The concept of “losing well” is introduced and defined as radical praxis of the Left that catalyzes social democracy, stimulates critical consciousness, and develops counterformations of solidarity for struggle in the nonrevolutionary situation. Walter Benjamin’s idea of amazement is interpreted as a personal praxis for self-critique and critical awareness. Herbert Marcuse’s conception of the one-dimensional society is interpreted as a society organized for maintaining the nonrevolutionary situation—the “society without opposition.” My own view is that Marcuse was trying to develop a theory of revolution for the nonrevolutionary situation. This is the introductory essay for the second 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—Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which we now reassess to contribute to the liberation theories of our time. A summary of each of the articles featured in this special issue is also provided.

Taking Herbert Marcuse’s classic One-Dimensional Man as a critical point of departure, this contribution is framed around the insight that complex and contradictory underlying determinants in capitalism are subject to outcomes and appearances that are conceptualized as one-dimensioning. The latter involves reduction to multiple dimensions as opposed to a single dimension, or homogenisation for which presumed conformity to the market and monetisation are the most obvious manifestations. The argument is illustrated through an account of one-dimensioning within the history of economics as a discipline since the marginalist revolution of the 1870s, and through the rise of financialized neoliberalism.

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was a critique of late capitalist society in the 1960s, with its “one-dimensional” culture and consumer-based subjectivity shaped by the political economy. Such subjectivity constituted one of the foundations upon which the “administered society” rested. The nature of character structure, as historically instantiated, provided motivation to work, motivation to consume, modes of consciousness, and the disposition toward certain modes of social relatedness. Since the publication of One-Dimensional Man, the contradictions of capitalism have become glaring. At the same time, there are crises of subjectivity, as the traditional forms of selfhood and identity are ever less able to adapt to current circumstances. In Marcuse’s work, we saw major changes as the Freudian Self became obsolescent with the rise of the post-Freudian, Consuming Self. We now again see major transformations, with the rise of a new form of contemporary selfhood—multiple, contradictory, mutable, flexible, liquid, Protean.

This essay seeks to read Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism together in the context of what Marcuse calls the “society without opposition.” It seeks to extract a conception of hope as method from within these two otherwise rather bleak analyses. Their shared conception of hope is understood as the attempt to speak from a conception of capitalism as hell, and to continue to speak anyway. The essay concludes by defending a conception of hope that haunts rather than a hope that promises.

Today’s Left has inherited and internalized the rift that split the New Left. This split led to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, a book that angered many because of MacIntyre’s harsh treatment of Marcuse. I situate MacIntyre’s engagement with Marcuse against the background of the split in the New Left: on the one side, E. P. Thompson, MacIntyre, and those who then saw the revolutionary class in the proletariat, and on the other side, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, and Marcuse who seemed to put their faith in radical student intellectuals, Third World movements, and identity politics. I examine—without polemics— this rift in search of a new basis for Left unity, particularly as regards the question of radical, working class subjectivity. I argue that we must draw from MacIntyre his concept of revolutionary practices and from Marcuse—in One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization—the analysis of technological rationality, aesthetic reason, phantasy, and imagination.

The title of Herbert Marcuse’s famous book One-Dimensional Man implies the existence of one or more other dimensions beyond the one-dimensional. This essay theorizes two alternative and opposing dimensions—utopia and barbarism—and perhaps a fourth, the aesthetic dimension. This expanded treatment of the concept of dimensionality may be useful for generating theory and informing praxis in the struggle for liberation.

In this essay, I defend the legacy of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the relation it sketches between art, politics, and human instincts against detractors who see the work as defeatist. Through an examination of Marcuse’s use of ideas drawn from biology and aesthetics, I outline a creative politics that illustrates the manner in which new forms of human life might be created from the “bottom up,” through political struggle and artistic practice. I further compare these ideas to those of Jacques Rancière, Autonomist Marxism, and epigenetics in order to better understand the prescience of Marcuse’s thought and its continued relevance.

This paper examines the contemporary social context in order to consider why Marcuse’s ideas, specifically those represented in One-Dimensional Man, do not resonate in the United States in the same way that they did when the book was published a half century ago. Although much of Marcuse’s analysis continues to be relevant for contemporary society, a fear of one-dimensional thinking has diminished. This is due, firstly, to scholarly defenses of populism. And secondly, it results from changes in international relations, the social and economic status of youth, and a more uniform reverence for technology.

This article engages a central argument of One-Dimensional Man: that a core register of power rests at the sensible level, within desires, needs and pleasures. Although this line of argument has been targeted by many readers as particularly problematic, this article proposes that it possesses significant resources for contemporary political thought. Where Marcuse has been described as a thinker of a bygone age, his reflections on power and sensibility possess vital resources to cognize power and agency in late modernity.

This article aims to introduce Bell’s work to philosophical audiences while also presenting his work for consideration within our contemporary discussions of race and racism. Bell’s contributions to our understanding of race have gone largely unnoticed, and that those who consider themselves philosophers of race are unfamiliar with the contributions of the intellectual father of Critical Race Theory is not only a failure of intellectual scholarship, but it is also a missed opportunity to take seriously the claims of a legal, political, and philosophical titan. The first section of this paper seeks to present Bell’s paradigm of racial realism and its constituent components. The second section explores what has led to Bell’s near complete exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, and philosophy of race specifically. The third section addresses the contributions that Bell’s theories can make to our contemporary discussions of race within the discipline of philosophy.

Critical theory has recently charted the rise of an unprecedented wave of social acceleration transforming Western capitalism. Within that body of work, a tendency has emerged to frame this new temporality as a stable structure lacking in the possibility for visions of alternatives, let alone for substantive revolt or challenge. This essay argues that recent struggles like Occupy and 15-M experimented with an alternative, utopian temporality that challenged and disrupted acceleration, revealing the latter to be prone to generating and expanding the conditions of temporal struggle. Acceleration is therefore unstable, and cannot be adequately understood apart from its increasing cultivation of visions of and experiments in other temporalities.

In this essay I pay homage to one of the most important but neglected philosophers of liberation in Latin America, Luis Villoro, by considering what possible lessons we can learn from his philosophy about how to approach injustices in the Americas. Villoro was sympathetic to liberatory-leftist philosophies but he became concerned with the direction they took once they grew into philosophical movements centered on shared beliefs or on totalizing theories that presume global explanatory power. These movements became vulnerable to extremes or vices that undermine their liberatory promise. I examine some of these worrying tendencies among that body of literature roughly described as “decolonial thought” (e.g., Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo). After a concise presentation of Villoro and the decolonial turn, I consider four dangers that this new liberatory-leftist movement faces and why Villoro should be a significant voice as the decoloniality debate moves forward.

This paper argues that certain orientalist writings authorize the genocide of Arab peoples precisely by establishing the conditions for the impossibility of Arab death. Of particular import to this analysis is the nineteenth century philological work of famed orientalist Ernest Renan, who argues that Arabs are psychically inorganic because their language has never demonstrated the organic historical development characteristic of European peoples. The historico-logical impossibility of killing Arab peoples is essential not only if philosophers are going to grasp the rationale of the ongoing and often casual murder of Arabs, but also if scholars of race hope to comprehend the specificities of biopolitical racism, orientalizing racism, historical racism, animalizing racism, and so on.

This paper critically examines the ways in which dominant poly discourses position polyamorists among other queer and feminist-friendly practices while setting polygamists outside of those practices as the heteronormative and hyper-patriarchal antithesis to queer kinship. I begin by examining the interlocking liberal discourses of freedom, secularism and egalitarianism that frame the putative distinction between polyamory and polygamy. I then argue that the discursive antinomies of polyamory/polygamy demarcate a distinction that has greater affective resonance than logical validity—an affective resonance, moreover, that is built on neocolonial framings of polygamy as barbaric and idealizations of polyamory that whitewash its practices.

Mexico faces a crisis of national sovereignty and independence as it struggles to establish a democracy amidst integration into the world market system and internal demands for social justice. U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs, providing military training and equipment for government troops, contributes to a state-sponsored war against civilians, namely indigenous groups and the middle and lower classes devastated by NAFTA. While resistance movements in Chiapas respond to capitalist practices and repression, Valdez argues the Mexican government minimizes them to displace its indigenousgroups and facilitate their silent annihilation. U.S. policy, the Mexican state, indigenous issues, and free trade are interconnected with Mexico’s larger society.

With 5,000 convicts, most of them lifers, working soy, corn, and cotton crops, Angola’s “penal slavery” system today eerily recalls Louisiana’s past investment in the peculiar institution. Present-day form of discipline (chain gangs and striped uniforms) also indicate that dehumanization and popular vengeance are the selling points of a new punishment order. Using “America’s worst prison” as a case study, the author charts an archeology of the penal system in the U.S. South, arguing that prison revolts, and particularly the heelslinger revolution of 1951, have historically ushered in significant if short-lived improvements in the penal system, and that activists in the free world must heed them in their efforts to bring about prison reform.

In this address, Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that a sustained commitment to revolutionary activity is no accident, that it depends upon an initial and irrevocable choice to change intolerable social conditions. The individual who makes such a choice, Abu-Jamal recognizes, is often aware of the suffering that his or her decision may entail. Citing the deliberately led lives of several revolutionaries, including Huey Newton, John Brown, and Ramona Africa, the author hopes that young people will draw inspiration from these examples by understanding the importance and continued possibility of such a choice.

Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are criminal justice system’s primary targets, the author argues that the system still discriminates against women. Vtilizing postmodern scholarship, he argues that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating dominant norms of gender correctness.