Blog Herbert Marcuse, Father of the "new left" and "identity politics" worked AGAINST communism for the CIA/OSS

Herbert Marcuse:

Herbert Marcuse - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Very Interestingly:

Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). After his studies, in the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him the "father of the New Left".[8]

In other words the father of the "new left" and "identity politics"
worked for the OSS / CIA on propaganda against communism in the Soviet Union
It's there in black and white folks!

Still think what you're seeing around you today is being engineered by "commies"?
Or is it just the poisonous fruit of good old American capitalist pro corporate neoliberal think tanks?

 

[Tadhg Gaelach]

That does surprise me, I have to say. But, when you think of it, the "New Left" is all about uncontrolled consumerism - so we shouldn't be surprised if Capitalism loves it.

 

[GodsDog]

Well he worked directly as a propagandist against the nazis.
Why is it all that surprising he was involved in anti communist propaganda too?

I think his critics summed him up pretty well

Criticism
Leszek Kołakowski described Marcuse's views as essentially anti-Marxist, in that they ignored Marx's critique of Hegel and discarded the historical theory of class struggle entirely in favor of an inverted Freudian reading of human history where all social rules could and should be discarded to create a "New World of Happiness." Kołakowski concluded that Marcuse's ideal society "is to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group [who] have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences."[17]

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asserted that Marcuse falsely assumed consumers were completely passive, uncritically responding to corporate advertising.[34] MacIntyre frankly opposed Marcuse. "It will be my crucial contention in this book," MacIntyre stated, "that almost all of Marcuse's key positions are false." For example, Marcuse was not a Marxist. Like many of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse wrote of "critical theory" not of "Marxism" and MacIntyre notes a similarity in this to the Left Hegelians, whom Marx attacked. Hence, MacIntyre proposed that Marcuse be regarded as "a pre-Marxist thinker". According to MacIntyre, Marcuse's assumptions about advanced industrial society were wrong in whole and in part. "Marcuse," concluded MacIntyre, "invokes the great names of freedom and reason while betraying their substance at every important point."[36]

 

[GodsDog]

And there's this:

"During World War II, Marcuse first worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Directed by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, the Research and Analysis Branch was in fact the biggest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it comprised over twelve hundred employees, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad. In many respects, it was the site where post–World War II American social science was born, with protégés of some of the most esteemed American university professors, as well as a large contingent of European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks.

These men comprised the "theoretical brain trust" of the American war machine, which, according to its founder, William J. Donovan, would function as a "final clearinghouse" for the secret services

It's all pretty damning for the "father of the new left"
He was just a tool of US propaganda think tanks in their ingoing wars against nazism and communism

The material in his books should probably be read with this context firmly in mind.
However one strongly suspects that today's ersatz leftists,
so busily steeping themselves in divisive identity politics, have not done so.

 

[Tadhg Gaelach]

And the CIA also funded George Orwell and Abstract Expressionist Art. Not to mention funding Bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood - who the Trots were very fond of for a very long time.

 

[GodsDog]

Then there was another german exile to the US horkenheimer.

Max Horkheimer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

He emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland and then to New York City the following year, where Horkheimer met with the president of Columbia University to discuss hosting the Institute. To Horkheimer's surprise, the president agreed to host the Institute in exile as well as offer Horkheimer a building for the Institute.[12][13] In July 1934 Horkheimer accepted an offer from Columbia to relocate the Institute to one of their buildings.[3]In 1940, Horkheimer received American citizenship and moved to the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, California, where his collaboration with Adorno would yield the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1942, Horkheimer assumed the directorship of the Scientific Division of the American Jewish Committee. In this capacity, he helped launch and organize a series of five Studies in Prejudice, which were published in 1949 and 1950.

You don't get a whole building for nothing, do you! He was likely working to undermine the "commies" too.
Same pattern to Marcuse. Moves to the states. Spouts undermining shite couched in academia that can be usefully deployed against communism.
Gets generous treatment by the US

Ingar Solty (in a Feb 2020 Jacobin article) identifies Horkheimer's (and, implicitly, the Frankfurt School's) work as an important influence on that of Michel Foucault: "Ultimately, both Horkheimer and Foucault only considered the defense of remaining elements of freedom and the identification of “micro-powers” of domination a possibility, but changes in the macro-power structures were out of reach. In other words, a Left was born that was no longer oriented toward “counter-hegemony” (as per Antonio Gramsci), as a way of building toward power, but rather “anti-hegemony” (Horkheimer, Foucault, etc.), as John Sanbonmatsu put it in his critique of postmodernism."[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer#cite_note-31

in other words, a left that "gave up" trying to defeat capitalism and instead focussed on shit like identity politics.

It's time a proper analysis of the frankfurt school and it's links to the forces of right wing capitalism and anti communism in the US
was undertaken to link the roots of modern identity politics with right wing capitalism and their relentless fight to destroy
and undermine any remaining embers of collectivism and communism

 

[Eriugena]

Marcuse is also the originator of the no platform anti-free speech attitude of leftist lunatics and antifa.
Repressive Tolerance (1965) is a key text for this.

From the wiki: Marcuse argues that "the realization of the objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." He makes the case for "liberating tolerance", which would consist of intolerance to right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing movements.

 

[Louis-Ferdinand Céline]

Why in the world are you so defensive about Communism? I don't care if he was working for the Communists or against them, his and his colleges terrible ideas have led us to the mess we live in.

 

[GodsDog]

Why in the world as you so defensive about Communism? I don't care if he was working for the Communists or against them, his and his colleges terrible ideas have led us to the mess we live in.

Because I dislike seeing communists and collectivists being wrongly blamed
for the crimes of capitalists and neoliberals and their useful idiots.

The longer term future of humanity lies in collectivism.
Covid-19 has shown us how poorly the "every rat for himself" ideology
of neoliberals and capitalists is suited to coping with even a small crisis
and the hollowing out and privatisation of key public services etc has left us very vulnerable

 

[Eriugena]

Because I dislike seeing communists and collectivists being wrongly blamed
for the crimes of capitalists and neoliberals and their useful idiots.

I agree, communism has more than enough crimes to its account without falsely adding to it the considerable crimes of capitalism.

 

[GodsDog]

I agree, communism has more than enough crimes to its account without falsely adding to it the considerable crimes of capitalism.

Your information regarding the many crimes of communism
likely comes straight from cold war capitalist propaganda!

 

[Eriugena]

Your information regarding the many crimes of communism likely comes straight from cold war capitalist propaganda!

Certainly not. And don't be so patronising.