Marx, Freud and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent Cultural Revolution

by Bruce M. Brown

An analysis of the New Left during the 1960s and their struggle to make Marxism critical to everyday life

The theory and practice of revolutionary social transformation, Bruce Brown argues, cannot rest content with the exclusive emphasis of traditional Marxism on world-historic processes and the struggle of the working classes for their collective emancipation. This means to discover how capitalist rule becomes internalized in individuals who suffer not only from economic and political oppression, but also from forms of specifically psychological oppression that any revolutionary worthy of the name must address. Toward this end of reconciling the personal and the political, the author surveys not only the lessons learned in the New Left during the 1960s, but also the contributions of critical Marxists who have sought to reconstitute Marxism as a critique of everyday life through a critical assimilation of Freudianism into the broader structure of historical materialism.

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Uğur · Rating 4 out of 5]

The political and economic sanctions and orientations imposed on the individual by the capitalist economic environment in which we have struggled and stopped have been the main subject of Marxism. In order to ensure the existence of marxism, which has put forward a critical, reactive line against this, in new areas outside the economic-political field, such new marxist views have emerged and have fed the main Marxist thought.

With this book, Bruce Brown discusses the problems, solutions and ways of working people in everyday life; a system in which the capital class is fed directly through the employee through economic forms of production and employees are further oppressed, while evaluating the uprising and revolutionary process of the people, the working class, predicted by Marxism against these conditions on a more comprehensive basis. What is this scope? let me continue to describe the book by referring to him.

The capitalist class has also established an oligarchic political order in order to keep the working class at the level of economic bottleneck and prevent their politicization. Within this system, while marxism was thinking directly about the way to overthrow these channels, a new interpretation of the left movement emerged in the 20 century, in particular, the so-called generation of '68. This interpretation has found a name for itself as a social revolution. Especially the 20th. living in the most active period in the first half of the century criticisms of the Frankfurt School of Marxism and theories inadequate filled in the fields, including the leading philosophers of the school of Fromm Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas removed from the site, such as sociologists, communication, media, sexuality, has studied the effects of political issues. With these research titles, the paths crossed with Reich and Freud, and in the light of their theses, criticisms of today's everyday life were carried out. These criticisms have become the titles of theories that have basic foundations rather than being such ordinary things, things that are put forward to be opposed.

For example, the mainstream media and the new culture revealed through this media channel were nothing more than consumer culture, which has become more dominant than the labor exploitation of the capitalist system. Creating a consumer culture and imposing societies on it would lead to the passing of customer identity in front of citizen identity. With the fact that the individual who has been transformed into a customer has been directed to continuous consumption, emotion and value consumption and meaning consumption are now starting to emerge in addition to goods consumption. and a lot of psychological problems were arising in the new individual accordingly. Apart from this, another example is the topic of sexuality. The concept of family has been blessed with the new employee power - new consumer customer policy, which has been put forward as indexed to reproduction, and every relationship that disrupts reproduction, that is, the employee-consuming customer balance, except heterosexual relationship, has been banned and cursed. Drawing from the author to the Reich sexual fulfillment and satisfaction at this point, and that is the most important source of human happiness and freedom in this area we will pave the way for the development of the human person productive though recognized, it will show itself in other areas of life happiness and the demands of development of the capitalist system and the administrators of the community to afford to meet this high demand, as the demand for this material, and implies that the system will collapse. Because the only way out in this regard is to plan production rationally and to collectivize economic life.' This meant the disappearance of the capital class.

If I have to make a personal comment at this point, there was also a serious flaw in the book. It is not that it did not strike me that the expression of feminist thought was used without including feminist thought. I have seen that marxist thought, which does not see feminist thought in the class struggle, is indexed to feminist philosophy, so to speak, 'exactly'. The only criticism I have about the book is that the author didn't mention it. Apart from that, I would say that you should definitely read a very qualified book.