it committed itself to controlling nuclear weaponry. Language given such horrors is bent manipulated to hide the multiple Orwellian lies that must be told, as a consequence -- ‘peace through war’, the ‘luxury fall out shelter’; all phrases that unify opposites to make them digestable but not understood. The “linguistic behavior blocks conceptual development..serving as a vehicle for coordination and subordination” By an odd coincidence the film that represents the best analogue to ODM came out in the same year that ODM was published. Dr Strangelove brilliantly describes the failure of thinking, and the triumph of technocratic one dimensional values.
The lasting influence of Marcuse’s work is on the sixties radicals who recognized that Marx needed to be reformed for an age where Stalin in particular and the Soviets in general had discredited the very terms of the Marxian anaysis. He gave young people a way to think about their protest when traditional political language and speech seemed to have been almost entirely coopted by the system. He gave them first permission to rebel and resist as he saw western society as fundamentally irrational, the productivity of our society as a whole he states
“ is destructive of the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence.” The engines of the system “economic rationality is a liberal construct that privatizes freedom, and allows each individual to believe they are free even if others are not. In this calculus, “theoretical and practical Reason, academic and social behaviorism meet on common ground: that of an advanced society which makes scientific and technical progress into an instrument of domination.” As Douglas Kellner writes in the introduction to The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, a “generation of radicals turned to study Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man “which seemed to deny the possibility of fundamental political change.” But Kellner points to what Marcuse and later others recognized was missing, his failure “to specify in any detail agents of social change or strategies for revolution” Kellner notes Marcuse spent the rest of his life defending radical politics and revolutionary violence against those who wanted to follow a more moderate course.” In this effort he seems to be searching for ways that the “political trend may be reversed; essentially the power of the machine is only the stored-up and projected power of man. To the extent to which the work world is conceived of as a machine and mechanized accordingly, it becomes the potential basis of a new freedom for man.”
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