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• Title: Sartre, Marcuse, And the Utopian Project Today (Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre) (Essay)
• Author : Robert T., Jr. Tally
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 100 KB

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The recent celebrations and remembrances occasioned by the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Revolution in May 1968 raised, or perhaps exhumed, ideas that are surprisingly timely for our own postmodern condition in a moment of global cultural and economic crisis. One of the great slogans of May '68, equally forceful when scrawled on the walls or enunciated in philosophical discourse, was l'imagination au pouvoir ("power to the imagination"). The revolution, such that it was, seemed to catapult the imaginary into the real, if only for a moment. That which had previously been unthinkable suddenly was not only possible, but actual. This seemed a victory for the imagination in and of itself. This utopian impulse proposed that the imagination might be given free rein to create hitherto unthought social formations, as well as personal relations, creative forms, and so on. May '68 was also a moment when theory and practice seemed to come together in a harmonious intersection, when the promise of existentialism and Marxism found common cause in the liberatory forces of anti-repression in all of its manifestations. In essence, the empowered imagination made possible a glimpse of real freedom (see Katsiaficas). Today, in the era of globalization and with the extension of the capitalist mode of production and consumption into the remote corners of the globe, the utopian moment of Paris 1968 (or Prague 1968, for that matter) seems quaint. The revolutionary power of the imagination seems more suitable for technical, industrial, and entertainment-based applications than for worldwide revolutions. When Herbert Marcuse could express alarm at the efficiency with which rationalized society could absorb, transform, and redirect forms of revolt into products for consumption, he had barely scratched the surface of the manifestations of such rationality in the era of global capitalism. However, the current worldwide financial crisis, much like the somewhat more limited one in 1857 that drove Karl Marx to work feverishly on his Grundrisse, discloses points of rupture in what had seemed a closed system. The very elements of late capitalism that had seemed to ensure its security--instruments of risk management, financial derivatives, banks "too big to fail," widespread availability of credit, deregulation of industries, global markets and workforces--are precisely the causes of the current crisis. Marx had noted the irony of the liberal economists' positions in 1857, when the demand for a laissez-faire government became a call for more government regulation in the face of the disruptions caused by the world market (see 8-9). Then, as now, a hypocritical business class asserted its paradoxical call to arms in which thoroughgoing, systemic change must be resisted at all costs ... except when it can benefit the businesses that foundered on the shoals of the existing system. Now, forty years after "the events of May" and amid another crisis, perhaps the time has come to revisit the old ideas, ideas born of the last cataclysm of the Great Depression, World War II, and the spread of Cold War-era advanced, industrial capitalism. Not as an act of nostalgia, but as a sustained effort to generate new ideas.

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