On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 09:30 AM, Charles wrote: > > "Not a word about class struggle! not a word about impoverishment!"
Marcuse did, in fact, say that in his lecture. He was dead wrong. He quoted one passage there from a manuscript that contained an extensive analysis of class struggle and impoverishment. The passage Marcuse quoted appears on pages 704-706 (notebook VII) in the Martin Nicolaus translation. Marcuse's statement contradicts even that passage, which includes the sentence, "The theft of another man's labor time, on which the social wealth still rests today, then becomes a miserable basis compared with the new basis which large-scale industry itself has created." What is not class struggle about the theft of labor time? But worse, Marcuse terminated his quote mid-sentence, which continues, "and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis." Penury is impoverishment; antithesis refers to class struggle (as should be clear from the context). In notebook IV and notebook VI, Marx delved deeply into class struggle and impoverishment. e.g. p. 604: > > It is already contained in the concept of thefree labourer, that he is a > pauper: virtual pauper. According to his economic conditions he is merely > a living labour capacity, hence equipped with the necessaries of life. > Necessity on all sides, without the objectivities necessary to realize > himself as labour capacity. If the capitalist has no use for his surplus > labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour; not produce > his necessaries. > If Comrade Andrews was at all familiar with what I have written, he would not leap to the false conclusion that Marcuse's rather inept words are my "platform." I will address that remark as if it was uttered in good faith, although experience suggests otherwise. In Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom ( https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2024/06/book-proposal-marxs-fetters-and-realm.html ) I discussed the striking parallels between the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , which Lenin described as "An integral formulation of the fundamental principals of materialism as applied to human society and its history" and key passages in notebooks IV and VII of the Grundrisse. As George Sorel noted, the 1859 preface didn't even mention the word “class." The parallel passages in the 1857-58 manuscripts fully restored class struggle and impoverishment to non-historically specific summary Marx presented in the 1859 preface. For the record, I am not a Sorelian or a Marcusean and the fact that I cite Marcuse doesn't mean I don't criticize him. In my earlier discussion of Marcuse and planned obsolescence ( https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2022/02/herbert-marcuse-and-planned-obsolescence.html ) I wrote, "The second kind of obsolescence, which Marcuse deplored, was planned obsolescence -- a term that Marcuse never elaborated upon but instead included in almost a dozen lists, often coupled with militarization, advertising, and waste." This led me to subsequently elaborate on planned obsolescence. On the "small point" of Marcuse not mentioning Capital in his Brandeis lecture, I must plead guilty to assuming that when Marcuse referred to "Marx's analysis of capitalism," he meant Marx's analysis of capitalism in Capital , as opposed to Marx's analysis of capitalism in the Grundrisse , which Marcuse claims Marx "repressed." Where else could Marx have "repressed" the analysis from the Grundrisse than in Capital ? To be clear I do not agree with Marcuse's claim that Marx "repressed" his Grundrisse analysis. My own view of the relationship between what Marx wrote in the Grundrisse and what he wrote in Capital has to do with ambivalence, as I discussed in part in " The Ambivalence of Disposable Time ( https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article/40/1/80/6274282?guestAccessKey=caaebc39-503b-4a8a-a74b-d85297481566&login=false )." I give a short account there of Julia Kristeva's usage of "ambivalence" that is maybe a bit too abridged, but here it is: > > Three years after Quaderni Rossi published Marx’s 'frammento sulle > macchine,' Julia Kristeva’s essay, ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue, le > roman’ was published in the French journal Critique. In that essay > Kristeva introduced the term ‘intertextuality’. Intertextuality refers to > an insight Kristeva attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin, that ‘any text is > constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and > transformation of another’ (Kristeva 1967, p. 37). Marx’s fragment > undeniably absorbed and transformed Dilke’s homage to disposable time. > According to Kristeva, words acquire a new meaning through reuse while > retaining the old one, ‘[t]he result is a word with two significations: it > becomes ambivalent’ (p. 43). Earlier in her essay, Kristeva had explained > ‘[t]he term “ambivalence” implies the insertion of history (society) into > a text and of this text into history; for the writer, they are one and the > same’ (p. 39). > In my essay, I was writing about the ambivalence of the words, subsequently I have realized that an author who becomes aware of that ambivalence may inherit an ambivalence toward that "mosaic of quotations" and seek to create distance between the new meaning and the old meaning by restating the new meaning, purged of the old words. This may or may not involve "repression." It may simply be an effort to untangle the new meaning from the old. 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