DIALOGUE AND ISODEMOCRACY: CREATING THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF GOOD TALK

I don’t know why, but a few months ago I found myself reading Herbert Marcuse, the “improbable guru” of the Sixties, as Fortune, the popular U.S. business magazine, labeled him at the time. Fortune found him improbable on two counts. First, his age: Marcuse in the Sixties was himself in his sixties, leading the decade of those in their twenties who said they trusted no one in their thirties or above – except Marcuse and his paradigm-shattering One Dimensional Man. Second, his philosophy: a magazine like Fortune could hardly be expected, though, to approve of a writer who penned passages like the following (Marcuse, 1964, p. 9): We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality.Or this one (Marcuse, 1964, p. 3): By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.Or this (Marcuse, 1972, p. 131): The fetishism of the commodity world, which seems to become denser every day, can be destroyed only by men and women who have torn aside the technological and ideological veil which conceals what is going on, which covers the insane rationality of the whole – men and women who have become free to develop their own needs, to build, in solidarity, their own world.Ripping good lines, steaming with the same liquid fire, as I once heard it described, with which Marx himself often wrote. But the Sixties have come and gone, quaintly registered now only in the gray hair of its dark-suited former activists, dressed for consensus about what they take to be the actual nature of human satisfaction: the fortunes of capitalism. It is, of course, in the nature of the true guru to be improbable, right?