Marx, Marcuse, and Modernity

An Essay on the Ever-Changing Revolutionary Class

Cover Image: DALLE·2 rendition of “Cyberpunk Marx”

1. The Laborer

“The Communist Manifesto” has probably started more wars than any other book since the Industrial Revolution. One shouldn’t really be surprised – after all, that’s what happens when you spell out the incentives of a sociopolitical system too clearly. The power of the “Manifesto” was that it condensed the core of Marx’s economic observations – that economic productivity ultimately resided in ordinary workers’ laboring – into a potent political foci and “specter” that haunted the entire world in the 20th century.

Marxist economic theory is founded on the idea that labor is the primary source of economic value. To put it flippantly, it takes people to produce things. Take, for instance, a cup of coffee. Its value as a good is derived from the effort it takes for the farmer to plant the beans, for the trucker to haul it to a store, and for the barista to brew the drink. Today, of course, this process is heavily mechanized: you have tractors ploughing fields, trucks to transport the beans, and coffee-machines making the drinks. But who made these machines? Even more machines – conveyor belts, steel plant robots etc. But who made those? Trace this line of thought recursively downwards, and you eventually end up with a single answer: Man. Manual labor is ultimate factor of production.

Technology is only a packaging-up of manual labor, redeployed elsewhere to make more goods and services. This is what Marx calls “dead labor.” And as workers continued to be replaced by robots, we have “living labor being replaced by dead labor,” from which the capitalist actively profits. If a worker is paid $15 dollars to make a tractor, but the tractor can create $50 dollars of economic value, who bags the remaining $35? The capitalist, of course. And as more and more workers become technologically unemployed, the capitalist is able to suppress wages even further and bag even more surplus value.

Digital technology has only exacerbated this trend. As shown in the graph, while productivity has soared, the typical worker’s hourly compensation has all but stagnated since the late 1970s. So where did all that “missing money” go? The answer seems to be clear. In Marx’s view, it is this trend that should galvanize workers to rebel and start a revolution. After all, manual labor was the ultimate factor of production. The capitalist was nothing but a leech on workers’ productivity, and the wedge between the laborer and the good life. Physically annihilate the capitalist, and we can create a workers’ paradise where the people who produce the goods take 100% of the goods’ value. And voila, the promise of communism.

2. The Artist

But Marx’s revolution didn’t happen. Or at least, not in the way he thought it would. The most successful communist revolutions took place in Russia, China, and other less economically developed countries rather than the advanced industrial societies which Marx thought would be the pioneers of communism. As time went on, “international communism” and “Marxist theory” gradually devolved into nothing more than a cudgel of Russian foreign policy and a rebranding of imperial ambitions. So what happened in those “advanced technological societies”? Why was the working class tamed into complicity? That was the question that Herbert Marcuse and other Neo-Marxist scholars set out to answer in the 1950s.

The short answer was that workers were “bribed” into acquiescence by the Welfare state. With two day weekends, year-end bonuses, suburban homes with cars and televisions, the modern-day “worker” was no longer the overworked, blackened, malnourished factory-line “worker” of the Dickens’ era. In modern industrial societies, the difference between a capitalist’s quality of life and that of his workers was reduced from a qualitative one to merely a quantitative one. Both the worker and the capitalist had homes, cars, and vacations – the capitalist merely had a better location, a better model, and a better hotel. Thus, for the worker, there was a subjective feeling of empowerment, even as the underlying class distinction between capitalist and worker did not disappear. Marcuse summed this phenomenon up in the stunning opening lines of “One Dimensional Man”:

“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress… Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole” – Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man

The potential political power of the revolutionary classes were thus subdued through the brainwashing of mass consumerism. The ideal for this is epitomized in the American Dream, the “work hard, buy stuff, be happy” pipeline. Most importantly, science, art, and philosophy were all coopted to support this mass-consumerism narrative. Instead of being a window to objective realities, science became the henchman of accelerating productive efficiency. Instead of being a window to subjective realities, art became subservient to billboard charts and auction sales. Instead of being a window to metaphysical realities, philosophy became a computational exercise in logical truths and symbol games. It seemed that this democratic totalitarian socioeconomic machine had quelled and subdued every avenue of qualitative change.

Yet Marcuse always held out a glimmer of hope, believing that artists that dared to imagine alternate realities would become the pivot of a new social movement. In Marcuse’s eyes, advanced industrial societies reduced man into a single dimension – the dominant materialistic-consumer dimension. What was needed was the restoration of a different dimension – an alternate spiritual-aesthetic dimension, where people could imagine a qualitatively different and freer lifestyle. In Marcuse’s eyes, art was not an ornament, but a form of dynamite. Art tears apart the emptiness of modernity like a firework in the night sky, exposing the absurdity of the present and daring us to imagine that we can build a radically different society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the abstract impressionist art that flourished in the late-20th century, just as Marcuse was forming his mature philosophy. The common reaction towards abstract art is a dismissive sneer, believing it to be nothing more than an artists’ excuse for laziness and intellectual poverty. While there definitely are some impostors that use abstractionism as a shield against aesthetic responsibility, the great works of abstract art are so much more than unintelligible doodles of boredom.

“Autumn Rhythm”, by Jackson Pollock. The Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

Consider this Jackson Pollock painting of “Autumn Rhythm.” At first glance, you cannot make anything out of it except for a bunch of unorganized and shocking squiggles. But if you closely look, think, and feel this piece of art, you can begin to feel Pollock’s interpretation of autumn: a lively, swaying, dynamic image of rustling branches and leaves. Abstract art needs to be felt – but most people only see this painting, rather than feel it. Like all pieces of art, this painting will conjure different emotions and thoughts in different people. But unlike other forms of art, abstract art puts this subjective perspective in plain sight – there is no object to “see,” only emotions to be “felt.” Abstract impressionism is the artist’s response to existentialist philosophy – a radically new imagination of freedom, experience, and self. To Marcuse, this seemingly irrational and otherworldly art form was the ultimate counterpoint to the socioeconomic machine of mass consumerism, and the potential pivot for a new revolution.

3. The Technologist

But today, the “latent power” of the artist to transform society has come under the full-scale assault of modern tech monopolies. Copy-paste has probably stifled more artistic progress than all the purges and executions of the 20th century. In this new world of digital serfdom, all the artists’ revolutionary power has been starved away by Internet giants’ near-zero marginal cost of duplicating digital assets. For artists, sticking to an aesthetic vision means choosing starvation. No wonder why tiger parents instantly get upset when their kid tells them they want to be an artist when they grow up – “Big Tech” platforms such as Amazon, YouTube, and TikTok derive their entire business model from divorcing content value from content creator.

With the advent of modern artificial intelligence systems (such as the Generative Adversarial Network, GAN), even the creation of art itself has been reduced to an engineering problem. Consider OpenAI’s new DALLE 2 system, a text-to-image system that takes a word prompt and produces an array of images. These hyper-realistic outputs that to the untrained eye would easily pass for a professional artist’s work.

I was lucky enough to get an API key to DALLE 2. Here is the AI’s rendition Jackson Pollock style water lilies. Compare this with his actual painting “Autumn Rhythm” shown above.

DALLE 2 epitomizes the triumph of the technologist over the artist. Artistic creation, once hailed as the holy grail of human ingenuity, is now just a technical exercise in matrix multiplications and gradient optimization. But in the very instant the artist drops his bloody arms into the oblivion of obsoleteness, Marcuse’s torch of the “alternate dimension” falls like the autumn fruit into the surprised hands of the technologist.

Because software systems have become a more and more integral part of our daily lives, more and more pressure has been put on engineers and tech companies to uphold social responsibilities. Creating a new AI system is no longer a purely technical exercise. What data to train on, what parameters to select, where to deploy the system have all become moral and political questions with profound social consequences.

As the line between technologist and policymaker becomes all the more blurry, modern software engineers hold a never-seen-before level of power to fundamentally reshape the structure of society. Inadvertently, they have become the new revolutionary class. Instead of shirking away from the sociopolitical responsibilities of technology, this engineer class must learn to embrace this responsibility and take it one step further, being able to use these revolutionary technologies to imagine a qualitatively different society.

From this lens, the decentralized world of Web 3 appears to be moving in precisely this direction. The idea of “decentralized finance,” for example, allows ordinary users to circumvent the layers of fees and other structural barriers artificially imposed by traditional banks and other institutions. The open-source code of “smart contracts” can be transparently analyzed and audited by anyone in the world, and unable to be shut down at the will of any government. This is undoubtedly the type of “alternate reality” that Marcuse and other neo-Marxists envisioned the revolutionary class would provide, a qualitative change compared with the status quo.

Decentralized technologies need not be a panacea-like replacement for all our institutions. Despite its fits and starts, our post-war society has largely held up well, bringing about the most prosperous period in human history. The long-term goal of the decentralized Internet should be to instead provide an alternative way of life, one where all its participating members have an equal and partial weight in its community decisions and identity.

As technology advances, two radically different societies may arise: the “algorithmic aristocracy” and the “nation of nodes.” The first, inspired by Yuval Harari’s idea that “1% of the people will control all the algorithms” in the future, posits a world where the vast majorities’ daily lives are influenced through a kaleidoscope of automated algorithms, all controlled by an elite technologist-politican class. This type of society is a natural successor to the totalitarian mass-consumerist state that Marcuse describes in “One Dimensional Man.” The other “nation of nodes” is one where everyone needs to actively participate in maintaining the community system, akin to Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of the “Network State,” and the progeny of the global Web 3 community.

Importantly, one society is not necessarily “better” than the other. One is not even necessarily “freer” than the other; are you “freer” washing the dishes yourself or having a dishwasher wash them for you? There’s a valid argument either way. But the “algorithmic aristocracy” and the “nation of nodes” are in fact qualitatively different, and sufficiently so to present viable alternative ways of life. William James once argued that the world needs a “variety of religious systems” to accommodate a “variety of psychological makeups.” In the same vein, having a variety of techno-political systems provides a far greater degree of personal liberty.

4. Conclusion

The Marxist struggle has always been one about freedom. It is a David-versus-Goliath fight between the oppressors of the “establishment” and the latent-power of the “revolutionary class.” But as society has changed and adapted, both the type of freedom desired and the group of people holding this latent power have also changed.

In the 19th century, the “oppressed” faced a poverty of goods. In Marx’s age, the suppression of wages meant that workers could barely afford to feed their families. Freedom in this context meant an abundance of physical goods, so it was the makers of physical goods, the workers, that could bring about this freedom.

In the 20th century, the “oppressed” faced a poverty of thought. In Marcuse’s age, mass-consumerism and the abundance of physical goods led to a lack of will and imagination to think beyond the cookie-cutter lifestyle of modernity. Freedom in this context meant the diversity of aesthetics and thought, so it was the creators of aesthetic alternatives, the artists, that could bring about this freedom.

In the 21st century, the “oppressed” face a poverty of action. In our age, automated systems and the overabundance of information have stripped us of our agency to choose the lifestyle that we want to lead. Freedom in this context means the ability to decide how much control you want over different facets of your everyday life. Therefore, it is the creators of decision systems, the engineers, that can bring about this freedom.

And when this happens, when we let this freedom ring, when we let it ring from every nation and every city, from every algorithm and every node, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, workers and industrialists, artists and patrons, engineers and investors, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that timeless spiritual: “Free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty we are free at last!”

2022.08.27

San Francisco, CA

Bibliography

Balaji, Srinivasan. The Network State. 2022

Deresiewicz, William. The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. First edition, Henry Holt and Company, 2020.

Harari, Yuval Noaḥ. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker, 2016.

Kātz, Barry. Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography. Verso ; Distributed in the United States and Canada by Schocken Books, 1982.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1991.

Tucker, Robert C., et al., editors. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed, Norton, 1978.