In the mid-twentieth century when One-Dimensional Man was first published, the rapid advance of technology was already beginning to render “labor”—that is, what is known as “work”—superfluous. In 2016, half a century later, the process of “work” is being made largely redundant, if not “unnecessary”: the material truth of capitalist society that can never be uttered since as “work” disappears, so does what was one of its functional cornerstones. This article seeks to contribute to identifying some of the trends in the early twenty-first century first outlined by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man fifty years ago, in critically defining One-Dimensional Society in 2016.

In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse synthesized a wide range of ideas from the early Lukács, Husserl, Heidegger, and his colleagues, Horkheimer and Adorno. This synthesis is the culmination of the tradition of radical modernity critique that rose to prominence in the 1960s, providing the ideological basis for the New Left and its successor movements such as feminism and environmentalism. I develop an approach to this tradition in terms of the relation of function to meaning as it is reflected in the thought of Lukács and Heidegger. The paper concludes with an account of the relation between this theoretical heritage and contemporary technical politics.

The Marcusean concept of one-dimensionality is used to explore contradictions of organized labor. Since the original 1964 publication of One-Dimensional Man, the labor movement has suffered significant losses in membership and power. This essay examines the current relevance of Marcuse’s description of the increasing integration and collusion of organized labor with business, the loss of the union’s role as radical/revolutionary subject, and the containment of organized labor as an oppositional force. The specific mechanisms found in the structure, culture, logic, and legal constraints that characterize the deradicalization of organized labor are critically reviewed.

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a key text from within the Critical Theory tradition in terms of its utility for assessing today’s new stage of automated production, its impact on social relations, and the prospects for the type of challenge to capitalism that includes within it a concept of an achievable postcapitalist society. The interpretation here seeks to uncover the socially relevant dialectical relationship of the Grundrisse and Capital, which is in contrast to Marcuse’s theory, which holds that Marx, in Capital, had “repressed” his version of critical theory developed in the Grundrisse.

I discuss how I came to read, interpret, understand, critique, and use One-Dimensional Man, and I consider the book’s reception and relevance in the 1960s when it appeared, suggesting how its ideas relate to experiences and developments within US society and global capitalism from the 1940s and 1950s. Then, I examine how the model of one-dimensional society was put in question by the struggles and upheavals of the 1960s, how Herbert Marcuse revised his model in the 1970s, and how it fares in making sense of developments in the succeeding decades, up to the present. Thus, my interpretation will be philosophical, historical, and political, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse would want it to be.

This article sets out to revisit Herbert Marcuse’s “transcendent project” of liberation, as well as his notion of “post-technological rationality,” which grounded this project, articulated in outline form in the last section of One-Dimensional Man and in fragments throughout his middle writings between 1955 and 1972. The aim is to assess this project’s continued validity for the struggle for alternatives to the disorganizations and enclosures of neoliberal capitalism and its perpetual moments of crises. This article first reviews Marcuse’s place within substantivist critiques of technology. It then works through how Marcuse’s “post-technological rationality”—the other side of his technology critique—envisions social change happening via a rerationalized, revalued, and reaestheticized technological base spurred by the openings for alternatives made possible by a reconstituted subjectivity, determinate negation, and moments of crisis.

This is the introductory essay for the first of two special issues of Radical Philosophy Review marking the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the twentieth century’s most provocative, subversive, and widely read works of radical theory—Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), which we now reassess in an effort to contribute to the critical theory of our time. What are the possibilities and limits of our current situation? What are the prospects for moving beyond one-dimensionality? A summary of each of the articles featured in this special issue is also provided.

This essay discusses the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man for contemporary radical politics. It approaches the topic from an unconventional perspective: the untimely nature of One-Dimensional Man, i.e., its being conceived in the 1940s as an answer to the crisis of Marxism after the defeat of European communist revolutions in the early twentieth century, and published in the 1960s in the very moment when the postwar stabilization was to collapse. From this perspective, its relevance for a political theory and praxis of global radical movements is not to be found in its main concepts and categories (e.g., “totalitarianism”), but on its shortcuts and limits, especially those related to political subjectivity. Shortcuts and limits which are, mutatis mutandis, still ours.

This paper argues for the legitimacy of daydreaming as an important condition of a liberatory political vision, using a Marcusean framework to supplement and extend the critique of productivism recently made by Kathi Weeks. By differentiating free time from mere pastime, I show that daydreaming not only builds our political imagination, but it also reminds us of the value of unproductive free time. Situating Marcuse within a survey of the role of play and leisure in Aristotle, Schiller, and Marx, I show how Marcuse’s theory integrates neglected historical possibilities for reconceptualizing leisure as a right and not a luxury.

Socialism is meant to be democratic. Socialist democracy demands solidarity but it remains unclear what solidarity consists of. Theorists provide a range of different characterizations of solidarity which are adequate in their contexts but will not suffice as the basis for socialist democracy. This paper shows how we should not understand that needed solidarity; it is not merely a solidarity based on commonalities that overlooks difference. On the contrary, it needs to be a kind of solidarity that establishes close but complex relations between various groups through their commitment to taking their differences seriously. There are many different ways of taking differences seriously. At the end, this paper makes some suggestions for further research to clarify the concept of solidarity in spite of difference.

Beginning from a critique of neoliberalism, and in particular of its concept of freedom, I develop an alternative notion of freedom as love. In order to escape the current neoliberal hegemony, I argue that we must reconnect with the radical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I thus take as my starting point the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm over the nature of freedom that took place in the pages of Dissent in the mid-1950s. Building on their work I construct a theory of freedom as “connective expression.”

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not only a work of economic history and theory but also a political and normative argument and a critique of ideology. It is invaluable for its magisterial documentation of increasing inequality in capitalism, and unprecedented US economic inequality in particular. I situate it within philosophical conceptions of justice. I also identify it as a non-determinist critique of the political economy of capitalism and a substantive and methodological challenge to mainstream economics. I discuss not only what Piketty does not do, as some Marxists do, but what Piketty does do and summarize some of his central claims. I then discuss some problems in his work, some of which have not been addressed in the literature. In particular Piketty’s concept of labor income masks forms of capital, and given his arguments, gender and all women’s reproductive practices should have been addressed more fully.

Judith Butler maintains that the universality of the precarity of life confirms the interdependence of lives. Such interdependence makes us fundamentally responsible for the lives of Others. Through the application of Marx’s critique of capitalism as ontological degradation, we ask whether the notions of a life and of lives as Butler outlines them in her recent works are adequate to ground moral understanding and practice, or whether, the manner in which human lives produce and reproduce themselves within the capitalist context (now being globalized) problematizes the revision of the ethical. We therefore expand from her claim that “moral theory has to become social critique if it is to know its object and act upon it” (Butler, 2004).

Current struggles over laws prohibiting and criminalizing the public disclosure of violence in the spaces of animal use in the US have underscored the centrality of exposés to animal activism. This article complicates the activist belief in the power of exposure—“If slaughterhouses had glass walls . . .”—by drawing on the insights of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir concerning the prevalence of bad faith in systems of oppression and exploitation. I describe four forms of bad faith common to these systems, and offer suggestions for exposés of the animal enterprise modeled on Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s “engaged exposés.”