ff, and Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
Interview with Marcuse, 28 December 1978.
Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, pp. 414ff. Once again, in both the 1941 essay and SM Marcuse’s analysis of domination is similar to Max Weber’s theory, although Weber is not mentioned in either text — though Marcuse does cite Lewis Mumford, Veblen, Horkheimer and many American sources on the subject of technological rationality in the 1941 article.
Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications’, p. 419.
In ODM, Marcuse continues his analysis of the degradation of language and ideology in advanced industrial societies, capitalist and Communist. See ODM, pp. 84ff, especially pp. 94 and 101f, where he provides examples of one-dimensional Communist language and ideology. See also the earlier draft of this chapter, ‘Language and Technological Society’, Dissent, vol. VIII, no. 1 (Winter, 1961) pp. 66–74. Marcuse’s analysis of the degeneration of Marxism into a legitimating ideology provides a paradigmatic analysis of the shift from ideology-as-ism to ideology-as-hegemony, in which a once relatively rational and subversive programme of social reconstruction becomes a legitimating-stabilizing instrument of social control. See my article, ‘Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism’.
In a 1954 review article Marcuse stresses certain trends towards domination rooted in the industrial-technological features of ‘advanced industrial society’ which undercut differences between capitalism and communism; see ‘Recent Literature on Communism’, World Politics vol. VI, no. 4 (July 1954) pp. 515–25, where he writes: ‘Certain basic trends seem to be dangerously common to both competing systems: the triumph of technological rationality, of large industry over the individual; universal co-ordination; the spread of administration into all spheres of life; and the assimilation of private into public existence’ (p. 517).
Marcuse’s analysis here might be compared with Milovan Djilas’s interpretation of The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957).
Djilas argues that a new class has arisen in the Communist societies which performs the same dominating, repressive and exploitative functions in Soviet society as the bourgeois class performs in capitalist society. He argues against Marcuse that the new class possesses its privileges and special interest through its ownership of collective property and is therefore a ‘new owning and exploiting class’; see pp. 44f, and 54ff. Others have argued convincingly that it is not ownership and economic power that is the basis of domination in the Soviet Union, but rather that political power in the party hierarchy and bureaucracy becomes the basis of power and domination. See Claude Lefort, Elements d’une Thésorie de la Bureaucratie (Paris: Droz, 1971)
part of which is translated as ‘What is Bureaucracy’, Telos, 22 (Winter 1974–5) pp. 31–65, and Serge Mallet, ‘Bureaucracy and Technocracy in the Socialist Countries’, Essays on the New Working Class, ed. and Trans. Dick Howard and Dean Savage (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1975), especially pp. 132ff.
Djilas argues in detail for the party character of the bureaucracy in The New Class, pp. 39–43 and ‘The Party State’, pp. 70ff. A typical statement is: ‘The Party is the main force of the Communist state and government. It is the motive force of everything. It unites within itself the new class, the government, ownership, and ideas’ (p. 78). See also Lefort, ‘What is Democracy?’, pp. 45ff. Marcuse’s friend Barrington Moore’s book, Terror and Progress — USSR (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954) analyses prospects of a technocratic development in the USSR, in which technical-bureaucratic administration would replace political terror; collective rule would replace personal rule, and a ‘larger flow of goods and services would be distributed to the population’ (p. 189). Moore indicates in the preface that Marcuse suggested the title to him and discussed the book with him in detail. In fact, Moore and Marcuse worked together closely on several of their books, and no doubt their exchange of views on Soviet Communism influenced the interpretations of both of them. See Marcuse’s review of Terror and Progress in ‘Recent Literature on Communism’, pp. 519ff. Although it is possible that Moore and Marcuse may have grasped a long-range trend in the Soviet Union in which power and the constitution and control of the bureaucracy will shift from loyal Party members to technocrats or the intelligentsia, nonetheless, when Marcuse published SM, and even today, the bureaucracy and power of the state seem to be concentrated in the hands of the Party. And while technocrats seem to be gaining power, the intelligentsia seems to be suspect; thus there is little evidence that the Soviet Union will indeed be the first technocracy.
Marcuse writes: ‘This framework leaves much room for personal and clique influences and interests, corruption and profiteering; it also permits one group (and one individual of the group) to come out on top — but it also sets the limits beyond which the mobilization of power cannot go without upsetting the structure on which Soviet power rests’ (SM, p. 97).
For other views of the 1956 Eastern Europe uprisings, see Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958); Marcuse’s preface to her book notes his disagreement with Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of these events (p. 12). See also Stern’s critical remarks on this issue in his review of SM, pp. 91f.
On the history of the Soviet Union, see Trotsky’s many works; Boris Souverine, ‘Stalinism’, in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford: University Press, 1965)
E. H. Carr’s multi-volume opus, History of Soviet Russia (London and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964–78)
Charles Bettleheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period, 191 7–23 and Second Period, 1924–29 (Hassocks, England: Harvester, 1977 and 1978).
On the discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism see the articles in the anthology Stalinism, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1977), especially the studies by Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’. Curiously, Cohen’s comprehensive discussion of the main trends in Soviet studies, which stresses the continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, fails to mention that Marcuse’s SM did stress a ‘break’ (SM, p. 58), although, as I am indicating, he does not analyse the issue adequately. Cohen’s article, and other historical research he draws upon, put in question the claims of Solzhenitsyn, the ‘new philosophers’ and other anti-Communists and ex-Communists, like Kolakowski, that there is a direct line of continuity between Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism. Cohen argues, in fact, quite convincingly for sharp discontinuities between Stalinism and Leninism. See his article, ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’ and his book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1973). On Stalinism see Souverine, ‘Stalinism’; Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York: Vintage, 1971)
Alvin W. Gouldner, ‘Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism’, Telos, 34 (Winter 1977–8).
On the role of Marxism in the Stalinist debacle see the article by Kolakowski and the rebuttal by Markovic in Stalinism. For typical works by the ‘new philosophers’ — who are really neither ‘new’ nor ‘philosophers’ — which try to blame the Gulag on Marx, see Andre Glucksmann Les Maitres Penseurs (Paris: Grasset, 1976) and Bernard-Henri Levy, Barbarism with a Human Face (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
S. Stojanović, Between Ideals and Reality (New York: Oxford, 1973)
Antonio Carlo, ‘The Socio-Economic Nature of the USSR’, Telos, 21 (Fall 1974)
Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettleheim, The Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); and the articles in Critique by Hillel H. Ticktin, Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, no. 1, ‘Political Economy of the Soviet Intellectual’, no. 2 ‘Socialism, the Market and the State’, no. 3. ‘Soviet Society and Prof. Bettelheim’, no. 6 and ‘Class structure and the Soviet Elite’, no. 9; the two articles by Ernest Mandel in Critique, 3; and the various debates in almost every issue.
This was noted by Karl Kosch in his 1930 Afterword to Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971).
SM, pp. 127 and 128–9: ‘It is the Dialectics of Nature which has become the constantly quoted authoritative source for the exposition of dialectic in Soviet Marxism’ (p. 128). Further, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism replaced the dialectial notion of truth by a primitive naturalistic realism, which has become canonical in Soviet Marxism’ (SM, p. 133).
See my discussions of Marcuse’s concept of art in 4.3, 6.3, and 10.4.
Rudolf Bahro in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978) discusses literary opposition in the Soviet Union and stresses that Soviet art does not simply follow a model of onedimensional ‘Soviet realism’ to the extent that Marcuse claims. The dissident and oppositional currents in Soviet culture were probably not, as visible however, in the 1950s when Marcuse wrote SM.
Marcuse, SM, p. 133. Marcuse never wrote extensively on Lenin, and although he criticized ‘Leninism’ in the late 1960s and 1970s, he never developed a systematic critique of Lenin or Leninism.
Codifications of Soviet Marxism include G. Glezerman and G. Kursanov, Historical Materialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968)
R. O. Gropp, Grundlagen des dialektischen Materialismus (Berlin: VEB Verlag, 1970).
G. Wetter, Sowjet-ideologie Heute (Fisher: Frankfurt, 1962).
Richard T. De George, Patterns of Soviet Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970).
See sources in note 16.
See Marcuse, ‘Preface à l’edition franpaise’, Le marxisme sovietique (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) pp. 7ff.
On the relation between Leninism and Stalinism, see the literature cited in note 27. On the continuities and discontinuities between the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes in Russia, see the heated debates between Martin Nicolaus, Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Chicago; Liberator Press, 1975)
On the relation between Leninism and Stalinism, see the literature cited in note 27. On the continuities and discontinuities between the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes in Russia, see the heated debates between Martin Nicolaus, Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Chicago; Liberator Press, 1975), Michael Goldfield and Melvin Rothenberg, The Myth of Capitalism Reborn (San Francisco: Line of March, 1980)
Albert Szymanski Is the Red Flag Flying? (New York: Zed Press, 1980).
For critiques of bureaucratic Communism see Stojanović, Between Ideals and Reality; the aticle by Lefort, ‘What is Democracy?’; Andrew Arato, ‘Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism’, Telos, 35 (Spring 1978)
Rudi Dutschke, Versuch Lenin auf die Füsse zu stellen (Berlin: Rot Verlag, 1974)
Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Social Regime in Russia’, Telos, 38 (Winter 1978–9); and especially Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe.
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© 1984 Douglas Kellner
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Kellner, D. (1984). Marcuse’s Critique of Bureaucratic Communism: Soviet Marxism. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_8
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