Marcuse and Buhle: why culture mattered

A movement could fight for better wages without changing the society around it. That was part of Paul Buhle’s argument in 1968. Writing about American radicalism, he asked why economic struggle had so often fallen short of the change radicals wanted.

His answer turned toward culture: how people understood their lives, what they accepted, and what they could imagine changing. Near the end of his article, he invoked Herbert Marcuse. A footnote directed readers to Marcuse’s essay on culture and to work by Theodor Adorno.

Marcuse had examined a related problem in an essay first published in German in 1937. Culture could promise people fulfillment in their inner lives while leaving their material conditions unchanged. Art could offer relief from a difficult world without requiring that world to change.

Yet Marcuse also saw another possibility. Art could preserve desires for happiness that existing society failed to satisfy. Culture could help people accommodate themselves to their lives, while also keeping alive hopes for something different.

Three decades later, Buhle used the problem of culture to reconsider the record of American radicalism. In his account, radicals had too often treated culture as a simple reflection of class interests. They had missed how it helped people adjust their understanding to life within the existing system.

He pointed to advertising and mass media. He also argued that a militant union struggle could seek a better arrangement between owners and workers without seeking a different social order. Winning concessions and creating revolutionary change were different outcomes in his analysis.

Buhle’s conclusion urged a break with inherited assumptions about American culture and the development of alternatives. His reference to Marcuse belonged to that argument. Here an earlier discussion of culture becomes a resource for a writer reconsidering the aims and methods of radical politics.

Radical America published Buhle’s article in July–August 1968. A year later, the journal carried another Marcuse text, this time about Marx and the loss of political freedom. That opens a second episode: how Marcuse reread an older revolutionary history for twentieth-century readers.