This paper offers a critique of the emphasis on anti-futurity and failure prevalent in contemporary queer theory. I argue that responsibility for climate change requires commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist. A queer crip feminist commitment to the future is, I contend, informed by radical hope.

There is little doubt that our political discourse has become more polarized over the last thirty years. I argue that as radical thinkers we can turn to politeness as one way to begin working past this partisan and adversarial atmosphere. I define politeness as a self-conscious appreciation of the role of social convention in repairing and maintaining our relationships. The first section compares politeness and decency to highlight what is unique about politeness. The second section argues that politeness can be considered a form of care. The third and final section describes how radical theory can use politeness to start initiating healthier dialogue.

It is tempting for socialists to claim that there is no human nature. I argue that we should resist this temptation and that the socialist project needs to take human nature seriously. To make this argument, I put forward a view of human nature derived from Marx, from Kropotkin, and from some recent work in evolutionary psychology. I also argue that while a socialist society is more in accord with the potentials for human flourishing and self-realization, we would do a disservice to the socialist project to simply wish away certain negative tendencies which may be built into the human genome.

Charles Mills has urged philosophers to turn their attention away from issues of class injustice and towards the deep inequalities in wealth, opportunity, and life prospects that divide racial groups in American society. Mills’s position is that philosophers on the left should make racial justice the higher priority. His argument advances two theses: first, race is a “material” structure with the same causal power Karl Marx attributed to class, and second, a reparations-oriented redistribution of wealth from all white to all black Americans is a moral imperative. Mills’s materialist understanding of race is cogently argued, but undercuts his moral argument favoring reparations. Considering (1) the extreme and growing inequality of wealth between black and white Americans and (2) pervasive white resistance to the goal of racial equality, a radical redistribution of wealth on the basis of class offers the only hope for progress towards the goal of racial justice.

One impediment facing socialists is the widespread belief among their opponents that they advance only by destroying things. Ironically, socialists often help spread this belief by declaring defeat when they are unsuccessful at destroying their targets. The thesis tested in this article is that, instead, socialism at its best hopes to transform the institutions we all inherit. It tries to transform values, culture, governance, production, and finance. Destroying that inheritance leaves no secure basis for generating a better world. The trick for the socialist realist is to find the right balance between radical destruction and timid gradualism.

This paper answers the question what is radical philosophy today by explaining the how, when, and who of socio-political transformation. We need both critical theorizing and a transformative practice to explain how we can change the world. We must theorize the moment of the limit in the objective domain of power, to answer the question when agency becomes possible. I introduce the idea of the “political subject-in-outline” that moves within the tension of minimal closure (the subject) and permanent openness (the outline) to theorize a who that remains inclusive and in a position to transform the status quo. Marx’s and Adorno’s thought remains central to theorize socio-political transformation today.

For Herbert Marcuse, rationality today—amidst advanced capitalism and neoliberalism—is not confronted with an external irrational universal, as it was in the earlier period of liberalism. “General ‘harmony’” is converted into a goal that pacifies because it is technically feasible. Through the critique of everyday experiences, it is possible to distinguish between how individuals immediately appear in actual society and what is essential to society and humanity—by revealing the dependency on capital as a dehumanizing factor. Dependency remains hidden in the relations between universals such as “capitalist society” and technical targets in the everyday lives of individuals. Only social movements that can decipher the rule of capitalism over everyday experiences have any chance of overcoming domination.

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is framed as a response to the “end of ideology” thesis of political equilibrium and a criticism of mainstream theoretical construction in advanced industrial countries. Such formulations obscured new forms of self-alienation in totally administered society, and replaced any conceived potential subjectivity with objective laws that govern social relations. One-Dimensional Man is also framed as a response to the “crisis of Marxism” by underscoring the importance of popular ideology in shaping subjective action, which at present, precludes proletarian revolution.

This article reflects on the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of technology in the age social media. Although Marcuse did not experience the rise of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and “social media” as major means of communication, his insights about technological rationality, technology, and the role of technology in the context of labor allow us today to reflect on the relevance of Marcuse’s philosophy of technology for a critical theory of digital and social media.

This essay explores the lasting theoretical value of Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” via the psychoanalytic concepts of Žižek and Lacan. It argues that Marcuse’s theory should be adapted to include Lacanian notions of death drive and enjoyment, but also that it remains particularly suitable to structurally define consumer capitalist ideologies that incorporate both drive and immediate gratification to reinforce institutional patriarchy. Combining the theories then reveals a paradoxical demand to “enjoy responsibly,” which engenders various indirect rationalizations of Marcuse’s “performance principle.” This interpretation also points to various positive ideological beliefs with critical significance that exceeds Marcuse’s focus on their “higher unification.”

The paper will examine the critical psychoanalytical model of emancipation proposed by Herbert Marcuse. I will show that Marcuse’s critical model has two moments; one that I call negative, formulated around the idea of repressive sublimation—as developed by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man—and another one that I call normative, which finds its roots in a very peculiar reading of Freudian narcissism and leads to the idea of nonrepressive sublimation. By this reading of Marcuse, I hope to circumscribe the role of psychoanalysis in the redefinition of the actual tasks of Critical Theory.

In this historical contextualization of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, I present critical arguments that Marcuse deploys in the US context—especially in light of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. I argue that (1) Marcuse’s critical perspective worked to deprovincialize Anglo-American philosophy and to demythologize the extravagantly glorified and sanitized “American Pageant” view of the world that prevailed in the United States at the time and (2) Marcuse’s critical pedagogy thus led to a revitalization and recovery of philosophy in the United States after World War II.