by George Katsiaficas

[AN EXCERPT FROM THE ESSAY--dated December 14, 2021--APPEARS BELOW.]

Christian Parenti Joins Right-wing Chorus Attacking Herbert Marcuse

The latest voice in the chorus attacking Marcuse and “critical race theory” belongs to none other than Christian Parenti, a left-wing professor whose diatribes against colleagues he deems insufficiently class-oriented are growing increasingly sectarian. In November, amid a continuing series of posts criticizing “identity politics,” Parenti published his essay, “The First ‘Privilege Walk’ - How Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to hook the left on identity politics and psychobabble.”⁷

Parenti feels that consciousness raising about our intersectional identities in relation to others will hinder the development of class consciousness. He uses this concern to attack the pioneering anti-racism work of Erica Sherover-Marcuse in ugly and unprincipled ways, and he seeks to tar Herbert Marcuse in the process. Long before she married Herbert Marcuse, Erica Sherover was centrally involved in co-counseling, also called Reevaluation Counseling (RC), a cluster of group therapy techniques designed primarily to examine and transform racist and sexist patterns of speech and action.

Parenti found audio tapes of a 1984 session which Sherover-Marcuse led where participants were asked to take pride in their intersectional identities. Based on one case, he concludes the exercise shamed a white participant, who years later turned into a Trump supporter. Willow Simmons, who participated in that 1984 workshop felt compelled to say she was “white and proud.” As she subsequently recalled, “And where I nearly choked with guilt and disgust on my affirmation of white pride, the Latina woman’s affirmation was a cause to celebrate. The women of color at the workshop recalled the pain they experienced being raised in a racist environment and realized that they had never been encouraged or given an opportunity to express their legitimate anger.”

Does Parenti celebrate the liberating experience of Latina women? No. On the contrary, using psychobabble evident throughout his essay, he labels their joy as “cultivation of socially destructive narcissism” through “wacky gestalt therapy.”⁸ His choice of sympathy for Willow and  disdain for Latinas joy indicates his own unacknowledged bias. While Parenti trivializes group  therapy as “Oppression Olympics,” could the privilege walk be a form of measuring social capital,  an important resource for the maintenance of a class society? In his haste to connect Sherover to Scientology, Parenti fails to consider such an alternative. He gives little or no justification for yoking Sherover’s work on privilege walks to Scientology. At several points he asserts that “identity politics” and privilege walks obscure class oppression, but he never explains how. It  would’ve been much more helpful to the reader if Parenti had instead examined in dispassionate  detail the questions he raises about privilege walks.

The point Parenti seeks to make is that when individuals take personal responsibility for racism, patriarchy, and “non-class” forms of oppression, they miss and minimize class struggle. He feels that co-counseling, RC, and all of the various forms of group therapy in use today only cause individual blame-taking while letting corporate capitalism off the hook. He believes confessional culture (in which people publicly take responsibility for such social problems like race, gender, and class oppression) only has ill-effects like making people suffer lower self-esteem, while ignoring the primary planetary problem, capital as a self-expanding value.

If we take a less controversial subject to illustrate his point, guilt-ridden drives to stop environmental devastation by encouraging individual recycling overlooks the fact that the destruction of the earth is mainly caused by capitalism’s unending need for growth and corporations’ production of cancer-causing products like Round-Up as well as profitable but toxic packaging for consumer goods. I think many of us would agree that individual recycling is time consuming and does not address the primary cause of planetary destruction, but we recycle nonetheless as part of a global effort to rescue our planet.

So far so good, but Parenti forgets individual responsibility entirely since he believes taking any individual responsibility only deflects from the larger struggle against capital. If we examine his title, it reflects precisely his disdain for individuals’ being held responsible for their impact in the world. “Marcuse‘s widow”? Since when are we reverting to calling females by reference to their male partner rather than by their own names? Has Parenti learned nothing about sexism in the past 50 years? To hell with feminism and women’s calls to be treated with respect! After all, to my great disappointment, the system has turned 1960s feminists’ calls for an end to war into “women in combat” and their advocacy for greater female political representation into a score of female Republican extremists. Does that mean we throw out feminism?

In his willfully crafted essay, he complains that “sketches of Ricky Sherover-Marcuse litter the web.” Wait, did he say “litter“? As in garbage? Beyond impolite, he is insulting. But no matter, for in his next phrase, Parenti complains that these sketches “never mention that she was the daughter of a very rich man, the daughter of an actual capitalist…” (In fact, for several years, Sherover’s father was a major supplier of weapons to the Spanish republic as they fought Franco. He secretly worked with US President Franklin Roosevelt against Hitler and was a long time loyal communist. He subsequently purchased a large steel factory in Venezuela.)

Parenti claims the internet’s omission of Sherover’s wealthy background is HER doing. Ricky Sherover-Marcuse died in 1988 at the age of 49, before the internet emerged from its infancy. The internet’s first web browser was launched on April 30, 1993, five years after Marcuse- Sherover passed. But inside the psychobabble bubble in which Parenti lives, the internet’s omission “seems to betray not only Oedipal rage, but also a guilty conscience. The charge could be: rich girl convinces people to focus on race and gender instead of class.” Wait a second. Did he say “girl,” not woman, as a sexist put-down? Parenti blames her for what has been posted about her after her death, an indication how his zealous attempt to tar her blinds him to basic facts. His misguided psychoanalysis of the reason for the omission (“a rich girl’s guilty conscience and Oedipal rage” led her to cover up her capitalist father) is indicative of deep misogyny more than anything about Sherover-Marcuse. Parenti’s line of reasoning also has nothing to do with Herbert Marcuse, who always insisted that “Marxism is not family psychology.”

 

TO READ THE COMPLETE ESSAY,
as published on the MARCUSE SOCIETY's website,
please go to the following link:
 

 "Behind Recent Attacks on Herbert Marcuse"