The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 46
Liberation Series, Part 3 of 4
The more one reads of Herbert Marcuse, the father of the New Left, the less there is to recommend his ideas and more there is to recommend learning about them. This is because thanks to the New Left that he spawned, we live in Herbert Marcuse’s twisted world, which may now be in the early stages of collapse. This episode of the New Discourses Podcast features James Lindsay taking us through the third part in Marcuse’s infamous 1969 essay, “An Essay on Liberation.” In this part of the essay, Marcuse makes an argument for forging an alliance movement between the bourgeois Leftists students and intelligentsia in the universities and the minority and “ghetto” populations that were, at the time in their militancy movements, showing the necessary energy for revolution. Hear him make the case for the ends justifying the means for Leftist revolutionary movements among other shockers (spoiler: he indicates that his New Left movement should be driven by a refusal to grow up and get a job, for example, because attacking functioning, prosperous, free societies is a moral duty, including by refusing to participate). He even explicitly compares his own movement to what we now call “Clownworld.”
This episode of the New Discourses podcast is part three in a four-part series that reads through “An Essay on Liberation.” Part 1 is available here; Part 2 is here; Join James for the whole series as well as his four-part series on Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), starting here.
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1 comment
If I had the resources and connections, I would found my own academic discipline called “Generation Studies”. Basically, Generation Studies would explore grievances about Baby Boomer (or ’68er to use the Continental European term) philosophies and ethoses and seek to undermine them. In particular, it would distain anything with the word “liberation” in it that they embraced from “black liberation” to “fat liberation” to “Iraq Liberation”!