Political commentary
The testament of Dr Marcuse
Ferdinand Mount
There's no place like a crowded British beach to hear that Herbert Marcuse is dead. How he would have hated the Wall's Cornett() wrappings in the sand, the huddle of orange and blue anoraks, the senior citizens sitting in their cars staring glumly at the view through steamed-up windows, the distant whine of the Boomtown Rats on the trannie, No philosopher of the Left was more celebrated for his dislike of the masses in the flesh than the guru of '68. August for the people, but not for old Frankfurt Marxists dying gracefully in California.
Marcuse achieved fame late in life, and by a curious route. His claim to orginality as a socialist thinker was the unashamed way he gave up the working class as a lost cause. For him it was not the revolutionaries who had sold out the masses, but the masses who had sold out the revolutionaries. A new revolutionary class had therefore to be created out of the leavings of the affluent society. The only hope lay in those who had not yet been corrupted by tellies and fridges, whose consciousness had not yet been warped by falsely created needs; this meant students, most blacks, the very poor and the inhabitants of the Third World, a precarious alliance of those who were united only in their exclusion.
It was not merely the vulgarity, the lack of striving for aesthetic nobility, that Marcuse disliked about the masses. He seemed to find more distasteful their easygoing acceptance of the world asthey found it, their toleration of the intolerable. The trouble with the poor, as Chesterton remarked, is that they are so kind to the rich. How horribly repressive Marcuse would have found the civilities of beach life: each family crouching behind its windbreak at a respectful distance from the next, mothers trying to hush their children, fat men modestly struggling into bathing pants behind the insecurely anchored towel.
Marcuse was not the first to feel like this. Marx himself feared that higher wages would seduce the British workers from their revolutionary task far more effectively than repression by the ruling class — which could only hasten the revolution by sharpening revolutionary consciousness. In the 19th century this fear of the masses was only a vague apprehension. The poor were still so poor that they remained an area of enigma and possibility. But in the 20th century the collapse of proletarian anger has become unmistakable. Marcuse's significance is the candour with which he observed this phenomenon and tried to cope with it.
The revolutionary's fear of the masses is a quaint mirror image of the diehard's fear. The alarmed country gentleman visualises a constant supply of demagogues whipping up the mob with fatal ease, while revolutionary leaders are always complaining about the shortage of demagogues and regard the mob as maddeningly liable to cool down and slope off home at the slightest lack of provocation. There comes a point in the history of every radical movement when some old-timer moans 'you can't get a good mob together any more. If you ask me, what we need are a few more hotheads.' The average sensual man's torpor is a perpetual threat to those whose livelihood depends on spreading political obsessions.
It's worst for trade union leaders. They are, after all, employed primarily to insert their members' 'snouts in the trough', to quote Sid Weighell, the railwaymen's leader. But they also inherit a different commitment, to the furtherance of socialist ideals. And upon this other commitment — to the political power and militancy of the Movement — depend the personal power, fame and sense of fulfilment of the leaders themselves.
The leaders of the shipbuilding unions are duty bound to negotiate the best deal they can for their members in lossmaking yards. The best deal is often to accept a sizeable redundancy payment and go off to start a small business. When Swan Hunter closed last year, 85 per cent of the men volunteered for redundancy. But that means fewer members for the shipbuilding unions and less muscle for the Movement, fewer votes at the TUC and the Labour Party Conference, fewer visits to Downing Street, smaller expenses and a smaller office car — in fact less of everything that makes life worthwhile. And so it is that unions leaders may be drawn to resist the dreadful materialism of their own members.
When Len Murray came out of his meeting with Jim Prior last month and talked about`basie trade union rights' being at risk, and the threat of 'divisive legislation', the flurry of non-sequiturs and internal contradictions gave the impression — as with George Woodcock and Vic Feather before him — that Mr Murray is himself a muddlehead. Yet this kind of General Secretary's argot is the only way to reconcile the conflicting roles of a union, the conflict between an industrial bargaining—organisation and an ideological mob.
The underlying trouble facing the TUC at Blackpool this week is not that Labour lost the last General Election, or even that the trade unions were much to blame for this. The real trouble is the loss of moral confidence; it doesn't look so easy to get a decent mob together any more.
True, trade union membership and aggressiveness have grown over the past 10 years. But this militancy has been largely brought about by external agency — by the bias towards unionisation in the statutory terms of reference of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service, by flying and mass picketing, by legislation extending immunity for breach of contract. These new weapons, and others like them, derive not so much from an upsurge of proletarian feeling as from the political power of a Lett-wing minority within the Labour Party and the trade union leadership. Indeed, the Left's control may itself be a paradoxical by-product of embourgeoisement. The pursuit and enjoyment of affluence lead to a declining interest and participation in the traditional organisations of working-class politics, leaving the way open for an unrepresentative minority to take control. For a time these new weapons appeared to enhance the power and prestige of the trade unions. Arthur Scargill closed the Saltley Coke Depot. Governments fell. The mob filled the streets outside the Grunwick factory. Huge lorry-drivers stood sentinel outside closed depot gates. Hospital patients were wrapped in tinfoil. Graves gaped. But somehow these great deeds turned to dust. Grunwick turned out to be a defeat. Some hospitals worked rather better without the services of the COHSE mob. One or two unions 'won', but what they Won beyond what they had originally been offered rarely made up for the wages lost during the strike. And worst of all, all unions lost a quantum of self-esteern. Perhaps for the first time, the depth of public loathing began to seep through to the separate mental compartment most godfearing union men reserve for their trade union activities. Many of them have begun to feel used and abused by, their own leaders. The respectable excuse for callous mob rule—the struggle against government wage controls — no longer' applies. And Mr prior intends to knock away one or two of the props which made the trade unions once look so irresistible. This is not to deny the undiminished power for obstruction, luddism and general industrial bloodymindedness possessed by the trade unions. But their leaders know how warily they will have to go this winter', they are not to offend their members abraded sensibilities and push them further than they want to go. Trade union leaders like to denounce Mrs Thatcher as 'the most reactionary Prime Minister for 50 years and as a gruesome threat to the living standards of all working people. Yet so far • they dare not act as if they meant it. For the old socialist fear of the masses whispers that she may more truly speak for their menl hers' aspirations than they do. That is the dilemma of Mr Murray; it is also the testa ment of Dr Marcuse.
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