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The next MARCUSE SOCIETY conference will be held October 7-10, 2021 at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ: https://na.eventscloud.com/website/23723/ 
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June 2021  /  No. 27
Critical Highlights
The Monstrous Character of the Modern World
  • Stefan Gandler, Der diskrete Charm der Moderne: Zeitgenössische Ideologien und ihre Kritik (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2020) 185pp.
  • Lauren Langman and George Lundskow, God, Guns, Gold, and Glory: American Character and its Discontents (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016) 358pp. 
Review by Charles Reitz
 
Stefan Gandler has written a philosophical and political memoir of his visceral and intellectual disgust with what he (and many of us) feel to be the hideous qualities of capitalist modernity today: sick new forms of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and toxic masculinity. Gandler focuses on these new forms of old patterns of discriminatory ideology and practice that have in particular a German coloration, given that country’s post-1989 unification under its capitalist bourgeoisie and in terms of the nation’s fascist past. Gandler’s writing is moving and subtle in describing repugnant circumstances. I have been blunt in formulating the title of this review. He writes instead with a kind of satiric literary irony about the modern world’s “discrete charms.”

This is the third volume of a series published both in Spanish and German. The first, Critical Marxism in Mexico (Chicago: Haymarket [1999] 2015) is a notable introduction to versions of critical theory from the Global South, i.e. not based exclusively on European or US sources, and which he argues are better equipped to understand oppressive social circumstances globally and to develop more effective forms of oppositional praxis. This book deserves much acclaim given Gandler’s ground-breaking discussion of the life and work of contemporary Mexican social philosophers, Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez and Bolivar Echeverria. They are less well-known in the US than the Brazilian critical educationist, Paulo Freire, but of the same Marxist/humanist caliber. Sanchez Vazquez, originally from Spain, fought in the Republican effort during the Spanish civil war. In Latin America after the 1959 Cuban revolution, he came to develop his own “philosophy of praxis,” and focused on the role of revolutions in philosophy. In spite of certain criticisms of Marx, he remained an advocate of socialism and the Marxist emphasis on changing the world. Echeverria, born in Ecuador, also saw Che Guevara and Fidel Castro post-1959 as important revolutionary models of political and intellectual leadership. He came to know Che Guevara personally and published a Guevara biography in German. In 1961 Echeverria studied in West Berlin where he was attracted to the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, especially the latter’s political engagement. His major work focused on the interconnection of ethics and production for use values. Fortunately, this volume by Gandler on critical Marxism beyond the margins of the metropole has recently been published in English as well as German and Spanish.

Both Sanchez Vazquez and Echeverria figure in this third volume as well, yet largely in terms of his personal experiences when he encountered them both as radical professors at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. Something new in this third volume is a longer chapter on the political liberalism and anti-colonialism of Mexico’s Benito Juárez. Gandler proclaims vividly that in Mexico the liberal call for liberty and equality was “a cry of pain and rebellion . . . the voice of those with no voice” (49). Liberalism could thus become the foundation of both an anti-colonial and an anti-racist struggle. Gandler notes that Mexico in 1813 was the first country in the Americas to outlaw slavery. Juárez, himself of indigenous Mexican heritage, ratified slavery’s final elimination in 1861 while president of Mexico, seeing this as both an extension of universal human rights and as a removal of a burden of colonialism (52). Gandler emphasizes that it was the Oaxacan (i.e. non-European and less Catholic) context that allowed liberalism to become radical in the hands of Benito Juárez: an indigenous leader for whom freedom and equality were seen as being what his people—and the world as well—deserved (63). This assessment could also be applied to the ultimate radicalism of the initially liberal Ho Chi Minh.

Gandler fled his native Germany to Mexico in 1993, a place where he could literally and figuratively “sleep without German nightmares (17).” He would return to Frankfurt from time to time, attaining his PhD there in 1997. His second book, also primarily a memoir, Frankfurter Fragmente (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition, 2013) discloses that he had been elected to the top leadership of the Frankfurt University student organization, AStA, in 1989. During the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the university, however, Gandler, as official representative of the student body, publicly raised concerns about the university administration’s then-current authoritarianism and antisemitism. He reminded all concerned that the university was founded in large measure by Frankfurt’s most prominent Jewish leaders in 1914. Jewish leaders contributed two thirds of the foundation capital. During the Nazi upsurge in the 1930s, however, university administrators exiled the members of the Institute for Social Research in an antisemitic purge. These key elements of the past were completely erased from the university’s official (and in Gandler’s opinion “more Aryan”) 75th anniversary commemoration. Gandler wanted to bring to mind these “fragments” of a repressed history that could have furnished a fuller context for understanding. Although second- and third-generation Frankfurt School luminaries were present and feted at the ceremony, these individuals ignored the administration’s use of baton-wielding police to keep Gandler and others from entering the hall. In contrast, the critical theory of the first-generation critical theorists, Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and subsequently also that of Alfred Schmidt, is said to have given the student movement of post-fascist Germany its most significant theoretical impulse and dynamism. 

Just as some people, like Stephen Colbert, cannot bring themselves to utter the name of the immediate past president of the US after he organized the neofascist assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Germany’s fascist history and its anti-foreign cultural remnants are so repulsive to Gandler, that he can no longer bring himself to call his home country by its own name. Instead he refers to it as Alemania. He does this in accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement-effect, hoping this slightly irritating abnormality will nettle the reader into a heightened awareness of his point: that “the Alemania of today is built on the ashes of millions who were murdered.”

He argues in Frankfurter Fragmente that the once venerated Germany of Kant, Hegel, Heine, Marx, as well as the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse is gone. No elderly German wants to talk about life before 1945, before the ostensibly democratic present. Because of the silence of the older generation, Gandler’s third volume highlights how it devolved upon Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah to teach a generation of German youth a new awareness of the devastation of antisemitism and the necessity of opposition to it. After Shoah, Gandler says, life clearly changed in Germany. University students were moved to oppose the old Nazis still in Germany’s political establishment. This is similar to the way that there has been an antiracist sea change following the recent wave of racist police killings in the US, from Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, to George Floyd, and the ensuing power of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Racial animosity, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and resurgent nationalism/patriotism are being orchestrated today also by the troubled system of American/global capitalism—as neo-populist/neo-fascist instrumentalities of social control and economic stabilization. Langman and Lundskow’s God, Guns, Gold, and Glory: American Character and its Discontents makes a strong case several times over that, as a religiously inspired colonial settler society, US-American culture is authoritarian, malicious, monstrous. Their research explicates the American historical record: genocide against Native people; slavery; property qualifications to vote and govern; predatory adulation of plutocracy and power, religious zealotry; militarism, and the denial of science. They demonstrate the development of a reactionary national character type that is pathological model of American manhood: masculinist and aggressive, sado-masochistic, punitive, tough, heroic, and white supremacist and antisemitic. They hold that by means of its WASP racism, antisemitism, and toxic forms American masculinity, the US has become a self-righteous global power under the delusion that it is free and democratic. — All this is said without mentioning name of Trump. Langman and Lundskow furnish the historical-cultural political backdrop to the conservative cultural-political backlash we are seeing today attacking the New York Times’ 1619 Project and critical race theory.

If today’s gods are money, fame, thrills and power, and this reveals the dominant side of the American character, Langman and Lundskow recognize that it is but one side. On the other side the US has witnessed significant historical struggles, even if these have been repressed: progressive social forces struggling against slavery, for women’s suffrage, a populist anti-monopoly radicalism, socialism, co-ops, collectives, communes like New Harmony and Oneida. During the 1960s “New Sensibilities” of the sort Marcuse described in An Essay on Liberation emerged that prefigure a sane socialist society in 21st Century America. As Langman and Lundskow conclude: “Given the processes of dynamic change, the emergent social character of our times is more flexible, more open, more pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and perhaps protean. Such a social character is not only more open economically, politically, and culturally, but psychologically as well. S/he is more amenable to, and perhaps actually seeks to recapture long lost, suppressed elements of American society that provide a framework that is democratic, inclusive, dedicated to equality, genuine freedom, justice and dignity. Such a social character portends the coming of a truly democratic society, a sane society that unlike the pathological normality of the society in which we now live, may not only be desirable, and fulfilling, but necessary for the very survival of human civilization (323).” 

Both of these volumes help us understand the power of the repressive cultural forces we are up against. Our task is to re-conceptualize our understanding of the political work at hand —and the feasibility of a better future condition for both humanity and the planet. Survival requires a new political and philosophical strategy, and this strategy can become feasible when it has the force of a new general interest.
Andrew Feenberg remembers Herbert Marcuse (2021)
MARCUSE SOCIETY Conference 2021
Arizona State University
  • Featuring both in-person and virtual conference sessions.
This professional and scholarly gathering will feature presentations by an international community of Marcusean scholars, students, and activists as well as critical theorists from a variety of disciplines. We invite scholars from all disciplines and career pathways to contribute—graduate students, early career/contract faculty, and senior/established scholars to the meeting.

The conference theme is centered around Marcuse’s theorization of technological rationality, broadly construed. We encourage an expansive approach to this theme with a wide range of papers, from neoliberal authoritarianism to psychoanalytic theory, and from one-dimensionality to utopian imagining. Technological rationality is a unique theoretical touchstone to Marcusean thought as it provides the basis not only for the external means of production and how it shapes social relations, but how it explains the stabilizing social forces that register at the level of thought and subjectification.
 
If you have any questions,
please contact the conference organizers at:
ihms.2021.asu@gmail.com
 
We look forward to seeing you in the Fall! 

--Taylor Hines, Nicole Mayberry, and Robert Kirsch
International Herbert Marcuse Society
2021 Conference Organizers
For archives of fascinating material on HERBERT MARCUSE,
visit the website curated by
Prof. Harold Marcuse
(University of California, Santa Barbara).

You are also invited to visit the MARCUSE SOCIETY website for past newsletters and more information.
The Marcuse Society welcomes your thoughts on our future direction as well as your participation in moving things forward. If you have ideas or questions about the Marcuse Society, please do not hesitate to contact:
  • Terry Maley <maley@yorku.ca>,
  • Imaculada Kangussu <lekangussu@gmail.com>, 
  • Andy Lamas <ATLamas@sas.upenn.edu>
 
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