The traditional modes of protest are judged by Marcuse to be ‘ineffective’ but he goes further they might also be ‘dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. These are some dark thoughts indeed. There is no way out of the maze.
We are all caught in the web, in the machine. It is a familiar sixties trope and Marcuse might have been the first to state the reality so starkly. Marcuse is the prophet who is now helping to reveal the full matrix like reality. The analysis anticipates the Robert Redford movie the candidate that although came out in 1972 was written in 1968 by a speechwriter for then candidate Eugene McCarthy. The satire on the electoral system where candidates who like the character Redford plays try to sincerely promote oppositonal views in a media climate that is only interested in superficiality. The candidate in the end is revealed as an empty suit ill when asked the memorable question after unexpectedly winning “What do we do Now?’ There is no real way the Candidate can oppose a system where the language of politics is the same as the language of advertising. The distrust of political power that a movie like The Candidate illustrates was part of a much larger turning away from “the system” as whole. The "back to nature" movement was well underway before Woodstock made the idea of returning to a kind of Eden where rural living and peace and love could prevail between all people. The happenings, the marches and the sit-ins and the variety of creative demonstrations that populate the sixties all reflect the same dilemma that Marcuse faced; yes we can rebel and resist but after the In the phrase of The Candidate, Now What?
But although ODM will be remembered for its sweeping analysis of the ineffecitveness of conventional politics the book’s ambition is much wider. Chapters are devoted taking on an entire philosophical tradition since Socrates death revealed how logic could be used as a form ofl oppression and how both history and science cannot be understood as neutral. Another chapter deals with the fate of the artist, their failure to create characters who oppose their societies. When he is off his central topic a crituque of how one dimensional thinking works to destroy freedom, he wanders into solipism a failure to connect with readers who have not spent a lifetime studying dialectal materialism. For these reasons in an odd way ODM maybe the most influential unread book of its era. Was this intellectual laziness or the fact that he had already been paid for his work by ironically enough as Arthur Marwick points out the American government and the Ford Foundation.”
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