Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa

Recommendable! Of course, Herbert Marcuse was not the only philosopher of the so called Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research.

Herbert Marcuse is one of those primitive and shallow philosophers like e.g. Karl Marx, who tried to explain the world by painting only in black and white. Society, according to Marcuse, can neatly be divided in oppressed and oppressors. Enforced strict equality among humans is the sole solution! What a dangerous fanatic!

Marcuse is also one of the proponents of the so called Critical Theory, although his contributions may only be minor.

One may also detect a weird, naive, and distorted form of pacifism in Marcuse's writings!

Here are some excerpts of Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance:

1. "The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed."
2. "The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives."
3. "Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society."
4. "This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested."
5. "To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude."
6. "Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced. Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria: its range and its limits cannot be defined in terms of the respective society. In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims. And such universal tolerance is possible only when no real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and training of people in military violence and destruction. As long as these conditions do not prevail, the conditions of tolerance are 'loaded': they are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society. In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their 'connections'."

"... This [Critical Theory] might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.” ... Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful."

Meet the Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa - Foundation for Economic Education His work is considered to be the root of neo-Marxism, which is a backward philosophy that is manifesting itself in backward ways.