Herbert Marcuse

A Democratic-party counterstrategy against consolidation of power by the Republication party in the USA.

Losurdo analyzes the debate which took place in 1954 between Galvano Della Volpe and Palmiro Togliatti (the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party) over the relationship between Marxism and liberalism. Della Volpe championed the standard position that liberalism enshrined formal (negative) freedom which Marxism seeks to preserve while also extending social rights (or positive freedom). Togliatti recognized the main problem with this view: the majority of people who lived under the rule of states which purportedly adhered to Western liberalism (...) were colonized peoples who did not share in the experience of exasperation with the merely formal nature of bourgeois negative freedom, because it was never extended to them in the first place (pp. 94–95)! In a sense, we can say that the problem with Marxism in its Eurocentric form is that it is too charitable towards liberalism. It attributes to liberalism achievements that it is innocent of (p. 216). Losurdo remarks on the irony of the date of this debate, for 1954 was the year of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ when the Việt Minh forces defeated the French in a war of independence which was fought, at least partly, in the name of the formal bourgeois freedom which Western liberal states had, according to Della Volpe and other Western Marxists, already actualized in the world. (shrink)

El influjo de temáticas heideggerianas en la obra tardía de H. Marcuse, todavía implícito en 'Eros y civilización' (1955) ante al peso determinante del psicoanálisis freudiano (1), reaparece de modo explícito en 'El hombre unidimensional' (1964). Ello acontece en dos planos mutuamente interdependientes: el análisis de la reificación en las sociedades unidimensionales de posguerra (2) y la crítica de la racionalidad tecnológica (4). Algunas debilidades conceptuales de ambas obras, derivadas en gran parte de esta recepción de Heidegger, ya fueron subrayadas (...) en su momento por autores pertenecientes a la llamada izquierda husserliana (P. A. Rovatti y P. Piccone, etc.) (3). (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda la recepción de los 'Manuscritos de economía y filosofía' (1844) de K. Marx en la obra de H. Marcuse. En sus ensayos «Nuevas fuentes para la fundamentación del materialismo histórico» (1932) y «Sobre los fundamentos filosóficos del concepto científico-económico de trabajo» (1933), Marcuse empieza a tomar distancia respecto de su anterior pretensión de hallar un soporte ontológico para el materialismo histórico recurriendo exclusivamente a la fenomenología existencial de Heidegger. A partir de la primera publicación de los (...) 'Manuscritos de economía y filosofía' en 1932, el autor berlinés buscará fundamentar ontológicamente el materialismo histórico con el recurso a la obra juvenil de Marx. (shrink)