The true left is not woke

[Consul]

…[Schmitt] is certainly a hero and major theorist of the New Right (the Neofascists)….

"NEW RIGHT: The New Right is a marriage between two apparently contrasting ideological traditions. The first of these is classical liberal economics, particularly the free-market theories that were revived in the second half of the twentieth century as a critique of ‘big’ government and economic and social intervention. This is called the liberal New Right, or neoliberalism. The second element in the New Right is traditional conservative – and notably pre-Disraelian – social theory, especially its defence of order, authority and discipline. This is called the conservative New Right, or neoconservatism. The ideological coherence within the New Right stems from its defence of a strong but minimal state: although it seeks to ‘roll back’ the state in the economic sphere, it aims to strengthen it in the social sphere."

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 62)

This is not what I mean by "New Right". That is, I don't use this term to refer to neoliberal neoconservatism/neoconservative neoliberalism, which is still democratic in the sense of accepting constitutional & parliamentary democracy, the control system of checks & balances, party pluralism, and basic human rights. Instead, I (and German and other European politologists) use it to refer to post-WW2 neofascism, as historically and ideologically rooted in Italian fascism and the antidemocratic "Conservative Revolution" in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).

[Consul]

A critical comment on Neiman's new book Left Is Not Woke: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05 ... iples.html

[Constantine]

It's quite possible to escape the Left-Right Divide by simply not fucking around with Nazi and Marxist writers (note a Marxist will put anyone not a Marxist into THEIR right).

I don't bother with that crap, never read Francis Fukayama. Only read enough Zizek so as to troll him proper. My political party shall go unnamed, it gets labeled as conservative but comes from the 19th century, is quite small and outside our core beliefs many insist on "liberal policies" mixed in and we say "whatever, fine" usually in response if it doesn't hurt anything. Nobody is digging through old Nazi literature to defend or accommodate or adopt ideas from. I don't get this fucking instinct from the left. Hitler Bad, don't touch that shit. Marx Bad, don't touch that shit. Simple.

[Consul]

Hitler Bad, don't touch that shit. Marx Bad, don't touch that shit. Simple.

No, not so simple! You may put Stalin and Mao on a level with Hitler, but not Marx, who wasn't a mass-murderous, KZ/Gulag-building dictator. I'm not a Marxist, but I agree with the following:

"Despite the many attempts to bury Marx and Marxism, the strength of his ideas is undeniable. His profound critique of capitalism and of the different modes of production in human history remain, to this day, unparalleled (…).

Marxism is capitalism’s most radical self-criticism. It critically analyzes the deep roots of our social system. It unveils the structures and the internal logic that organize our economies, cultures, and politics. Once these deeper structures are brought to the fore, Marxism then offers a path to overcome our challenges—both via critique of existing social structures and analysis of ideology and human agency, including a theory of the working class as the necessary agent for transcending capitalism (…).

Marxism is as relevant today as when Marx himself was alive. Reasons for that abound: appalling levels of wealth inequality and exploitation, workplace alienation, and social alienation; the instability of finance, financialization, globalization, and the political turmoil that threatens our fragile parliamentary democracies; gender and racial oppression; climate change and the looming environmental collapse; imperialism; fiscal austerity; immigration crises, unemployment, and job insecurity.

Each major crisis of capitalism rightfully reignites interest in Marx’s teachings. Global crises including periods of negative growth and extended recession alongside the large- scale devaluation of capital have occurred in 1857, 1873, 1929, 1973, and 2008. While mainstream economic theory continues to theorize markets as self-regulating and tending toward market-clearing equilibrium, Marx developed the most systematic theory of capitalism as a crisis-prone system, with tendencies toward disequilibrium, overproduction, overaccumulation, and a declining rate of profit (…)."

(Prew, Paul, Tomás Rotta, Tony Smith, et al. "The Enduring Relevance of Marx." In The Oxford Handbook of Marx, edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, et al., 3-34. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. pp. 3-4)

[Constantine]

So I have to embrace Marx but reject all his.... I'm guessing here "mistaken" or "misguided" followers?

If I want to be socialist, why can't I just latch on to a non Marxist Socialist movement? One without a track record of genocide? Or having to have a super smart ideologue running the party or committe or society who has figured out the dialectic so well that only he truly understands is and everyone else needs to just fanatically follow and give up all their money.

Best use of Marxism is a small community community, completely voluntary like primitive Mormonism.... gives you a community, people know each other so when it is time to leave, you can take your fair share. If someone turns power hungry everyone can just leave or vote them out. Once it turns into the Khmer Rouge.... oh fuck.

[popeye1945]

Wokeism is the feminization of society, where feelings trump facts, and there is an infinity of genders and victims. It is not the left; it is gender politics taken to the absurd.

[Consul]

If I want to be socialist, why can't I just latch on to a non Marxist Socialist movement? One without a track record of genocide? Or having to have a super smart ideologue running the party or committe or society who has figured out the dialectic so well that only he truly understands is and everyone else needs to just fanatically follow and give up all their money.

Best use of Marxism is a small community community, completely voluntary like primitive Mormonism.... gives you a community, people know each other so when it is time to leave, you can take your fair share. If someone turns power hungry everyone can just leave or vote them out. Once it turns into the Khmer Rouge.... oh fuck.

Many people think there is an inevitable developmental pathway from classical Marxism, i.e. Marx's (& Engel's) original Marxism, to dictatorial, Stalin- or Mao-style state communism; but they are wrong. Orthodox Marxism, which is the basis of the latter, was created after Marx's death by people such as Kautsky, Plekhanov, Trotsky, and Lenin. It rose to power in Russia in 1917, eventually resulting in Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist state communism, the despicable authoritarian and totalitarian sort of communism (socialism).

But that's not the end of the story, because there is a different historical pathway from Marx to Western Marxism aka neo-Marxism (as represented e.g. by Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School with theorists such as Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and their successors such as Habermas and Honneth), and further to contemporary post-Marxism (as represented e.g. by Laclau and Mouffe). Both forms of post-Marxian Marxism reject Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist state communism.

Moreover, most people seem to have forgotten that there has been a libertarian, anarchist (anti-statist) form of communism/socialism since the 19th century (as represented e.g. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Goldman). Anarcho-communists prefer smaller, democratically organized communities.

Moreover, there is social democracy as a non-anarchistic, moderate form of socialism.

[Consul]

Wokeism is the feminization of society, where feelings trump facts…

"Feminization of society" sounds pretty sexist, because it implies: "Women don't think, they just feel. Women aren't rational beings but only emotional beings."

It should be mentioned that fascism with its cult of virility is both anti-feministic and anti-rationalistic (emotionalistic)!

"Anti-rationalism

Although fascist political movements were born out of the upheavals that accompanied World War I, they drew on ideas and theories that had been circulating since the late nineteenth century. Among the most significant of these were anti-rationalism and the growth of counter-Enlightenment thinking generally. The Enlightenment, based on the ideas of universal reason, natural goodness and inevitable progress, was committed to liberating humankind from the darkness of irrationalism and superstition. In the late nineteenth century, however, thinkers had started to highlight the limits of human reason and draw attention to other, perhaps more powerful, drives and impulses. For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche (see p. 212) proposed that human beings are motivated by powerful emotions, their[198]‘will’ rather than the rational mind, and in particular by what he called the ‘will to power’. In Reflections on Violence ([1908] 1950), the French syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) highlighted the importance of ‘political myths’, and especially the ‘myth of the general strike’, which are not passive descriptions of political reality but ‘expressions of the will’ that engaged the emotions and provoked action. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the French philosopher, advanced the theory of vitalism. This suggests that the purpose of human existence is therefore to give expression to the life force, rather than to allow it to be confined or corrupted by the tyranny of cold reason or soulless calculation.

Although anti-rationalism does not necessarily have a right-wing or proto-fascist character, fascism gave political expression to the most radical and extreme forms of counter-Enlightenment thinking. Anti-rationalism has influenced fascism in a number of ways. In the first place, it gave fascism a marked anti-intellectualism, reflected in a tendency to despise abstract thinking and revere action. For example, Mussolini’s favourite slogans included ‘Action not Talk’ and ‘Inactivity Is Death’. Intellectual life was devalued, even despised: it is cold, dry and lifeless. Fascism, instead, addresses the soul, the emotions, the instincts. Its ideas possess little coherence or rigour, but seek to exert a mythic appeal. Its major ideologists, in particular Hitler and Mussolini, were essentially propagandists, interested in ideas and theories largely because of their power to elicit an emotional response and spur the masses to action. Fascism thus practises the ‘politics of the will’.

Second, the rejection of the Enlightenment gave fascism a predominantly negative or destructive character. Fascists, in other words, have often been clearer about what they oppose than what they support. Fascism thus appears to be an ‘anti-philosophy’: it is anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-communist and so on. In this light, some have portrayed fascism as an example of nihilism. Nazism, in particular, has been described as a ‘revolution of nihilism’. However, fascism is not merely the negation of established beliefs and principles. Rather, it is an attempt to reverse the heritage of the Enlightenment. It represents the darker underside of the western political tradition, the central and enduring values of which were not abandoned but rather transformed or turned upside-down. For example, in fascism, ‘freedom’ came to mean unquestioning submission, ‘democracy’ was equated with absolute dictatorship, and ‘progress’ implied constant struggle and war. Moreover, despite an undoubted inclination towards nihilism, war and even death, fascism saw itself as a creative force, a means of constructing a new civilization through ‘creative destruction’. Indeed, this conjunction of birth and death, creation and destruction, can be seen as one of the characteristic features of the fascist world-view.

Third, by abandoning the standard of universal reason, fascism has placed its faith entirely in history, culture and the idea of organic community. Such a community is shaped not by the calculations and interests of rational individuals but by innate loyalties and emotional bonds forged by a common past. In fascism, this idea of organic unity is taken to its extreme. The national community, or as the Nazis called it, the Volksgemeinschaft, was viewed as an indivisible whole, all rivalries and conflicts being subordinated to a higher, collective purpose. The strength of the nation or race is therefore a reflection of its moral and cultural unity. This prospect of unqualified social cohesion was expressed in the Nazi slogan, ‘Strength through Unity.’ The revolution that fascists sought was thus ‘revolution of the spirit’, aimed at creating a new type of human being (always understood in male terms). This was the ‘new man’ or ‘fascist man’, a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, and prepared to dissolve his personality in that of the social whole.“

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies. 6th ed. London: Palgrave, 2017. pp. 197-9)

[popeye1945]

Wokeism is the feminization of society, where feelings trump facts…

"Feminization of society" sounds pretty sexist, because it implies: "Women don't think, they just feel. Women aren't rational beings but only emotional beings."

It should be mentioned that fascism with its cult of virility is both anti-feministic and anti-rationalistic (emotionalistic)!

"Anti-rationalism

Although fascist political movements were born out of the upheavals that accompanied World War I, they drew on ideas and theories that had been circulating since the late nineteenth century. Among the most significant of these were anti-rationalism and the growth of counter-Enlightenment thinking generally. The Enlightenment, based on the ideas of universal reason, natural goodness and inevitable progress, was committed to liberating humankind from the darkness of irrationalism and superstition. In the late nineteenth century, however, thinkers had started to highlight the limits of human reason and draw attention to other, perhaps more powerful, drives and impulses. For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche (see p. 212) proposed that human beings are motivated by powerful emotions, their[198]‘will’ rather than the rational mind, and in particular by what he called the ‘will to power’. In Reflections on Violence ([1908] 1950), the French syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) highlighted the importance of ‘political myths’, and especially the ‘myth of the general strike’, which are not passive descriptions of political reality but ‘expressions of the will’ that engaged the emotions and provoked action. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the French philosopher, advanced the theory of vitalism. This suggests that the purpose of human existence is therefore to give expression to the life force, rather than to allow it to be confined or corrupted by the tyranny of cold reason or soulless calculation.

Although anti-rationalism does not necessarily have a right-wing or proto-fascist character, fascism gave political expression to the most radical and extreme forms of counter-Enlightenment thinking. Anti-rationalism has influenced fascism in a number of ways. In the first place, it gave fascism a marked anti-intellectualism, reflected in a tendency to despise abstract thinking and revere action. For example, Mussolini’s favourite slogans included ‘Action not Talk’ and ‘Inactivity Is Death’. Intellectual life was devalued, even despised: it is cold, dry and lifeless. Fascism, instead, addresses the soul, the emotions, the instincts. Its ideas possess little coherence or rigour, but seek to exert a mythic appeal. Its major ideologists, in particular Hitler and Mussolini, were essentially propagandists, interested in ideas and theories largely because of their power to elicit an emotional response and spur the masses to action. Fascism thus practises the ‘politics of the will’.

Second, the rejection of the Enlightenment gave fascism a predominantly negative or destructive character. Fascists, in other words, have often been clearer about what they oppose than what they support. Fascism thus appears to be an ‘anti-philosophy’: it is anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-communist and so on. In this light, some have portrayed fascism as an example of nihilism. Nazism, in particular, has been described as a ‘revolution of nihilism’. However, fascism is not merely the negation of established beliefs and principles. Rather, it is an attempt to reverse the heritage of the Enlightenment. It represents the darker underside of the western political tradition, the central and enduring values of which were not abandoned but rather transformed or turned upside-down. For example, in fascism, ‘freedom’ came to mean unquestioning submission, ‘democracy’ was equated with absolute dictatorship, and ‘progress’ implied constant struggle and war. Moreover, despite an undoubted inclination towards nihilism, war and even death, fascism saw itself as a creative force, a means of constructing a new civilization through ‘creative destruction’. Indeed, this conjunction of birth and death, creation and destruction, can be seen as one of the characteristic features of the fascist world-view.

Third, by abandoning the standard of universal reason, fascism has placed its faith entirely in history, culture and the idea of organic community. Such a community is shaped not by the calculations and interests of rational individuals but by innate loyalties and emotional bonds forged by a common past. In fascism, this idea of organic unity is taken to its extreme. The national community, or as the Nazis called it, the Volksgemeinschaft, was viewed as an indivisible whole, all rivalries and conflicts being subordinated to a higher, collective purpose. The strength of the nation or race is therefore a reflection of its moral and cultural unity. This prospect of unqualified social cohesion was expressed in the Nazi slogan, ‘Strength through Unity.’ The revolution that fascists sought was thus ‘revolution of the spirit’, aimed at creating a new type of human being (always understood in male terms). This was the ‘new man’ or ‘fascist man’, a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, and prepared to dissolve his personality in that of the social whole.“

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies. 6th ed. London: Palgrave, 2017. pp. 197-9)

Just stating the obvious, it has been a long process, and I am old enough to have watched it unfold. Cloud the matter all you like, it still feelings over facts, which has brought multiple genders and multiple victims---- chaos, in cartoon fashion!

[Constantine]

Marcuse of the New Left.... the guy who developed the OSS/CIA?

Yeah.... I'll pass. And I've known about the red and black flag anarchists for years. I'm talking less civil war in Spain, and more just a hippy commune ran by people who like Socialism but never heard of Marx.

[Consul]

Just stating the obvious, it has been a long process, and I am old enough to have watched it unfold. Cloud the matter all you like, it still feelings over facts, which has brought multiple genders and multiple victims---- chaos, in cartoon fashion!

Yes, what matters for gender theory are subjective gender feels rather than objective gender facts; but it is sexist to say that the subjectivism and emotionalism we find in wokeism is a sign of "the feminization of society." You may call it a sign of irrationalization that affects both women and men.

[popeye1945]

Just stating the obvious, it has been a long process, and I am old enough to have watched it unfold. Cloud the matter all you like, it still feelings over facts, which has brought multiple genders and multiple victims---- chaos, in cartoon fashion!

Yes, what matters for gender theory are subjective gender feels rather than objective gender facts; but it is sexist to say that the subjectivism and emotionalism we find in wokeism is a sign of "the feminization of society." You may call it a sign of irrationalization that affects both women and men.

Tell me your theory on how this workerism through process came to be, it seems particular to the west, much of the world is laughing their asses off. How does such chaos as multi-genderism and victimhood come about if not what I feel I watched develop? The height of militant feminism and it anti-male stance then uniting with the gay movement, and a general belief that all damaged people were victims of the middle-aged white male. You've got the floor, who do you think were the shaker and movers.

[Consul]

Marcuse of the New Left.... the guy who developed the OSS/CIA?

OSS ≠ CIA! That he worked for (the Research and Analysis Division of) the Office of Strategic Services doesn't mean that he "developed" it; and he never worked there as an agent or spy, but as an analyst.

"Due to Nazi activity, Marcuse never actually worked in Frankfurt. Anticipating the fascist takeover, the Institute deposited their endowment in Holland. A branch office was established in Geneva where Marcuse began his work with the Institute. He would go to Paris for a short time and then finally in July 1934 to New York. From 1934–1942 Marcuse worked at the Institute’s branch at Columbia University. In 1942 he moved to Washington D.C. to work first with the Office of War Information and then with the Office of Strategic Services. Later Marcuse would teach at Brandeis University and then the University of California, San Diego. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States until his death in 1979."

Herbert Marcuse: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/

——————
"On a hot summer day during Italy’s long 1968, the leader of the French student movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (today a member of the European Parliament and distinguished member of the Green Party) frequently interrupted a lecture being given by Herbert Marcuse in the packed Eliseo Theater in Rome, demanding he own up to his scandalous past as a CIA agent during World War II. The accusation—originally
circulated in the United States by an anonymous source and later picked up by the European press—was inaccurate: the German philosopher did not in fact have any collaborative relationship with the controversial American agency, much less during the war, when the CIA didn’t even exist. Instead, Marcuse had later been under FBI investigation during his period of political notoriety as “father of the student movement” (although, to be truthful, half of the memos connected with that investigation were concerned with protecting him from death threats, especially after 1968). Indirectly, however, the provocation offered by “Danny le rouge” contributed to bringing to light a period in Marcuse’s life that had previously been neglected. The same was true for other proponents of the so-called Frankfurt School, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, who also participated in the American war effort as political analysts at the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first American intelligence agency.

In truth, these thinkers never demonstrated any particular embarrassment in connection with their past government service. Rather, on more than one occasion, they proudly defended their participation as one of the few attempts to make the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory a practical tool in the fight against fascism. Precisely when Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno retreated into their Californian exile to write their
Dialectic of Enlightenment—the Frankfurt School’s philosophical urtext, envisioned as a “message in a bottle” for future generations while they faced a present that appeared irremediably evil—the other three Frankfurt scholars produced a formidable number of studies and reports on the “German enemy” that represent the most complex and insightful analyses of Nazi Germany ever put forth by members of the Frankfurt School, as well as an extraordinary historical source for scholars of the Second World War.

The years spent by the three “Frankfurters” in the service of the American government share little of the romanticized life of the secret agent who, immersed in danger, works in the theater of war or the double agent who plots in secret with the enemy; their endeavors much more closely resemble the “labor of the concept” that one associates with a stern German professor.

Directed by the Harvard historian William 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 included 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. To cite only a few such figures: the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the historian Felix Gilbert, the geographer Richard Hartshorne, the Marxist economists Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, the economist Walter W. Rostow, future Nobel Prize winner Vassili Leontief, the sociologists Talcott Parsons
and Barrington Moore Jr., two-time Pulitzer winner Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the classicist Norman O. Brown, and the Frankfurt School scholars Arkadij Gurland and Friedrich Pollock. These men comprised the “theoretical brain trust” of the American war machine, which, according to its founder, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, would function as a “final clearinghouse” for the secret services—that is, as a
structure that, although not engaged in determining war strategy or tactics, would be able to assemble, organize, analyze, and filter the immense flow of military information directed toward Washington, thanks to the unique capacity of the specialists on hand to interpret the relevant sources. In a global totalitarian war, Donovan was convinced, “intelligence must be total and totalitarian.”

One may situate the activities of Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer for the Research and Analysis Branch within the process of “total mobilization” of the American academic and intellectual world that, after the entrance of the United States into the war, pervaded “the classrooms of [its] colleges” and “rustle[d] the thumbed pages of our scholars.”

The first of the three German scholars to transfer to Washington was Franz Neumann. After a series of careful investigations by the FBI, he was hired in spring 1942 as chief consultant for the Board of Economic Welfare and later, in August of the same year, as chief economist in the Intelligence Division of the Office of the US Chief of Staff. At the beginning of 1943 he would assume the duties of deputy chief of the Central European Section, the subdivision of R&A charged with analyzing and studying Nazi Germany (as well as Austria and the other Central European countries). He gained these senior positions by virtue of the prestige he acquired after the 1942 publication of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism—which was itself the fruit of a memorandum prepared at the request of Assistant Attorney General Thurman W. Arnold and a significant contribution to the American war effort.

In 1941 Marcuse had published Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory in the hopes of securing an academic position. Reluctantly abandoning the Institute for Social Research, he joined the Office of War Information (OWI) with the goal of formulating “suggestions on ‘how to present the enemy to the American people’, in the press, movies, propaganda, etc.” In March of 1943 Marcuse joined Neumann in R&A’s Central European Section as senior analyst and rapidly established himself as “the leading analyst on Germany.”

Kirchheimer, who together with Arkadij Gurland had collaborated with Neumann in 1942 on an important study, The Fate of Small Business in Nazi Germany, for the US Senate’s Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, worked for a few months as a consultant for the OSS before, in 1944, being welcomed among the members of the Central European Section as a specialist on the German penal and constitutional system."

(Laudani, Raffaele. Introduction to Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort [Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer], edited by Raffaele Laudani, 1-23. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. pp. 1-3)

[Constantine]

Just stating the obvious, it has been a long process, and I am old enough to have watched it unfold. Cloud the matter all you like, it still feelings over facts, which has brought multiple genders and multiple victims---- chaos, in cartoon fashion!

Yes, what matters for gender theory are subjective gender feels rather than objective gender facts; but it is sexist to say that the subjectivism and emotionalism we find in wokeism is a sign of "the feminization of society." You may call it a sign of irrationalization that affects both women and men.

Tell me your theory on how this workerism through process came to be, it seems particular to the west, much of the world is laughing their asses off. How does such chaos as multi-genderism and victimhood come about if not what I feel I watched develop? The height of militant feminism and it anti-male stance then uniting with the gay movement, and a general belief that all damaged people were victims of the middle-aged white male. You've got the floor, who do you think were the shaker and movers.

Marcuse had a hand. From political correctness to Occupy Wall Street and BLM. It has all the elements of a CIA Operation but done via leftist groups. Switching from the proletariat to rich entitled college students exploring their identity and sexuality for the first time as the true revolutionaries, and the rest of society being weirded out and confused by these weird protests.

[Gary Childress]

Marcuse of the New Left.... the guy who developed the OSS/CIA?

Yeah.... I'll pass. And I've known about the red and black flag anarchists for years. I'm talking less civil war in Spain, and more just a hippy commune ran by people who like Socialism but never heard of Marx.

Herbert Marcuse (/mɑːrˈkuːzə/; German: [maʁˈkuːzə]; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD.[4] He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim (1924–1951), Inge Neumann (1955–1973), and Erica Sherover (1976–1979).[5][6][7] In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.[8]

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 (R&A) Branch was the largest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it employed over twelve hundred, 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 numerous European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks.

In March 1943, Marcuse joined fellow Frankfurt School scholar Franz Neumann in R&A's Central European Section as senior analyst; there he rapidly established himself as "the leading analyst on Germany".[12]

After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, becoming an intelligence analyst of Nazism. A compilation of Marcuse's reports was published in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort (2013). He retired after the death of his first wife in 1951

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_M ... e%20Agency.

At least he wasn't a Nazi, I suppose. Indeed he seems to have criticized many forms of undemocratic social control (irrespective of whether his theories were right or wrong). But, yes. Those who led the US through the "Cold War" were guilty of many crimes themselves. Perhaps Marcuse got sucked into the political circles of Washington and ended up little more than an apologist for the power elite of the US.

However, it seems plausible to think that politics in the US is indeed less brutal internally. So-called "communist" nations were much more brutal to their own populations but they didn't engage in as much palm greasing to third-world dictators as the US did (exemplified in ways by the "Chicago School" economists). In the end, the US has not promoted democracy and peace in the third world. We have promoted the interests of powerful tycoons and investors who wanted the international markets open to them. We're now paying for that as we should. After the smoke has cleared, I just doubt that the governments of China and Russia would be quite what human beings ought to live under, but, unfortunately, we must wait and see what happens. Hopefully, the body count is something we'll ALL be able to more or less live with on our consciences.

Sorry to be grim. But I find very little reason right now to be optimistic or pleased with what is going on.