Marcuse: Freud & Marx

The marriage of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) may appear impossible at first glance. Marx focuses on the external world (material conditions, history), while Freud focuses on the internal (psyche, upbringing). Beyond that simple difference, hundreds of incompatibilities should lead us to believe that these two are impossible to bring together into a single philosophical framework. However, despite this seeming impossibility, an enduring philosophical tradition has been harmoniously doing just that for more then a hundred years. Simply put: how?

Perhaps the most famous work on the topic is Eros and Civilization (1955) by Herbert Marcuse (1898 — 1979). In this work, Marcuse elegantly connects both thinkers as homogeneously as any two thinkers could be connected. This article will not be a close reading of the book but a quick overview of the problem and how Marcuse goes about answering us.

Why it Seems Impossible

In an interview with Bryan Magee, Herbert Marcuse was questioned on how exactly he married the ideas of Freud with those of Marx in his own work given their seemingly opposite positions on fundamental issues.

Marx, Magee says, explains culture and human behavior as something that simply follows from a given society’s level of economic and material development. In other words, Marx believes that culture does not drive material development, but rather that culture follows from material conditions (economic, geographic, demographic, etc.).

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology

On the other hand, Freud, Magee says, explains culture and human behavior as being externalizations of “the repressed contents of the unconscious.” In other words, Freud says that culture is nothing but the organized sublimation of collective repressions.

In many of his works, though succinctly in works like The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Freud says that culture is a sort of mutually sustained field of sublimations. Our primitive drives are regulated and processed through this field of values and customs — we are being animals in the attire of mutually recognized civility.

It aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which strong identifications can be established between the members of the community, and it summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bond by relations of friendship.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

Though historical and material conditions may alter the style of this field, the blueprints are internal to man. In Freud, the external is molded by the internal, whereas in Marx, the internal is molded by the external.

One may reply that repressions are caused by the material circumstances of society, but Freud believes that society will repress the psyche’s ready-made drives — it will not invent repressions not already contained in the psyche. The psyche is repressed, but repressions are not made by society.

Religion, labor, violence, etc. can all be traced to some inner psychic structure lashing out within culture. Put more simply, Freud does not believe material conditions shape culture, but merely affect the psyche’s ability to exert itself; the shape of culture is already set by the psyche, and conditions can only interfere with it. Culture is shaped after the psyche.

This in itself would seem a big enough rift between Marx and Freud to prevent their marriage, but we are not done. On top of what we have already said, Freud was quite clear in Civilization and its Discontent that he did not stand with Marx on the of abolishment of private property.

In abolishing private property […] we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontent

With this, it might seem impossible or even ill-advised to try and reconcile the two thought systems under a single paradigm. Both are concerned with completely different domains of inquiry, and each insists on their own domain as having the answer to the true causes behind human affairs. When asked the same question, one answers “white”, the other “black”.

How then can these two thinkers possibly be married?

Why it is actually Possible

Too keep this article concise, I will simply summarize part of the main point he makes in Eros and Civilization.

A basic version of his argument goes as follows:

1. Marx describes capitalism as an intermediate state that will naturally and necessarily sublate, evolve, and resolve in communism. One way to understand communism is as “what will be born out of capitalism’s inborn historical trajectory”. Capitalism is a negation, and communism is the negation of capitalism — the synthesis of its inner contradictions. Instead of understanding capitalism as a societal model, it should be understood as a moment — a temporary step — in a historical trajectory.
2. Freud says that the reality principle (which is the drive that enables us to resist our incontinent desire for immediate gratification) is only there to help the subject later attain a better pleasure than could be afforded by the immediate pursuits of the pleasure principle. By delaying gratification, we can put in work to later secure greater pleasures.
3. Marcuse thinks these two ideas can easily be brought together. Capitalism, he says, can be understood as a temporary step of ever-increasing repression, all with the goal of latter securing greater prosperity than could be afforded by pre-capitalist communities. Through the increase of tensions, we will realize a historical project
   that enables us to cancel out, neutralize, and eliminate those very same tensions. Capitalism, then, is the historical embodiment of the reality principle. Marcuse thinks of Marx as merely describing the socio-historical realization of Freud’s psyche.

the performance principle has perhaps created the preconditions for a qualitatively different, non-repressive reality principle. […] the very progress of civilization under the performance principle has attained a level of productivity at which the social demands upon instinctual energy to be spent in alienated labor could be considerably reduced.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

For Marcuse, it is not very difficult to marry a theory on the economic oppression of one class by another with a theory of the psychic subject, especially when Freud discussed this at length in three of his major works.

the pleasure-principle is not thereby annulled. On the contrary, the transformation takes place in the service of the pleasure-principle; the binding is an act of preparation, which introduces and secures its sovereignty
— Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

If we turn to those restrictions that apply only to certain classes of society, we meet with a state of things which is flagrant and which has always been recognized. It is to be expected that these underprivileged classes will envy the favoured ones their privileges and will do all they can to free themselves from their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible, a permanent measure of discontent will persist within the culture concerned and this can lead to dangerous revolts.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction […] we ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

The limits put on libido are necessary for the eventual attainment of prosperity, but we must treat these repressions as temporary.

Marcuse projects Marx’s idea of class structure through the lens of Freud.
He conceives of every human as a libidinal subject and history as the realization of the libidinal project of every human.

Liberated from the pressure of painful purposes and performances necessitated by want, man will be restored into the “freedom to be what he ought to be.”
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

Though Marx and Freud disagree on a number of things, their theoretical frameworks can be used together. If we understand civilization as being a libidinal project, then it becomes fairly simple.

1. (CULTURE): Marcuse agrees with Freud on the primacy of the psyche in the origin of culture. However, this does not invalidate Marx’s crucial insight into the effect material conditions have on the resulting culture of a society. Culture is the product of a society’s material limitations imposed on its libidinal subjects.
2. (PRIVATE PROPERTY): Freud is right that a system of private property did not invent aggression, that it channels it. Marcuse’s solution shows how cultural is brought about by the interplay between psyche and the material conditions of society: primitive economic conditions leave people libidinally unsatisfied, forcing them to seek out gratification through primitive means. The goal of the reality principle is to develop a level of prosperity that will satisfy these libidinal needs such that we no longer have to rely on primitive means like private property to let off our libidinal steam. Until the libidinal needs of the population are sufficiently sublimated, private property will naturally emerge.