Marcusean resources to think coloniality

Abstract

The article aims to take a stand in the debates surrounding the potential contribution of the theoreticians of the first generation of the Frankfurt School to postcolonial/decolonial theory, by showing that Herbert Marcuse, in his work, has outlined coloniality as later authors have defined it. Marcuse denounced the neocolonialism and neoimperialism of which the Global South populations were prey at the time of decolonizations. He showed that the welfare state and the affluent society in contemporary Western societies largely fed themselves on the continued economic exploitation of the Global South. Marcuse decried the uneven development bred by the capitalist system and criticized the ideology and mechanisms of development imposed on the newly independent countries, which also violated the subjectivity of their peoples, ignoring their values and aspirations. He condemned the racial-based violence and war imposed on the ‘underprivileged’ in the Global South and the Global North alike. These trains of thought describe different aspects of coloniality. This article will analyze these insights through a close reading of Marcuse’s work and comparisons with the writings of Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and Samir Amin.

Echoing Edward Said, some critics in the last decade claimed that the work of the Frankfurt School’s theoreticians cannot contribute to understanding phenomena like imperialism and racism. ¹ From Said’s viewpoint, the alleged silence of the School’s members on these topics would be motivated by a commitment to a ‘false universalism’. ² One also underscores that the Frankfurt School and its primary sources of inspiration, from the first generation, are dominated by white European men. ³ As a consequence, the work of these thinkers could not contribute to postcolonial/decolonial theory. This position has started to be contested. Some scholars brought into focus concepts fruitful for postcolonial/decolonial theory, especially in Adorno’s writings. ⁴ By contrast, the potential contribution of Herbert Marcuse’s work remains largely overlooked. And yet, Marcuse has reflected on the situation of the Global South at the time of decolonizations, which was exposed to neocolonialism and imperialism. He denounced the uneven development bred by the capitalist system and criticized the ideology and mechanisms of development imposed on the newly independent countries. Also, in the late 1960s, Marcuse insisted that if a revolution should occur, it would have to be global. Through these trains of thought, he outlines coloniality as later authors have defined it. Marcuse’s insights on these topics are scattered in over a dozen books, articles and talks from One Dimensional Man (1964) to Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972).

A few scholars underscore Marcuse’s engagement with domination, repression, alienation, and on the other hand, liberation and revolution at the global level. ⁵ For Douglas Kellner, the potential of Marcuse’s work ‘for developing global perspectives on domination and resistance’ ⁶ goes without saying. Beck Matustik points out that Marcuse was searching for ‘an anticolonial critical theory’ ⁷ and outlines ‘postracist, postpatriarchal, postcolonial solidarity’. ⁸ Moreover, Marcuse breaks with the Eurocentric perspective, making ‘us aware that theorizing from the standpoint of Western, middle-class, existentialist (and deconstructionist) rebellions alone does not give us any right to speak for the wretched of the earth’. ⁹ Like Sartre, the late Marcuse demanded that ‘the middle-class European existential revolts join with the wretched of the earth’. ¹⁰ This article will expand such insights.

The ‘globalization’ of Marcuse’s thinking from the mid-1960s is connected to his involvement in the New Left. This assemblage of movements equally opposed the affluence of advanced industrial societies and violent interventions in developing countries. ¹¹ If Marcuse’s work inspired the New Left at the time, conversely, he oriented much of his theoretical effort toward the concerns and struggles of these movements. ¹² The revolutionary theories developed in the by-then-called Third World, by Franz Fanon for instance, influenced the activists of the New Left ¹³ and inspired Marcuse, who borrowed the Fanonian concept of ‘wretched of the earth’. Marcuse acknowledged the strong echoes of the revolutionary movements in the Third World in the New Left. ¹⁴ According to Kellner, his involvement in the movement against the Vietnam War was essential in developing his views on global capitalist domination, neoimperialism and neocolonialism. ¹⁵ Marcuse was ‘encouraged by the global forces of revolt’ in which he sought ‘instruments of social radical change’. ¹⁶ His readers and listeners did not miss this evolution. In 1967, after his lecture ‘The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition’ (1967), a listener commented that given the importance Marcuse attributes to the Third World proletariat in his thinking about revolution, which he depicts as the mass basis for the opposition of the time in the Global North, especially in the United States, he had to ‘take this into the structure of [his] theory’. ¹⁷

Marcuse regards the situation of the people in the so-called peripheries and those of the centers – a terminology borrowed from theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin that refers to the global polarization inherent to the capitalist system – as tightly knitted because they all evolve within the capitalist system, which, for him, is inherently global and totalizing. Not only the exploitation of the peoples subjected to colonialism, neocolonialism or imperialism was inseparable from the situation of the exploited and underprivileged in the metropoles, but such exploitation, for Marcuse, was essential to the existence and smooth working of the affluent society in the Global North, whose function is to shut working class protest. Thus, his reflections on the Global South also contribute to unpacking the mechanisms of domination and alienation in advanced industrial society and understanding why they failed to foster human emancipation. As this paper will underscore, Marcuse’s one-dimensional society has a global anchorage. This is why he yearned for a ‘total revolution’, namely, global in its geographical scope and total in character, as the only way to uproot capitalism, which is global and shapes the totality of social life. This revolution would bring about a radical transformation of life and, thus, of human beings themselves, who are totally subjected to the imperatives of capitalism, on the global scale. For Marcuse, liberation will be total, and global or will not be. ¹⁸ He cannot foresee another way out of the mechanisms of a global and totalizing system that breeds oppression, exploitation and alienation worldwide and dehumanizes its losers and winners alike, as this article will show. Marcuse’s hopes for revolution largely relied upon his conviction that ‘Third World liberation struggles were weakening the global framework of capitalism and were shifting the balance of power from capitalism to socialism’. ¹⁹

This paper will bring into light Marcusean resources that contribute to making sense of coloniality. While the focus is on the period when Marcuse developed most of his ideas on the topic, especially from the mid-1960s, and on contemporary developments, his insights also contribute to understanding why decolonization in the Global South did not produce the expected results and why coloniality persists, an issue that will be discussed in the last part of this article. The analysis is based on a close reading of Marcuse’s developments on the Global South and parallels with essential writings of champions of the decolonization movements in the 1950s and 1960s in Africa, Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah, and of Egyptian Marxist political economist Samir Amin, who shared many of Marcuse’s intuitions and theorized them, also allowing us to apply his insights beyond the 1960s. The first section of this paper will define coloniality and frame applications of the concept relevant to the topic examined, together with other notions essential to approach Marcuse’s developments on the Global South. The other sections deal with Marcuse’s work, first summarizing his conception of the advanced industrial society and the mechanisms of repression and alienation operative in this society. This survey is essential to understand why the predicament of the Global South is inseparable from the processes and relations generated from the Global North, and thus, why Marcuse believes in the necessity of a global revolution. Then, the impediments to decolonization are considered, based on Marcuse’s reflections on development, modernity, and violence. The last section will explain the reasons for the failure of the global revolution Marcuse hoped for and for the persistence of coloniality.

Coloniality

In 1965, Gonzales Casanova coined the word ‘coloniality’ when observing the persistence of ‘colonial structures’ in ‘formerly colonial societies even after the emergence of the independent state’. ²⁰ Two decades later, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano put forward his own conception, ²¹ which eclipsed Casanova’s formulation. Since the word coloniality became common only by the turn of the 1990s, ²² Marcuse does not use it, but he describes processes and mechanisms encompassed by the notion. One encounters in his work the concepts of imperialism and neocolonialism, which were commonplace in the 1960s and are encompassed by coloniality. Surveying relevant dimensions, articulations, and components of this concept will provide us with tools to scrutinize and appreciate Marcuse’s contribution to the understanding of coloniality.

Coloniality, the coloniality of power, or the colonial matrix of power in Walter Mignolo’s words – all concepts describing the same reality, according to him – originates in colonialism but outflanks it. Colonialism is a ‘concrete social formation’, while coloniality is ‘an encompassing political, cultural, epistemological and symbolic condition’. ²³ Coloniality ‘is a structure of management that controls and touches upon all aspects and trajectories of our lives’. ²⁴ In fact, coloniality is a structure of power that originates in the European overseas conquests in the sixteenth century and survives colonialism. ²⁵ Thus, the concept expresses the failure to get rid of colonialism after the period of formal foreign control ended: it signals the survival of colonialism under different forms and through various vehicles, ranging from mechanisms of domination and exploitation in the economic and political spheres to a hold on culture, knowledge and subjectivity. It is largely because it works through domination that does not rely exclusively on coercive means that coloniality endures. ²⁶

However, violence and racism are essential components of coloniality. With the onset of European colonialism, capitalism ‘became tied with forms of domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control’ over subjected peoples. ²⁷ Slavery and other forms of exploitative labor that presided over capitalism’s colonial origins testify to the ‘centrality of violence in capitalism’ and its nature as a racial system. ²⁸ For decolonial thinkers, conquest, genocide and war are fundamental aspects of coloniality, ²⁹ together with race and racism. ³⁰ One discovers such associations in Marcuse’s work.

Not only capitalism, but also modernity developed in the context of the European conquests of the sixteenth century. ³¹ Coloniality is the dark but necessary side of modernity from its onset to today, ³² according to Mignolo. For him, the achievements of Western civilization would not have been possible without coloniality. ³³ One finds a comparable rationale in Marcuse’s writings. The people engaged in the decolonization process in the second half of the twentieth century encountered modernity as a development ideology that dictates the nature and direction of economic and social development based on the Western path of development, which was presented as the best and only viable way to follow. Modernization ideology was encouraged by the great powers and enforced by the international agencies and countries that provided aid and loans, and elites in the newly independent countries endorsed it when they benefited from it. Industrialization played a key role in the ideology of development, together with international trade. The economic changes accompanying these two orientations strongly impacted developing societies without meeting the aspirations and needs of their populations. For Marcuse, such harmonization is essential to defining successful development strategies, but development policies too often result in dependent development.

The concept of coloniality derives from dependency theories. ³⁴ Based on the center-periphery dichotomy, these theories hold that the differences in levels of development were largely shaped by colonialism, later relayed by informal forms of foreign control. Uneven development is based on exploiting resources and labor in the peripheries, a phenomenon Marcuse brings to attention. Quijano explains that the international division of labor originates in the European conquests of the early modern era: the relations of production it imposed, which was the foundational stone of world capitalism, ³⁵ was built upon the structural dependence of colonized countries on the colonizers. From the sixteenth century, the subjected countries enriched wealthy countries ³⁶ while impoverishing themselves, ³⁷ and because of coloniality, this situation endures. ³⁸ Dependence theories hold that ‘underdeveloped countries’ are mostly ‘formerly colonized states that are actually prevented, by the forces of global capitalism, from independent development’. ³⁹ Marcuse’s view of the relations between the Global North and the Global South has many affinities with these theories and the postcolonial/decolonial theorists who hold that underdevelopment is ‘not internally generated but a structural condition of capitalism itself’. ⁴⁰

Coloniality encompasses the concepts of (informal or neo) imperialism and neocolonialism, ⁴¹ which Marcuse uses. He acknowledges how neocolonialism and (neo-) imperialism relayed colonialism. Since Marcuse views imperialism as intrinsic to capitalism, as an aspect of the capitalist mode of production ⁴² and of capitalism’s natural drive toward expansion, he often uses the concept of imperialism to refer to economic mechanisms of domination (at times, he applies the concept of neocolonialism to such economic asymmetrical power relations ⁴³ ). The Marxist sources of Marcuse’s thought are explicit here, such an economic understanding of imperialism displaying affinities with Lenin’s, despite Marcuse’s condemnation of Soviet Marxism in the late 1950s. ⁴⁴ As time went on, he increasingly connected capitalist domination and imperialism to monopoly capitalism, in a way reminding us of Lenin in Imperialism. The Latest Stage of Capitalism. Also, from the mid-1960s, Marcuse applied the notion of imperialism to a more encompassing form of foreign control that relied on military might, thus making imperialism and neocolonialism almost synonymous. This use of the concept echoes Kwame Nkrumah’s conception. The leader of the movement for independence of the Gold Coast, who became the first President of Ghana, coined the concept of neocolonialism in 1965 in a book whose title underscored Lenin’s influence: Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. ⁴⁵ For Nkrumah, neocolonialism does not essentially distinguish itself from imperialism: it ‘represents imperialism in its final and perhaps most dangerous stage’. ⁴⁶ Neocolonialism is ‘the main instrument of imperialism’, ⁴⁷ he writes. Like the Ghanian leader, Marcuse does not apply the concept of neocolonialism solely to the continuous control of the colonizers on their former colonies, but also to the domination exercised by the superpowers of the time, especially the United States, ⁴⁸ sometimes by supporting so-called lackey regimes ⁴⁹ in countries of the Global South. These regimes spring from a local elite or comprador class, which maintains aspects of colonial domination ⁵⁰ and profits from it. Since the 1990s, the concept of imperialism has been preferred to neocolonialism. ⁵¹

This section outlined various dimensions of coloniality. It has shown that coloniality encompasses colonialism and imperialism no less than postcolonial forms of foreign domination and explained that capitalism and modernity are constitutive of coloniality. Marcuse discusses coloniality when dealing with economy, politics and subjectivity.

The one-dimensional society, revolution and coloniality

From One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse developed a global outlook on the dialectic of oppression and liberation, although his primary focus was the advanced industrial society, which encompasses the capitalist and communist societies of the time. The advanced industrial society is an ‘affluent society’, which one cannot properly understand without putting it ‘in the framework of the Third World’. ⁵² Since ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ societies are equally embedded in the capitalist system, the repression of the greatest number and the possibilities of liberation in both types of societies are indissociable, although the specific forms of domination and exploitation operative within each of them depend on their respective position in global hierarchies. For Marcuse, ‘the system of advanced industrial society is global’, first, in the sense that ‘all dimensions of the human existence, private and public, are delivered to the reigning powers’. ⁵³ Second, the system is global because it encompasses every process and force: ‘there are no more external factors’, ‘the geographically and otherwise more distant forces become internal forces of the system’. ⁵⁴ Because of these close connections, this section will sketch the characteristics and mechanisms of the advanced industrial society as a prelude to the discussion of Marcuse’s perspective on the situation of the Global South.

The advanced industrial society and the dialectic of alienation and liberation

The affluent society is a product of the Western advanced industrial society, more broadly, of capitalism. The unprecedented level of technological development of the production apparatus allowed the coming into being of the affluent society. Its unseen productivity generates a higher standard of living for ever-growing strata of the populations ⁵⁵ in the Global North, who also enjoy the comforts and pleasures of the consumer society that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. With such affluence, the universal satisfaction of vital needs, the alleviation of poverty, ⁵⁶ and a reduction of labor ‘to a level where the human organism need[s] no longer function as an instrument of labor’ ⁵⁷ is possible at once. However, the affluent society did not take this road. This society is subservient to capitalist accumulation: reducing human labor ‘militates against the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production’. ⁵⁸

Affluence is canalized into luxury goods and ‘unproductive’ goods and services, and military equipment and it breeds waste and planned obsolescence. ⁵⁹ The affluent society prioritizes false needs, which are ‘superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression’, and ‘perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery and injustice’, ⁶⁰ and ‘the servitude of the exploited’. ⁶¹ Even its pleasures are harmful to those who enjoy them. ⁶² The system determines the needs and aspirations of the individuals: false needs are introjected into them. ⁶³ The working class is thus integrated into the system, to which it willingly submits, especially since the superimposed needs help control and repress individual consciousness. ⁶⁴ The individual is mutilated and participates in its own repression. ⁶⁵ Thus, the high standard of living resulting from material abundance perpetuates life in ever more senseless and dehumanizing forms, while the poor remain poor, and the number of victims of the affluent society is growing. ⁶⁶ These are the results of ‘overdevelopment’, which is no less harmful than underdevelopment. The repression that presided over the development of the capitalist mode of production ‘served the conquest of scarcity and the mastery of nature’ but it has lost all raison d’être in a society of abundance, ⁶⁷ together with the ‘social necessity’ of alienation, servitude and heteronomy. ⁶⁸ There can only be ‘surplus repression’ ⁶⁹ which, especially through the alienated labor perpetuated for the sake of profit, ⁷⁰ keeps the individuals in an unnecessary struggle for existence and is a source of aggressiveness, violence and war.

In advanced industrial societies, progress is regressive. Productivity is tied to destruction, and liberty to repression. ⁷¹ Such progress is not development, which opens on autonomy, emancipation and freedom, allowing the integral fulfillment of all individuals, and whose first step is the universal satisfaction of vital needs. In the affluent society, freedom mainly consists in choosing between goods and services that sustain alienation, ⁷² and people who are free in this sense observes Marcuse, ‘are not in need of liberation, and the oppressed are not strong enough to liberate themselves’. ⁷³ Embarking on the road of progress depends ‘completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs’, ‘qualitatively different needs and faculties’. ⁷⁴ This capacity requires breaking the spell of one-dimensional thought, of the ‘social habits of thought’ ⁷⁵ shaped by the manipulation of needs, desires and aspirations. ⁷⁶ Individuals must have the ‘good conscience to make life an end-in-itself’, ⁷⁷ which would be possible only after a successful revolutionary struggle against society. ⁷⁸ Thus, from Marcuse’s viewpoint, populations in advanced industrial societies are no less in need of a revolution than those of the Global South.

Revolution in the Global South and the Global North

This common and simultaneous need for revolution is not incidental. As postcolonial/decolonial thinkers underscore, since capitalism is by nature global, its expansion works through the extraction of surplus value worldwide. Thus, the Third World countries ‘are not external to the capitalist system. They are an essential part of its global space of exploitation’, ⁷⁹ writes Marcuse, on which capitalism must keep its hold to maintain itself and secure its expansion. This is why all the exploited and ‘underprivileged’ are structurally connected through capitalism for Marcuse. His concept of underprivileged encompasses peoples of the Global South and, in the Global North, those whose ‘vital needs even highly developed, advanced capitalism, cannot and will not gratify’, ⁸⁰ like the ‘outsiders’ and the poor, the persecuted color races ⁸¹ ‘national minorities’, ⁸² and the ‘ghetto populations’. ⁸³ The underprivileged of the centers of the capitalist system are among the most exploited, but the situation of those of the Third World is even worse. ⁸⁴

Marcuse points out that ‘neocolonial exploitation’ is an important source of the ‘benefits accorded to the metropolitan working class’, ⁸⁵ and thus, essential to its integration into the system and to the cohesion of the latter. Thus, the affluent society feeds itself on the backs of Global South workers; in other words, it maintains itself through coloniality. Marcuse explains that the dynamic of advanced capitalist society

has long since passed the stage where it could grow on its own resources, its own market, and on normal trade with other areas. It has grown into an imperialist power which, through economic and technical penetration and outright military intervention, has transformed large parts of the Third World into dependencies. ⁸⁶

Nkrumah similarly associates the development of neocolonialism with the postwar compromise and the affluence in the countries of the centers. ⁸⁷ Neocolonialism, he explains, perpetuates a practice common since the nineteenth century, namely, using colonies as ‘a source of wealth which could be used to mitigate the class conflicts in the capitalist states’. ⁸⁸ In the postwar era, the system of neocolonialism financed the welfare state. ⁸⁹ Marcuse and Nkrumah both underscore that the material resources available could ‘abolis[h] poverty and exploitation the world over’, thus, with the potential to unleash revolution on the global scale. ⁹⁰ Nkrumah rightly points out that ‘only the organization to deploy these potential resources […] is lacking’. ⁹¹ The will to do so is also lacking. The affluent society, writes Marcuse, ‘depriv[es] its victims abroad of the necessities of life’, ⁹² ‘mak[ing] hell of large areas of the globe’, ⁹³ besides the ‘ghettos’ in advanced industrial societies. ⁹⁴ These ‘infernal places’ reveal the character ‘of the whole’. ⁹⁵ The affluent society perpetuates the struggle for existence, on which growth is based, also in the Global South. ⁹⁶ Thus, this society, which is an outcome of the high level of technological development, thus, of modernity, is inseparable from coloniality.

A common denominator between the underprivileged populations in the Global South and underprivileged groups in the Global North is race. ⁹⁷ Marcuse observes that in the United States, ‘national and racial minorities’ constitute a large part of the ‘underprivileged’. ⁹⁸ Because they share the Global South peoples’ position in the capitalist system, they can equally threaten capitalism. Marcuse explains that ‘in the global framework the underprivileged who must bear the entire weight of the system really are the mass basis of the national liberation struggle against neo-colonialism in the Third World and against colonialism in the United States’. ⁹⁹ The civil rights movement in the United States and the Vietnam War ¹⁰⁰ both unleashed opposition to the system. The National Liberation Front in Vietnam, like elsewhere, contributed to the crisis of the capitalist system, ¹⁰¹ which perpetuates the servitude of these people, according to Marcuse. In An Essay on Liberation, he points out that

monopolistic imperialism validates the racist thesis: it subjects ever more nonwhite populations to the brutal power of its bombs, poisons, and money; thus making even the exploited white populations in the metropoles partners and beneficiaries of the global crime. Class conflicts are being superseded or blotted out by race conflicts: color lines become economic and political realities–a development rooted in the dynamic of late imperialism and its struggle for new methods of internal and external colonization. ¹⁰²

Postcolonial/decolonial thinkers typically regard capitalism as a racial system, ¹⁰³ and the idea of race is one of the axes of power of coloniality. ¹⁰⁴ [European] modernity has created or sustained different hierarchies, some based on race, ‘as it colonized and enslaved populations through the planet’. ¹⁰⁵ As Marcuse, echoing later thinkers shows, racism remains an essential basis of capitalist exploitation and accumulation centuries after the first overseas European conquests, into the so-called decolonizing societies.

Although race is a basis for domination, it can become the bedrock of struggle and solidarity, a solidarity that embodies a mortal danger for capitalism. Marcuse explains that there is a ‘tripartite division of historical forces which cut across the division into the First, Second, and Third World’. ¹⁰⁶ If the forces of repression pervade the system through and through, the same is true of the liberating struggles and forces. ¹⁰⁷ It is in the ‘global structure’ that the internal contradictions of the capitalist system assert themselves. These contradictions express themselves in the ‘sustained resistance against neocolonial domination’, ¹⁰⁸ in ‘the National Liberation movements’ ¹⁰⁹ : these ‘rebellions’, for Marcuse, signal the ‘historical obsolescence’ of the affluent society. ¹¹⁰ Amin also contemplates ‘the liberation struggles of peoples in the South’ as ‘closely linked with the challenge to capitalism’. ¹¹¹ For Marcuse, the synchronism of the civic rights and the National Liberation movements signals that the ‘class struggle’ is now waged at the global level. ¹¹² The underprivileged who fight in the movement for civic rights and the National Liberation Fronts act not only as ‘military’ and ‘political and moral opponents’: they are ‘the living, human negation of the system’. ¹¹³ Both movements embody a ‘political class struggle’ made up of ‘objectively anti-capitalist forces’. ¹¹⁴

For Marcuse, as suggested, underdevelopment and overdevelopment, embodied in the affluent society, both result from the capitalist system and repel emancipation and autonomy. For this reason, the surest path toward a free and autonomous society based on authentic human, economic and social development, whether in the Global South or in the Global North, is to overthrow the capitalist system, or, put in positive terms, a revolution. Indeed, revolution has to be thought of in a global framework ¹¹⁵ and be global. Like Marcuse, Samir Amin believes that the key to success lays in ‘the conjunction between the struggles of peoples in the South with those of the peoples in the North’. ¹¹⁶

Given that the Third World people were the most repressed and exploited by the capitalist system, and engaged in an effort to liberate themselves from their masters in the National Liberation Movements, many Marxists at the time, including Marcuse, believed that they were laying the ground for a revolution. In advanced industrial societies, where the majority does not feel the need for liberation, the ‘vital need for change is confined to “the ghetto population” and the “underprivileged sections of the laboring classes.”’ ¹¹⁷ Together with the intelligentsia, these groups form the tiny minority that constitutes the oppositional forces to the system. ¹¹⁸ By contrast, in the Third World, it is entire populations who yearn for and struggle to liberate themselves from ‘the intolerable heritage of colonialism and its prolongation by neo-colonialism’. ¹¹⁹ Those who wage wars of liberation live ‘a frightful existence’ that is ‘in total need of liberation, and their freedom is the contradiction to the overdeveloped societies’, ¹²⁰ whose affluence feeds itself from their exploitation. For Marcuse, the underprivileged of the Global South take upon themselves the armed struggle against the system, ¹²¹ and the National Liberation Movements embody ‘the strongest potential force of radical change’. ¹²² Although their uprising looks more like ‘a slave revolt than a revolution’, the rebels from the Third World countries are ‘more dangerous to societies which are capable of containing or defeating revolutions. For the slaves are everywhere and countless, and they indeed have nothing to lose but their chains’, ¹²³ by contrast with people in the metropoles, who are largely integrated into the system. Marcuse explains that

the threat comes from without-and precisely for this reason it threatens the system as a whole. The threat appears as a total one and those who represent it have not even a potential vested interest in the established societies. […] they simply do not want to be slaves any longer, and they are driven by the vital need to change intolerable conditions- and to do it differently from the old powers. This primitive rebellion, this revolt indeed implies a social program, namely, the awareness that their society cannot be constructed along the line of the have-nations which perpetuate servitude and domination.” ¹²⁴

Similarly, in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon underscores that the colonized wants an entirely ‘changed social panorama’: ‘the necessity of this change exists in the crude state, impetuous and constraining, in the consciousness and life of colonized men and women’. ¹²⁵ ‘Colonial exploitation, misery, and endemic hunger’ inspire in the majority of the population the necessity of a decisive confrontation. ¹²⁶ If this struggle is total, it is because what is at stake in the national liberation struggle, for the colonized, is to become human, because the colonizer has dehumanized him, ¹²⁷ he deprived the colonized of his essence, ¹²⁸ of being, writes Fanon. In the decolonization struggle, the colonized becomes an actor; thus, decolonization is about ‘being’, and it ‘fundamentally modifies being’. ¹²⁹ ‘The colonized thing becomes man in the very process in which it liberates itself’. ¹³⁰ The agency of the colonized and dominated subject inaugurates ‘the possibility of recognition and of revolutionary struggle’. ¹³¹ Thus, the people engaged in wars of national liberation do not recoil before the military arm of capitalism, because it is their humanity, the basic condition of autonomy and self-determination, that is at stake and one can only recover it through decolonizing.

As mentioned, capitalism, for Marcuse, even in its privileged enclaves, is dehumanizing, going as far as manipulating the individuals’ needs and consciousness. For him, rebellions and wars of national liberation in the Third World embody a refusal that entirely negates the global capitalist system in its working, principles and values, and the dehumanization it fosters. It is such a refusal that the Global North would also need to overcome alienation. For Marcuse, ‘[a]ny spectacular victory of the rebellious have-nots in any one place would activate their consciousness and their rebellion in other places-at home as well’. ¹³² At the time, he believed that the Vietnam War could light the revolutionary spark. ¹³³ This war for national liberation is ‘connected with the essence of the system’ for which it is ‘perhaps also a turning point’, ‘perhaps the beginning of the end. For what has been shown here is that the human will and the human body with the poorest weapons can keep in check the most efficient system of destruction of all times’. ¹³⁴ Vietnam has demonstrated that ‘it can be done; there is a morality, a humanity a will, and a faith which can resist and deter the gigantic technical and economical force of capitalist expansion’. ¹³⁵ For Marcuse, the Vietnam War is a struggle against coloniality and the capitalist system that perpetuates it. ¹³⁶

The integration of ever largest parts of the population in the Global North into the capitalist system is an important reason for the absence of a revolutionary will and thus, of a revolutionary subject. ¹³⁷ For Amin, not only revolutionary potential was lacking in the Global North, but the protests merely put forward economic demands that do not call ‘the imperialist system into question’. ¹³⁸ For Marcuse, the fact that the ‘two historical factors of transformation’ do not coincide in advanced industrial societies, namely, the objective one, embodied by the industrial working class, ‘the human source and reservoir of exploitation’, and the subjective factor, the political consciousness, which one finds among the ‘non-conformist intelligentsia’, ¹³⁹ is decisive. By contrast, the two objective factors of revolution coincide in the Third World, ‘where the National Liberation Fronts and the guerillas fight with the support and participation of the class which is the base of the process of production, namely, the predominant agrarian and the emerging industrial proletariat’. ¹⁴⁰ It is only in such contexts, where the proletariat is still the ‘human basis of the social process of production’, and ‘carries the weight of exploitation and oppression’, usually the ‘agrarian proletariat’, that the proletariat can be an agent of change again. ¹⁴¹ Fanon similarly observes that ‘in colonial countries, only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to win’. ¹⁴²

Given that the causes of overdevelopment and underdevelopment are both rooted in the capitalist system and its global space of exploitation and repression, Marcuse sketches a common way out of the predicament faced by the Global South and the Global North. In the developing world, the challenge is to overcome scarcity, a scarcity largely resulting from colonialism and formal imperialism, and perpetuated by informal structures of power and mechanisms of control, in short, by coloniality. In the Global North, by contrast, the problem is repressive productivity and affluence. There, a revolution would mean the ‘elimination of overdevelopment, and of its repressive rationality’, ¹⁴³ which, as mentioned, is also an outcome of coloniality because it relies on the exploitation of the Global South. Thus, in developing countries, ‘quantitative change – that is to say, the creation of human living conditions – is in itself qualitative change’. ¹⁴⁴ Nonetheless, indicates Marcuse, ‘it is not yet freedom’. ¹⁴⁵ Freedom is ‘self-determination, autonomy’, ‘the ability to determine one’s own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do, what to suffer and what not’. ¹⁴⁶ As in advanced industrial societies, developing societies cannot avoid the issue of the ‘quality’ of development, namely, its direction and nature.

For Marcuse, developing countries are presented with an opportunity to orient technological development toward liberation. The first reason is that they ‘enter upon the process of industrialization with a population untrained in the values of self-propelling productivity, efficiency, and technological rationality’. ¹⁴⁷ Also the vast majority of their populations ‘has not yet been transformed into a labor force separated from the means of production’, ¹⁴⁸ thus, subjected to alienated labor. If developing countries embarked on a non-capitalist industrialization eschewing ‘the repressive exploitative industrialization of early capitalism’, ¹⁴⁹ they could develop the production apparatus based on different values and nonrepressive needs. ¹⁵⁰ Maybe they could ‘ski[p] the stage of the affluent society’. ¹⁵¹ The populations of the Global South,

by their poverty and weakness may be forced to forego the aggressive and wasteful use of science and technology, to keep the productive apparatus à la mesure de l’homme, under his control, for the satisfaction of vital and collective needs.

For the overdeveloped countries, this chance would be tantamount to the abolition of the conditions under which man’s labor perpetuates, as self-propelling power, his subordination to the productive apparatus, and with it, the obsolete forms of the struggle for existence. ¹⁵²

Such a transformation is the first step of liberation, thus, of revolution.

Liberation entails ‘cutting the link’ of the capitalist system. ¹⁵³ Cutting the link means ‘to reconstruct the technical apparatus’, turned into an instrument of control and domination over the individuals, ¹⁵⁴ ‘in accordance with the needs of free men, guided by their own consciousness and sensibility, by their autonomy’, ¹⁵⁵ writes Marcuse. In a free society, ‘free individuals’ ‘determine the products of their labor’. ¹⁵⁶ These guidelines also apply to developing societies. Decolonizing requires ‘delinking’, which, beyond ending economic exploitation, means ‘re-existing’, according to Mignolo. ¹⁵⁷ Delinking would liberate people in the Global South from misery, and the populations in the Global North from the alienation bred by the affluent society, to the extent that it is also rooted in coloniality. This requires creating a society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiate self-determination, ¹⁵⁸ and ‘freed from the repressive requirements of a struggle for existence in the interest of domination’. ¹⁵⁹ Individuals who are free in this sense can also choose their government, ¹⁶⁰ linking autonomy and self-determination. The destiny of this project in the Global South will be considered in the next section.

Marcuse also saw in Global South countries the outline of an alternative model of society that could overcome the capitalist system. ¹⁶¹ Since repression, exploitation and alienation are rooted in capitalism, freedom, autonomy and self-determination involve the building of socialism, which was attractive in many newly independent countries at the time. Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon, among others, both championed a form of socialism. Fanon writes: ‘We know, of course, that the capitalist system cannot, as a way of life, enable us to carry out our national and universal task. Capitalist exploitation, trusts and monopolies are the enemies of the underdeveloped countries’. ¹⁶² But such socialism would be very different from the authoritarian state socialism that prevailed in the communist countries of the time, and which Marcuse submitted to thorough critique, because he did not see in this socialism the ‘determinate negation of capitalism’, ¹⁶³ instead a variant of capitalism. For Marcuse, one finds in the Global South countries the seeds of such a socialism built from ‘a new below’, by people ‘not integrated into the value system of the old societies – a socialism of co-operation and solidarity, where men and women determine collectively their needs and goals, their priorities, and the method and pace of “modernization.”’ ¹⁶⁴ This socialism would involve ‘the suppression of labor, the autonomy of the needs and their satisfaction, and liberation from the struggle for existence’. ¹⁶⁵ Here, Marcuse refers to the alienated labor which is at the basis of the capitalist system. ‘Non-alienated labor’, which is the ‘determinate negation of the alienated labor at the basis of capitalism’, ¹⁶⁶ should be the basis of the reproduction of society. ¹⁶⁷ Marcuse contemplates the socialist alternative as an inverted picture of the advanced industrial societies: it sketches a path of development valid for overdeveloped and underdeveloped alike. Nowhere else than in the Third World Marcuse saw an outline of this radical alternative: the people at the forefront of the May and June 1968 movements in the Global North have only raised this ‘specter’, ¹⁶⁸ without much effect. Despite his enthusiasm toward the revolutionary ferment in the Global South, Marcuse was rather pessimistic regarding the chances of success of a revolution there. ¹⁶⁹

Marcuse believes that the revolutionary force that could overthrow capitalism can be expected only from a ‘confluence of forces of change in the centers of advanced capitalism with those of the Third World’. ¹⁷⁰ Nonetheless, he concludes that a successful revolution would start in the Global North. The reason is that the centers of capitalism, from which neocolonial and neoimperial relations are generated, lie in the Global North. ‘The capitalist chain must be broken, not at its weakest link but at its strongest link’. ¹⁷¹ Since the global system is hierarchically organized, a ‘radical change in the imperialist metropole’ would have effects ‘on a global scale’, releasing the economic and political yoke of the wealthiest countries on the poorest ones, thus opening the way to political, social and economic independent development. ¹⁷² Also, a revolution in the Global North would provoke the collapse of the lackey regimes in the Third World, ¹⁷³ which are agents of neocolonialism. Thus, ‘emphasis must be on the advanced industrial society […] [for] the potential weakening and disintegration of the imperialist world system’ ¹⁷⁴ because it is there that ‘the will and power of colonialism must be broken’. ¹⁷⁵ However, in the concrete conditions of the time, this was a dead-end: while a successful revolution can only originate in the Global North, from which coloniality is produced, revolutionary political consciousness was lacking.

This section has shown that Marcuse developed a global outlook on the issues of alienation, liberation and revolution. The problem of development, which calls for revolution, pervades the capitalist system through and through, and pertains to overdeveloped no less than to underdeveloped societies, which are all entrapped into the capitalist logic. Both are ensnared (Allen, 2017; Amin, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Ashcroft et al., 2007; De Lissovoy and Bailón, 2019; Fanon, 2002; Fuchs, 2016; Grollios, 2017; Ingram, 2018; Kellner, 2005; Kellner and Pierce, 2014; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Marcuse, 1958, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1969a, 1969b, 1972, 1998, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d, 2007, 2009, 2014; Matustik, 2017; McArthur, 2021; Mignolo, 2010, 2017; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Nash, 2003; Nkrumah, 1965; Quijano, 2000; Stoetzler, 2018; Varadharajan, 2018) into coloniality: the societies of the Global South remain prey to colonial- and imperial-style exploitation, an exploitation which stands behind the affluent society, and thus, the alienation of populations in the Global North. An essential step to overcoming repression, domination and alienation for all human beings is orienting production toward the universal satisfaction of their real needs, and according to their aspirations. However, as the next section will explain, coloniality stands in the way, especially around the issues of development, modernity and violence.

Why decolonization was not entirely successful

Autonomy, self-determination and freedom, which are conditions of authentic human, economic, political and social development, entail cutting the link of the capitalist system, as mentioned. At the practical level, this requires a ‘revolution which makes technology and technique subservient’ to the needs of free individuals ¹⁷⁶ rather than to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. But modernity dragged most countries of the Global South on a heteronomous path of development.

At the time of decolonizations, the development of Global South countries had to mimic the one followed by advanced industrial countries, which was shaped by Western (and Soviet) modernity. Marcuse denounces this orientation:

indigenous progress would demand a planned policy which, instead of superimposing technology on the traditional modes of life and labor, would extend and improve them on their own grounds, eliminating the oppressive and exploitative forces (material and religious) which would make them incapable of assuring the development of a human existence. Social revolution, agrarian reform and reduction of over-population would be prerequisites, but not industrialization after the pattern of the advanced societies.” ¹⁷⁷

Nkrumah’s position on Africa echoes Marcuse’s: ‘the African continent’ ‘cannot hope to industrialize effectively in the haphazard, laisser-faire manner of Europe’. ¹⁷⁸ There were two major impediments: the time factor and, for this champion of African unity, the need for ‘cohesive and integrated planning’ and the mobilization of resources at the scale of the continent, ¹⁷⁹ namely, autonomous planning.

Fanon also warns against attempts at reproducing the European path of development, observing that it was also attractive among elites in developing countries. For Fanon, this is not the proper way to posit the issue of development. ¹⁸⁰ The conditions prevailing in Europe at the onset of industrialization, for instance, prosperity, a dynamic and enterprising bourgeoisie who controlled most of the riches, and the resources to develop the needed infrastructures and to educate specialists, are lacking in decolonizing countries. In the Global South, there were mainly masses struggling against misery and hunger. ¹⁸¹ But Fanon had an even more compelling argument for refusing to follow the path of advanced industrial societies. He reminds us that ‘European opulence was built on the backs of slaves’, ‘with the sweat and corpses’ of non-white peoples. ¹⁸² Unarguably, the Global South populations cannot replicate this trajectory and cannot wish such a repetition. Fanon insists that

The Third World must not content itself with defining itself in relation to the values that preceded it. The underdeveloped countries, on the contrary, must endeavor to bring to light their own values, methods, a style which are specific to them. ¹⁸³

Fanon’s position meets Marcuse’s, who also underscores that it is the peoples themselves who must set the parameters and pace of modernization, ¹⁸⁴ based on their own values and needs. In order for technology to be liberating for human beings, it has to be reconstructed in accord with ‘the demands of life instincts’, ¹⁸⁵ writes Marcuse, a requirement for which the modernization ideology has few regards.

A material reason why most countries of the Global South failed to embark on the road to sustainable development was reliance on external funding. Developing countries had to industrialize very fast in their effort to meet the numerous and urgent needs of their populations, ¹⁸⁶ as Marcuse points out. The universal satisfaction of needs, once again, is an underlying condition of freedom, and it is connected to the material and intellectual resources available. ¹⁸⁷ However, as a consequence of colonialism and imperialism, newly independent countries lack capital so that ‘the social capital required for primary accumulation must be obtained largely from without’. ¹⁸⁸ Marcuse thus rightly suggests that this dependence shapes the direction and nature of development. For Nkrumah, who regards the whole development aid mechanisms as neocolonial, ¹⁸⁹ ‘foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world’. ¹⁹⁰ ‘Something in the nature of an economic revolution is required. Our development has been held back for too long by the colonial type economy’. ¹⁹¹ Production and commerce, by continuing to work along the lines of colonialism, are shaped by coloniality.

Fanon explains the mechanisms of this continuous dependence. Former colonial power ‘keeps intact, and sometimes, reinforces, colonial type commercial circuits’. ¹⁹² Since the production and exports of colonies were determined by the colonizer, the newly independent countries could hardly avoid maintaining the economic circuits set up by the colonial regime. ¹⁹³ Marcuse acknowledges this situation when pointing out that successful revolts in the Third World would endanger the world market only if these peoples ‘reached real independence’, ¹⁹⁴ namely, if they delink from capitalist centers. Fanon and Nkrumah share his intuition that it is not a mere increase in production that will triumph over poverty, but its redirection. ¹⁹⁵ Marcuse also acknowledges the endurance of exploitative international division of labor, besides exploitative productive and investment relations. ‘[T]he growth of anti-capitalist forces in the Third World’, namely, of revolts, ‘reduces the reservoir of exploitation’, ¹⁹⁶ and may shrink ‘the capitalist hinterland to a dangerously suffocating area’, also causing the expropriation of foreign investments. ¹⁹⁷ Efforts to conjure these threats prompt the use of military might. Thus, the objective advantages that Marcuse attributes to the development of countries of the Global South, namely, the possibility of a non-capitalist development based on non-alienated labor and skipping the stage of the affluent society, in these circumstances, were not conducive to autonomy and self-sufficiency. ¹⁹⁸ The economic dependence created by colonialism, which is only an aspect of coloniality, endured, playing a large part in this failure.

‘[S]uperimposed development’ also repels the development of democratic governance. ¹⁹⁹ In the Global North, liberalism developed hand in hand with industrialization since the late eighteenth century, and democratic governance, especially from the late 1940s, grew in tandem with the affluent society, culminating in the welfare state. However, in the Global South, development imposed from outside, warns Marcuse, will create the conditions of ‘a period of total administration more violent and more rigid than that traversed by the advanced societies which can build on the achievements of the liberalistic era’. ²⁰⁰ Indeed, after experiencing the violence of foreign rule, the local bourgeoisie in newly independent countries, a bourgeoisie that could enrich itself due to its complicity with the colonial authorities, imposes authoritarian governance to secure its interests and those of neocolonial actors, a situation Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. ²⁰¹ The political authoritarianism resulting from dependent economic development, on which Marcuse drags our attention, is also an outcome of coloniality. Violence and war are other features.

The violence inherent to the capitalist system, which is needed to secure accumulation, is hidden in advanced industrial societies. However, it deploys itself in the open in the Third World. Marcuse and Nkrumah both observe that the Western welfare society is also a warfare society, ²⁰² which goes hand in hand with war abroad. ²⁰³ The affluent society repels violence at the margins: democratic governance at home, the satisfaction of manipulated needs and participation in the consumer society run parallel to violence, terror and war in the peripheries, ²⁰⁴ observes Marcuse. In advanced industrial societies, the artificially perpetuated struggle for existence absorbs part, but not all this aggressiveness and violence, ²⁰⁵ as mentioned. The surplus stands behind the militarization of the affluent society: ²⁰⁶ this aggressiveness and violence is directed toward an enemy, ²⁰⁷ often against an inner and an outer enemy. The Afro-Americans in the United States and the Vietnam War are examples. ²⁰⁸ War is a fundamental aspect of coloniality, ²⁰⁹ as Maldonado-Torres underscores and, besides killing or enslaving, it encompasses a wide range of violent acts directed toward non-white people. ²¹⁰

For Marcuse, the underprivileged inside the metropoles, who are often non-white people, and those outside the metropoles, on whose backs the affluent society developed, are all victims of the surplus of aggressiveness and violence generated by this society. The underprivileged in the Global North, ‘[t]hose whose life is the hell of the Affluent society are kept in line by brutality which revives medieval and early modern practices’. ²¹¹ As to the Global South, Marcuse writes, alluding to the Vietnam War, that ‘[t]orture has been reintroduced as a normal affair, but in a colonial war that takes place at the margin of the civilized world’, which only ravages the ‘underdeveloped’ countries. ‘Otherwise, peace reigns’. ²¹² Violence against and murder of racialized persons in the Global North and war against non-white peoples in the Global South are comparable, and Marcuse often connects them. ²¹³ For instance, he associates massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan, on the one hand, and the violence against racial minorities in the Global North, and the murders of famous militants like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, on the other hand. ²¹⁴ By bringing to attention the racial basis of violence and war generated by the capitalist system, Marcuse’s work enlightens a fundamental aspect of coloniality.

Let us mention that like Frantz Fanon, Marcuse distinguishes the ‘violence of liberation’, intended to defend ‘life’, from the ‘violence of suppression’ deployed by the oppressor. ²¹⁵ Such violence is essential to free oneself from colonization, which was violent in its essence, ²¹⁶ and from a colonial regime that derived its legitimacy from force. ²¹⁷ The violence of liberation, for Marcuse, is exemplified by National Liberation movements and the ‘ghetto rebellions’, which both feed the crisis of the system. ²¹⁸ The Vietnam War was a war of liberation initiated by a local revolutionary movement. ²¹⁹ Thus, this violence of liberation is common to all non-white peoples’ efforts to break the continuum of repression, and it is legitimate. What prompted armed interventions in the Third World, according to Marcuse, was not the threat of communism as such, ²²⁰ but instead ‘the real spectre of liberation’, which was the true ‘Enemy’. ²²¹ In short, the wars for national liberation and the ‘ghetto rebellions’ are both waged to break the spell of coloniality.

This section exposed many factors that prevented the Global South from decolonizing. The populations of developing countries, despite promising ‘objective’ conditions, could not embark on industrialization and economic development on their own terms, according to their needs and aspirations. They were entrapped in dependent development, under the combined effect of the modernization ideology and the maintenance of former commercial patterns. This economic situation also fosters coloniality in the political sphere, which could hardly get rid of the violence of the colonial era, perpetuated through the authoritarianism of many postcolonial regimes eager to preserve neocolonial relations to their own advantage. Violence and war, which Marcuse regards as inherent to the capitalist system, and as often deployed on a racial basis in the Global North and the Global South alike, is a feature of coloniality. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse writes that the prospect that peoples from the Global South crafted a development path of their own, based on self-determination and self-management, will be repelled as long as the superpowers of the time do not abandon ‘neo-colonialism in all its forms’. ²²² The next section will explain the reasons for the failure of Marcuse’s global revolution and show that his insights can be expanded beyond the immediate context of his writings to understand how and why coloniality endures in the postcolonial era.

The demise of revolution and the persistence of coloniality

Let us start with the situation in the Global South. For Marcuse, the development of anti-capitalist forces in the Third World was essential to the revolution. These forces would reduce ‘the reservoir of exploitation’, ²²³ whose expansion at home and abroad was essential to monopoly capitalism. ²²⁴ Amin agrees with Marcuse on this point and explains the consequences of this failure.

[T]he leaders of these movements had not properly assessed the necessity of combining the objectives of national liberation with a break in the logic of capitalism. Instead, these movements fostered the myth of “catching up” with the centres by capitalist means within globalized capitalism in the aim of building national capitalisms developed along the same lines as those found in the centres. Consequently, the changes that could have been achieved by […] ‘national popular governments’ were in reality quite limited, and their rapid exhaustion soon collapsed into chaos. ²²⁵

Neglecting the struggle against capitalism in the fight for national independence led to dependent economic development. Thus, capitalism, which is an essential pillar of coloniality, did not face the challenge ‘from the outside’ which, according to Marcuse, could have had deadly consequences for the system.

For Marcuse, the United States’ collapse would have been key in liberating Third World countries from neocolonial domination. ²²⁶ Afterward, the governments of the liberation movements would have taken the lead, and ‘induc[e] long and overdue radical social and economic changes’. ²²⁷ This did not happen: the United States remained ‘the protector of capital as a whole’, ²²⁸ underscores Marcuse, based on its military machine. Samir Amin explains this resilience by the emergence, in this period, of the ‘imperialism of the triad’, which brings together the United States, Europe and Japan. The triad reorganized the capitalist system in crisis on new bases at the global scale to secure accumulation. The law of globalized value, which presides over global economic processes, ²²⁹ perpetuates global inequalities and the exploitation of the Global South, thus, coloniality. Within the new structure secured by the triad, the benefits expected from the industrialization of the Global South were washed out in most of these countries: their industries became ‘subaltern’. ²³⁰

From the 1980s especially, developing countries, as they faced the huge debt crisis that reinforced their subordination to Western great powers and agencies, were included in the space of globalization. As the official decolonization phase ended, globalization took the relay of more direct forms of economic exploitation. ²³¹ While globalization is often understood as an ideology-free concept describing the economic processes connecting all regions of the world into a unified economic space, many theoreticians use the word globalization as a substitute for imperialism to describe the worldwide spreading of the capitalist mode of production ²³² and the global inequalities it perpetuates. It is this critical conception that is anticipated in Marcuse’s work, which acknowledges the world asymmetries secured through production and commerce as a continuation of colonial and imperial-type relations.

Postcolonial/decolonial scholars observe that globalization ‘originate[s] in and continue[s] to be perpetuated from the centers of capitalist powers’, ²³³ ‘perpetuat[ing] poverty, widen[ing] material inequalities’ worldwide, and ‘sustain[ing] militarism’. ²³⁴ Globalization preserves the colonial/imperial pattern of extractivism, trade and exploitative labor. The extension of ‘really-existing capitalism’ feeds ‘polarization on a world scale’ and in the Global South, it produces ‘pauperization’, writes Amin. ²³⁵ If some developing countries host industrial hubs, globalization prevents most of them from finding a way out of superimposed development, ²³⁶ and from delinking ²³⁷ from the capitalist system. Their exploitation and alienation in the world system go on, breeding dependent development, and pauperization ²³⁸ within globalization. As Marcuse writes in ‘Repressive Tolerance’, the ‘liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters’, ²³⁹ who, today, are agencies like IMF and the World Bank, lending countries and multinational companies. Also, far from being a purely economic phenomenon, globalization invades all domains of social life, ²⁴⁰ just like colonialism and imperialism. For Quijano, globalization is nothing but the ‘culmination’ of coloniality: ²⁴¹ it ‘cannot be separated from the structures of power perpetuated by European colonialism’. ²⁴² Globalization was a powerful factor in dragging the Global South firmly within the one-dimensional society created by affluent countries in the West. Instead of embodying a menace, a negative factor threatening the capitalist system, like at the time of National Liberation movements, the Global South was integrated into the global economic space, thus flattening the contradictions.

Regarding the Global North, Marcuse observed the first manifestations of the structural crisis of capitalism that set in the 1970s. This crisis, however, did not bring capitalism to its collapse. Marcuse wrote in 1972:

[The] restabilization of capitalism and imperialism which began after the Second World War, has not yet come to an end-in spite of Indochina, in spite of inflation, the international monetary crisis, and rising unemployment in the United States. The system is still capable of “managing,” by virtue of its economic and military power, the aggravating conflicts within and outside its dominion. It is precisely the unprecedented capacity of 20th-century capitalism […]. ²⁴³

For him, capitalism in the age of monopoly capitalism is especially resilient. The structural crisis of capitalism, which Samir Amin analyzed in his work, ²⁴⁴ and which is ongoing, has lifted the veil of the affluent society and the welfare state from the beginning. In ‘The Movement in a New Era of Repression’, Marcuse observes that the beneficiaries of the affluent society have steadily decreased in numbers, as the contradictions of the capitalist system intensified. ²⁴⁵ This trend reinforced itself: from the onset of the neoliberal era, in the early 1980s, the ‘goods were delivered’ to steadily decreasing numbers of people, thus weakening the material base of capitalist domination in the Global North, while the production apparatus was not ‘stripped of its exploitative features’. ²⁴⁶

However, the capitalist cultural system on which the affluent society was based was not only maintained but reinforced itself over time, becoming one of the strongest foundations of the capitalist system in the Global North. According to Marcuse, the ‘absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and think, to know himself and his society’. ²⁴⁷ Such absence could ‘begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve-the disintegration of the system’. ²⁴⁸ Instead, the development and spreading of computers, the Internet and social media provided immediate and permanent access to people’s minds, shaping their thoughts, feelings and instincts even more effectively. Marcuse acknowledged the liberating potential of the computer, which could socialize the means of production and communication, but also its capacity to be an instrument of control, exploitation and domination. ²⁴⁹ The second, capitalist application prevailed, putting the computer to the service of warfare, ‘surveillance, advertising’s manipulation of needs, the creation of unemployment and new forms of precarious labour’. ²⁵⁰ Similarly, capitalist social media are ‘means of advertising and commodification and spaces of ideology’, instruments that ‘ai[m] at instilling the belief in the system of capital and commodities into human subjectivity’. ²⁵¹ Also, in the passage from the welfare society to the neoliberal society, ‘the individuals’ whole being [was] integrated within the instrumental rationality of capitalist systems of domination and control, in which pleasures become intensified into forms of domination, such as addictive consumer sprees or obsession with media, sports or other leisure activities’. ²⁵²

Thus, the one-dimensional pattern of thought that prevented the emergence of a revolutionary subject, was reinforced, driving away the possibility that a revolution would break out at capitalism’s ‘strongest link’, which Marcuse deemed necessary to the global revolution. As long as people in the most affluent countries of the world will regard freedom as the possibility to choose between superfluous goods, services and media contents, like in Marcuse’s time, they will not feel the need for liberation.

Conclusion

In sum, Marcuse’s work makes an important contribution to postcolonial/decolonial theory. It shows that the capitalist system created an asymmetrical global space that secured the continued exploitation of formerly colonized countries. Like Mignolo, Marcuse regards modernity as the other side of coloniality, with capitalist-oriented scientific and technological development securing such exploitation. Also, in line with postcolonial/decolonial theoreticians, Marcuse singles out race and violence as central features of capitalist domination. He shows that the underprivileged in the Global North and peoples in developing countries subjected to racial violence are both under the yoke of coloniality.

A major aspect on which Marcuse departs from today’s postcolonial/decolonial thinkers is by pointing to revolution as the way out of coloniality. Revolutionary solutions are not popular at a time when ‘authoritarian democracy’, neoliberalism and cultural conservatism predominate. Marcuse’s hope for a revolution in the Global South had a strong echo in his time, but his conviction that the revolution had to be global set him apart from thinkers connected with ‘Third Worldism’. ²⁵³ The call for the global revolution dragged him more firmly on the ground of Marxism, with figures like Luxemburg and Lenin. Also, since the main object of his critical theory of society was the advanced industrial societies, Marcuse developed a broad analysis of the conditions that foster or block radical social change that are still relevant today.

Since the capitalist system, despite successive major crises up to this day and ever-deepening contradictions, endures, the structure of domination it created, which perpetuates coloniality, also persists. Marcuse, together with postcolonial/decolonial theoreticians, has shown the organic connection between colonialism and capitalism. For Marcuse, the only way out of coloniality was radical social change, or revolution. His prognosis that ‘liberation is the most realistic, the most concrete and at the same time the most rationally and effectively repressed-the most abstract and remote possibility’, ²⁵⁴ remains true. The way out of coloniality may be as long as the exit from capitalism.