Herbert Marcuse and Environmentalism

Charles Reitz has written two previous books on Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy and Critical Pedagogy (2016) and Art, Alienation, and the Humanities (2000). In this volume he turns to Marcuse’s writing on ecology, noting that Marcuse stood out among the New Left of the 1970s in recognizing environmental campaigning as an element within a wider movement for radical social change. Marcuse wrote two papers on ecology: “Ecology and Revolution,” from a conference paper given in France in 1972; and “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” from a lecture to a wilderness group in California in1979. Both align environmental destruction with consumer capitalism and what Marcuse called the warfare state. Both papers are included in Marcuse’s Collected Papers (vols. 3 and 5, respectively), but Reitz adds his own reading of five papers from the Marcuse archive at Frankfurt University, all unpublished until 2017, to contextualize the two ecology papers in terms of Marcuse’s social theory. This material emphasizes Marcuse’s view of philosophy as an inherently radical discipline; as he said in his inaugural lecture at the University of California, San Diego, in 1966 (which Reitz quotes), philosophy subverts common sense and scientific objectivity to reveal a disjuncture between the world as it is and as it can be imagined. This informs Marcuse’s recognition of the importance of ecology to revolutionary movements and, conversely, the need for a revolutionary movement to achieve ecological aims.

Reitz argues that Marcuse’s position on ecology and radical social change is as valid now as it was in the 1970s, and I agree. But Ecology and Revolution has a further aim: as well as connecting Marcuse’s texts on ecology to his social theories, it is a vehicle for Reitz’s support for a “green commonwealth,” referencing global wisdom traditions and other sources. I come back to this below.

From Marcuse’s writing, summarized by Reitz, the task is to understand that the processes of wealth extraction characteristic of consumer capitalism directly produce environmental destruction and social injustice. The exploitation of the environment as resource, and the parallel exploitation and objectification of human and nonhuman creatures, underpin the military-industrial complex of corporate and state interests, which, for Marcuse, was explicit in the Vietnam War. To end this destructiveness requires a revolution of consciousness. This begins in awareness of the contradictions of late capitalism and a recovery of a latent memory of joy that refracts the subject’s perception of the world, not as object or mere resource, hence expendable, but as a realm of mutuality: an ecology.

Reitz summarizes Marcuse’s philosophical development from his doctoral thesis on the German artist novel, to his work on Georg Hegel and Karl Marx and fusion of Marxism and psychoanalysis, to his optimistic work in the 1960s and concern for aesthetics in the 1970s. Reitz regards Marcuse’s critique of consumer capitalism in One Dimensional Man (1964) as his key legacy, which it probably is in relation to environmentalism. That is, consumerism spawns false needs and false consciousness, disregards the reality of a finite material world in pursuit of ever-expanding markets and profits, and compensates for exploitation and alienation by offering seemingly limitless (but unsatisfying) consumption.

Again, a revolution of awareness is prerequisite to ending consumerism and, by implication, capitalism as we know it. The problem is how this is achieved. Engaged in student protest, speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968, Marcuse looked not to a revolution driven by the working class (although millions of French workers were on strike in 1968) but to the counterculture as instantiating a new revolutionary consciousness. Marcuse was critical of the apparatus of state socialism in the East bloc, writing in defense of Rudolf Bahro, another early Green Movement theorist, when Bahro was under attack in the German Democratic Republic. After the failure of revolt in 1968, Reitz explains, Marcuse moved to aesthetics, seeing a new consciousness in art’s paradoxical reality...