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English Pages 138 [149] Year 1972
COUNTERREVOLUTION AND REVOLT HERBERT MARCUSE BEACON PRESS
BOSTON
Copyright © 1972 by Herbert Marcuse Library of Congress catalog card number: 79-179150 International Standard Book Number: 0-8070-1532-6 Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association Published simultaneously in Canada by Saunders of Toronto, Ltd. AU rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, November 1972
"Die Liebenden" by Bertolt Brecht is © 1967 by Suhrkamp Verlag and reprinted from Gesammelte W erke by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag and Stefan Brecht.
To Inge again and again
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My friends Leo Lowenthal (University of California at Berkeley) and Arno J. Mayer (Princeton University) thoroughly read and commented on the manuscript. Intensive discussions with Andre Gorz helped me to clarify my views. I did not show the manuscript to my indispensable friend, Barrington Moore) Jr., as I have always done in the past. He was engaged in writing his own new book. My wish is that his book be widely read. For me) it is a necessary correction of my work. Much of the material in this book was first submitted in lectures delivered in 1970 at Princeton University and at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Hartford Arts Foundation which allowed me to work out the ideas on art in Chapter 3. My thanks to Arnold C. Tovell and to Beacon Press for many yeais of faithful and pleasant cooperation.
CONTENTS 1
THE LEFT UNDER THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
2 NATURE AND REVOLUTION 3 ART AND REVOLUTION
4 CONCLUSION List of W arks Cited
129 135
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1
COUNTERREVOLUTION AND REVOLT
I
The Western world h~s reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime. Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called '