Abstract
Marx’s
mature critical theory, Marcuse, and post-Marcuse
Critical Theory, at
least in the work of Herbert Marcuse, has always interpreted contemporary
society by analyzing the internal relationship between the actual and the
possible. This has meant determining the social resources that are present or
are in development, which point the way toward freedom in a post-capitalist
society. Recent works by economists, such as Race Against the Machine, and The
Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, point to a new
stage of digital and robotic technologies, which echoes as today’s reality or
near-reality much of what Herbert Marcuse sketched as a distant but determinate
possibility in the “Prospects of Containment” section of One-Dimensional Man. Moishe Postone, perhaps the most important
theorist among the current generation of Critical Theorists, recognized
Marcuse’s theoretical achievements, which included systematic analyses of the
principal categories of what Postone has termed “Marx’s mature critical
theory”. Hence Marcuse repeatedly interpreted and subjected to careful analysis
in the context of contemporary developments not only Capital, but works unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, i.e. Grundrisse and Critique of the Gotha Programme. Yet, Postone, in revisiting that
all-important relationship of the actual and the possible, critiques Marcuse’s
social theory of one-dimensionality by developing Marx’s concept of an
“intrinsic contradiction”: on the one hand, direct labor as the sole source of value (the specifically capitalist form
of wealth), and on the other, the logic in capitalism for replacing direct
labor through automation, in today’s terms, with digital technology and robots.
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