This interview establishes Marcuse as philosopher. His command of English is awesome. People of such stature are rare these days. Thank God he's on tape. Magee did a perfect interview.

l watched this when it came out, it's now more relevant than ever.

Magee: I don't want to get into a political argument, Marcuse: why not? 19:55

The discussion was just ' Superb' There is no other word.

Thank you so much for these videos.

Im loving this episode..the interviewer does a great job with these subjects and the philosophers

An example of the importance of abilities of the interviewer. Magee was amazing.

That's an astonishingly good interview!

Thank you for posting.

Thank you! for this jewel of an interview philosophy overdose

Felt privileged to have heard both Mr. Bryan Magee and Herbert Marcuse ! What amazing articulation of complex and difficult relationships of mind and matter at the individual as well as societal level.

"In short, the artist experiences a gap between the ideal and the real. This ability to entertain, at least theoretically, an ideal form of existence for humanity, while at the same time living in far less than ideal conditions, produces a sense of alienation in the artist. This alienation becomes the catalyst for social change. This function of art stays with Marcuse and will be developed further as he engages with psychoanalysis and philosophy. As a dialectical thinker, Marcuse was also able to see both sides of the coin. That is, while art embodied revolutionary potential, it was also produced, interpreted, and distributed in a repressive society. In an oppressive/repressive society the forces of liberation and the forces of domination do not develop in isolation from each other. Instead, they develop in a dialectical relationship where one produces the conditions for the other. This can be seen throughout almost all of Marcuse’s writings and will be pointed out at different points in this essay. The task here is to take a look at how this dialectic of liberation and domination occurs within the context of Marcuse’s aesthetic theory. This should not be taken to mean that there will never be a point in time when human beings are liberated from the forces of domination. This simply means that if an individual group seeks liberation, their analysis or critique of society must come to terms with how things actually work at that moment in that society if any form of liberation is possible. As Marcuse saw it, there is a form of ideology that serves domination and creates the conditions for liberation at the same time. This will be discussed later. Also, there is a form of liberation that lends itself to be co-opted by the forces of domination. Just as art embodied the potential for liberation and the formation of radical subjectivity, it was also capable of being taken up by systems of domination and used to further or maintain domination. This is the theme of Marcuse’s 1937 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture”. Culture, which is the domain of art, develops in tension with the overall structure of a given society. The values and ideals produced by culture call for the transcending of oppressive social reality."

Learned a lot. I enjoyed it a lot - Love these ideas as I was stuck into the Frankfurt school

So glad that this interview series survived. I don't agree with any of the "criticisms" or denigrations of Magee posted here. For example to call hin a gadfly!

Magee: "Well the politicians certainly aren't dominated by the great economic powers but anyway..." 21:50 Arguable in 1978. Did not age well. Marcuse had the better assessment in my view.

Thanks for this

Very interesting and worth watching.

Grateful for yet another great interview by the master Magee. Awesome to hear Herbert Marcuse talking so openly and frankly about the errors and mistakes made by the left after the WWII.

and so on and so on and so on, it was with Marcuse that Zizek learn his most famous sentence.

Thank you

this is awesome

In the cold war background, it's understandable how the host himself is biased against Marxism. It's really ridiculous the host said "the democratically elected politicians in Western countries are certainly not dominated by great economic powers" .

"Inequality, Injustice, cruelty and destructiveness" compared to what?

Considering this was filmed in 1978 the video quality of this interview is superb--like something filmed in the 2000s

The criticism of Marxism - that it fails to take sufficient interest in the individual - seems to be of great importance now. We live in an age of 'identity politics', where the concrete, living human being is reduced to an exemplar of an in-group of some sort ( you know them : white, black, straight, male, female, etc. - the whole menagerie). Following Marxian logic, society is itself reduced to a power struggle between said in-groups for the spoils of what remains of our civilisation. The huge irony is that such a simplistic, divisive and dehumanising analysis plays right into the hands of those whom Marcuse and his pals purported to oppose : the global economic elites and corporations who are quite happy to see a poor white man criticised and accused by a poor black man on the grounds of his whiteness, for example, instead of the two of them uniting against the rich elite! All of this is encouraged and facilitated by social media and the digital economy - itself owned and controlled by global corporations and billionaires. Some revolution.

This is excellent! I have never heard Marcuse himself speak before, only a very unpleasant simplification from some of his New Left interpreters.

"To make sense of Marcuse’s position we must ask: what are these intolerable conditions and how are they produced? Philosophical anthropology and radical subjectivity are connected here insofar as the intolerable conditions that must be overcome by revolution or the radical act represent social distortions of the human essence. It is Marx and Hegel who provided Marcuse with a philosophical anthropology that discloses human essence and the social mechanisms by which it is distorted. The key category here is that of “alienation” which cannot be understood without examining the role of labor and objectification. According to Marcuse, Hegel, and Marx, human beings develop through a self-formative process wherein the external world (nature) is appropriated and transformed according to human needs. Labor is one of the main areas for this self-formative activity. The idea that labor is an essential part of a self-formative process is what distinguishes Marx from the classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo, etc. In classical economics, labor is simply the means by which individuals make provisions for themselves and their families. In these theories labor is not viewed as that activity by which the human subject is constituted. The Marxian view of labor as a self-formative process is what makes possible the Marxian theory of alienation and revolution. Marcuse argues that in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx shows how the role of labor as a self-realization or self-formative process gets inverted. Instead of having his or her subjectivity affirmed, the individual becomes an object that is now shaped by external, alien forces. Hence, Marx’s theory makes a transition from an examination of the self-formative process of labor to a critique of the forms of alienation caused by the historical facticity of capitalism. Within the historical facticity of capitalism this fact appears as the total inversion and concealment of what critique had defined as the essence of man and human labor. Labor is not “free activity” or the universal and free self-realization of man, but his enslavement and loss of reality. The worker is not man in the totality of his life-expression, but something unessential [ein Unwesen], the purely physical subject of “abstract” activity. The objects of labor are not expressions and confirmations of the human reality of the worker, but alien things, belonging to someone other than the worker-“commodities.” (Marcuse 2005b: 104)

19:00 god this is amazing love his answer to the question and Magge is dumbfounded he knows he’s right the great economic powers practically puppeteer politics u wish this could continue

This is an excellent discussion... particularly relevant in today's CRT, DEI... and the rest of that dross

The subtitles are wrong or missing in a lot of places. Is there some way I can contribute to them?

I think it's revealing of the difference between 1978 and now (and also revealing of how Marx was on-point about the long-term developement of capitalism) that Magee's points, right around minutes 20 and 21, about how democracy in the West has "tamed" capitalism, did indeed seem, in 1978, like a knock-down argument against Marxian economic history. ... And now seem laughably pollyanna-ish and naive. All the the categories that Marcuse just mentioned -- the ever-increasing concentration of economic wealth and power, the dominance of the economic over the political, etc -- did indeed seem to have been waning, not growing, from FDR to Carter, but since 1980, since Reagan and Thatcher, have come roaring back.

I hate to say it, but... Seems Marcuse's view is closer to where we are in the first quarter of the 21st Century than Magee's....

Seems like "and so on and so on" is quite a popular spelling among marxists philosophers

A caution...some of the auto-"translations" are ridiculously awry. Setting that aside, this is a very adeptly conducted interview, with candid and illuminating responses by Marcuse.

Oooph, Magee's bias laid bare. Lovely interview all in all though.

Surprising how Marcuse remarks about society speak about today situation

I think Magee had a very "naive" view of the political powers, as if they are independent and untouched by the economic sphere. And now we all now that is completely wrong.

21:00 maybe he said: "introduced by Hegel himself" ?

And is just the beginning..... exelente... interview.... more deshumanity....👽🫵👍

Magee: I come to bury Herbert, Adorno, Karl and Freidrich not to praise them.

24:49 (Hegel)

7:47

31:37 (aesthetics)

Those were the days! Citizens, not Consumers... 🌈🦉

When Marcus jealously eyes art for the colonization of packaged political symbolism did anyone forsee that that very spark was in grave danger. And now we have it, free art has been cancelld by the children of the Frankfurt school

dito

Hitler keep the Frankfurt school social engineering out of Europe and they were sponsored by Columbia University here in the states they just didn’t get up and leave voluntarily. Hitler feared these people and rightly so.

Glad I did not do my Ph.d on Marcuse. In my 70's, I see Vedanta as the Metaphysical Truth. In my 20's, I thought Sartre had it all. How wrong I was.

10:00

He died a year after

Seems like Magee doesn’t care too much for Marcuse, based on his questioning

I love Marcuse, but it must be noted how consistently impressive is Magee .

Gotta love the gentility of hostility on display here. Note my man has never asked anybody in this series why they don’t just give up on Hume, Locke or Mill, no matter how trenchant the criticism. But Marx can be binned. It is genteel, but it sure as heck isn’t subtle.

Funny to hear him conflate the development of nuclear energy with dehumanization. 😂

Ah yes, the beginning of the end

I like Magee but he is hugely out of his depth when talking about politics with such naive assumptions about who controls policy and the economy. Marcuse totally gets who's actually pulling the strings and its not Joe Public.

Thank you Marcuse for helping create the insanity we are living in today.

The German accent is not thick enough

magee's disdain of marxism unfortunately limits this discussion and certainly hasn't aged well

"Alienated performances"

He admits to being stupid, yet is willing to say he knows how society should be structured. Where is Socrates when you need him?

22:04 interviewer gets owned on his narrowminded and completely incorrect liberal world view and he knows it too; his excuse "have to let that pass reluctantly". Brotherman; u got shrekt cuz ur theories dont hold up; trust me im 45 year from the future turns out Herbert was correct and you were about as wrong as one can possibly be; yet your incorrect theory still exists today and THAT is the truly sad part!

Seems like he failed to realise the effects that the falling rate of profit would have on society & the further concentratjon if wealth that would occur. Society was far more ripe for revolution in 1968 and it strikes me that he was on the wring side of history.

Bryan Magee makes Some astonishingly naïve points.

Magee really believes the liberal fairytale?! Ahahahaha! Nice interview and both polite.

Perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher of all time.

Go read 'Repressive Tolerance' ... and reassess any praise you have for Marcuse.

Been watching a lot of Magee recently, and not even the representative of Heidegger was as hard to understand. There appears to actually be no effort at all on Marcuse’s part to make what he’s saying appreciable on an everyday level. The Marxist jargon is in full effect, and there’s no getting under it. Then you notice that when Magee asks why you don’t just drop Marxism, Marcuse just says ‘because it’s still right, it predicted what has happened’, and we don’t really get to the specifics of what that means i.e. just how accurately Marxism predicted what is happening, or even what it is factually that ‘is happening’. He mentions the centralising of wealth and power, but Magee raises a single example of how that might not be what is happening, Marcuse renders it ambiguous, and then they move on. Nothing is substantiated. I understand there are time constraints and a mild communication barrier, but it feels like Marcuse glossed over everything that he in fact believes, and most of what the Frankfurt school believed, content to just say they were ‘important’ and ‘brilliant’. I watched Heidegger and I learned roughly what Heidegger said and believed and why it matters. I watched Marcuse and I learned that there are people who believe that Marxism can be used with psychology, and that whatever *that* involves there are people doing it and so isn’t that one helluva thing. Marxism is the only philosophy that I come away from feeling like I’ve been to church instead of the lecture hall.

“Far more attention must be paid to the women’s movement.” Yes.

Marcuse was wrong! 😂

"We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control” Hey, philosopher, leave the kids alone!

femenine qualities end up beign a machistic views oif what is femenine,well no.

So this is the guy who shat out the turd we now know as wokism.

the seeds of wokeness ....

And now, nearly 50 years on, we can see the truly evil results of this evil man.

A singularly unpleasant person caught entirely in the web of his own ideological construction.

I remember 68 so very well. And what came of it? The nonsense of today: Trump, hedge funds, environmental collapse, and passive university students.

He looks like he’s part of a certain ethnic group

neurolinguistic cults

I had to read all of his shallow Marxist rubbish and have never seen him. Good to see that he is as embarrassing in person as his writings.

Jews