Herbert Marcuse’s “Soviet Marxism”

SOVIET MARXISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS, by Herbert Marcuse Columbia University Press, New York 1958.

History written from the viewpoint of victorious politicians and generals always carries the onus of apology: apology for the present rulers who are the heirs of these victors. Consequently, the critic Walter Benjamin saw the duty of the historical materialist as “..die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu buersten”—to brush history against the grain. This does not entail—as in liberal history books— parading the defeated alongside the victorious, or the muted truth together with the truth which has had its day. It is rather the demand made of the historian to see his subject from the viewpoint of the defeated.

No view per se is “good” or “bad,” “justified” or “unjustified.” Its measure cannot but be the degree of inner coherency with which it answers the questions put to it by Man in search of orientation. The limits of inner coherency are socio-historical insofar as the given historical period defines its highest possible degree and individual in as much as the consequences of the inquiry may run counter to its methodological premises.

HERBERT MARCUSE, author of several valuable studies such as Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, an unsurpassed guidepost of dialectical criticism, here in his latest study, Soviet Marxism, using what he calls the method of “immanent c...