4.3.2. Objective Dialectics
Marcuse pointed out that for Marx capitalist crisis is a negating moment of economic structures, by which capitalism develops itself. Crisis is for him an aspect of objective dialectics:
Capitalist society is a union of contradictions. It gets freedom through exploitation, wealth through impoverishment, advances in production through restriction of consumption. The very structure of capitalism is a dialectical one: every form and institution of the economic process begets its determinate negation, and the crisis is the extreme form in which the contradictions are expressed (Marcuse 1941a, 311–312).
Marcuse considered private property and alienated labour as objective contradictions of capitalism:
Every fact is more than a mere fact; it is a negation and restriction of real possibilities. Wage labor is a fact, but at the same time it is a restraint on free work that might satisfy human needs. Private property is a fact, but at the same time it is a negation of man’s collective appropriation of nature. […] The negativity of capitalist society lies in its alienation of labor (Marcuse 1941a, 282).
4.3.3. Subjective Dialectics
Marcuse wanted to avoid deterministic dialectics and to bring about a transition from a structural-functionalist dialectic towards a human-centred dialectic. Therefore he argued that capitalism is dialectical because of its objective antagonistic structures and that the negation of this negativity can only be achieved by human praxis.
The negativity and its negation are two diferent phases of the same historical process, straddled by man’s historical action. The ‘new’ state is the truth of the old, but that truth does not steadily and automatically grow out of the earlier state; it can be set free only by an autonomous act on the part of men, that will cancel the whole of the existing negative state (Marcuse 1941a, 315).
Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
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