All work and no play? The role of non‐alienated labor in Marcuse's emancipatory vision

Marcuse's farewell address to students and colleagues at Brandeis University in 1965 was entitled "The Obsolescence of Socialism." It was an extended reflection upon the significance of a passage from the Grundrisse in which Marx speculated about the possibility of a purely technologi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inConstellations (Oxford, England) Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 300 - 312
Main Author Noonan, Jeff
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2020
Subjects
Automation
Capitalism
Class struggle
College students
Crises
Machinery
Obsolescence
Predictions
Socialism
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Summary:Marcuse's farewell address to students and colleagues at Brandeis University in 1965 was entitled "The Obsolescence of Socialism." It was an extended reflection upon the significance of a passage from the Grundrisse in which Marx speculated about the possibility of a purely technological transition to socialism. In this one passage Marx breaks from the prediction of his mature crisis theory, according to which declining inputs from human labor relative to machinery causes the rate of profit to continually fall, provoking intensifying crisis and class struggle. Instead Marx allowed himself to imagine a situation in which mechanization advances within capitalism to the point at which the "instruments and their effectiveness are in no proportion to the actual labor time which their production requires" (Marcuse, 2013, p. 298).
ISSN:1351-0487
1467-8675
DOI:10.1111/1467-8675.12415