Marcuse’s critique of technology today

Marcuse was the face of the Frankfurt School during the 1960s and '70s. His eclipse led, among other unfortunate consequences, to the disappearance of his critique of science and technology. That critique is based on an experiential ontology that derives in part from Marcuse’s background in phenomenology. In this paper I trace the roots of that ontology in his early interpretation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. One-Dimensional Man takes up the phenomenological critique in a Marxist vein. This critique is newly relevant now that we face impending environmental catastrophe due to climate change. Thus the study of Marcuse today is not simply academic, but once again politically significant.


Marcuse's Paradoxical Role
Marcuse was the face of the Frankfurt School during the 1960s and '70s. His reputation rose and fell along with the New Left he championed. Today he is often overlooked in discussions of Critical Theory. His eclipse led, among other unfortunate consequences, to the disappearance of his critique of science and technology. In fact, he was the only member of the Frankfurt School to pursue a radical critique of instrumental reason beyond its early beginnings in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1 This critique is newly relevant now that we face impending environmental catastrophe due to climate change. Thus the study of Marcuse today is not simply academic, but once again politically significant. In this paper, I will discuss his concept of nature as it relates to his critique of science and technology, and argue that his work contains valuable resources for contemporary struggles.
But before entering into this aspect of his later thought, I should say something about Marcuse's development after World War II. His early work is addressed to scholars like himself, but something happened in the 1950s that led him to produce works with much more obvious political relevance. In 1955 he published Eros and Civilization, a utopian argument for a radically different form of social life. Then in 1964 he published One-Dimensional Man which projected a pessimistic view of advanced capitalist society. It is as though he had moved from utopia to dystopia in the course of the decade.
These books appeared originally as philosophical essays, but the New Left and the counterculture made them best sellers all over the world. Sales of One-Dimensional Man reached the hundreds of thousands. By the late 1960s Marcuse had become a celebrity. As one of the key theoreticians of the New Left, he was a major figure in the political controversies of the time and spoke at rallies in the United States and Europe.
In this role Marcuse confronted the crisis of Marxism. The Soviet Union had betrayed the socialist promise of liberation. Regulation and the new technologies had made capitalism acceptable to the working class of advanced capitalism. The mass media and consumerism seemed to have solved what Marx called 'the riddle of history'.
Marcuse accepted these facts which most Marxists still refused to credit. The dystopian prospects envisaged in One-Dimensional Man canceled all the old determinist versions of Marxism. The potential for socialism was there in the rich societies created by advanced capitalism, but consciousness was so successfully controlled that few desired revolutionary change. Marcuse emphasized the new role of technology which no longer acted simply as means of production, but had become an ideological resource for capitalism.
Paradoxically, this pessimistic vision evoked resistance and struggle. By 1968 Marcuse's 1964 dystopianism was distinctly out of date, yet the threat of dystopia continued to motivate the new left and his books were ever more popular. This was the moment when new forms of resistance emerged; the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, all testified to the limits of the system. And today the movement to protect the climate continues the struggle in the domain of technology.

Interpreting Marx's Manuscripts
Nature is once more on the agenda, as it was for Marx in 1844. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were Marx's first significant attempt to develop a theory of capitalism. Unfinished and fragmentary, they remained among the documents that ended up in the archives of the Soviet Union after the Revolution. When they were finally published in 1932, they had a major impact because they revealed a Marx much more concerned with normative questions than in his later work. Marcuse wrote one of the first interpretations of the Manuscripts, also in 1932. His interpretation was deeply influenced by his background in the thought of Husserl and Heidegger.
In the Manuscripts Marx rejects the idealist emphasis on consciousness and argues that human beings are natural, sensuous beings. The Manuscripts insistence that human beings are 'natural' seems obvious, but Marx claims that human feelings and passions are 'true ontological affirmations of being'. 2 By this he seems to mean that human feelings and passions belong in some sense necessarily to the natural objects they implicate. Some element remains here from the idealist notion of the unity of subject and object. Marx alludes to this when he writes: 'The sun is an object, a necessary and life assuring object, for the plant, just as the plant is an object for the sun, an expression of the sun's life-giving power and objective essential powers'. 3 The connection between human being and nature is further developed in Marx's concept of 'objectification', according to which human beings institute their needs and faculties in nature through labor. But the connection is broken by alienation and this is what makes revolution an ontological necessity.
Marcuse seems to have believed that the ontological references in the Manuscripts could be explained by ideas developed in contemporary German philosophy. Neo-Kantianism and especially phenomenology were the most important of these early 20th century trends. The phenomenologists rejected naturalism and argued that experience cannot be reduced to a subjective overlay on the nature of natural science. Husserl introduced the concept of the Lebenswelt-the lifeworld-by which he meant the essential connection of lived first-person experience with the objects of experience. Heidegger developed a related concept which he called 'being-in-the-world'. His term 'Dasein' refers to the human subject in its active role, engaged with the meaningful things implicated in its world. This too is a kind of subject-object unity although no longer based on the idealist concept of consciousness. Marcuse found here a connection to Marx's attempt to escape idealism. 4 In the 1920s, several influential Marxist philosophers, including Lukács, Korsch, and Bloch, sought to validate revolutionary experience philosophically in opposition to the scientism and determinism of what then passed for Marxist 'orthodoxy'. Marcuse found an equivalent argument in the phenomenological lifeworld. In lived experience reactions to the problems of the society have an existential weight that is missing in orthodox Marxism. The touchstone of Marcuse's own revolutionary experience was the German Revolution of 1918-1919 in which he participated as a conscript. That experience later informed his sympathy for the New Left.
Marcuse developed an experiential ontology on the basis of a synthesis of Marxism and phenomenology. This is not orthodox phenomenology or Heideggerianism, nor is it so-called orthodox Marxism. Marcuse crossed the lines between these two competing European philosophical traditions. At first he referred openly to phenomenology but after he joined the Frankfurt school he played down his phenomenological past, and yet it is essential to understanding his later thought. 5 In one early work Marcuse argues that the objective facts by themselves are incomplete because they leave out the form in which they are 'entwined' with 'historical human existence'. 6 This concept has to do with lived experience of social reality. Facts are not merely facts but need to be understood as they impinge on lived experience. Experience reveals connections that would be missed from an objective standpoint. Marcuse gives the example of a workplace. The experience of those who 'live' it reveals aspects hidden to the mere observer, and a fortiori, to management.
It is the task of philosophy to go beyond the facts to their human and social meaning. Marcuse writes: 'while the scientific method leads from the immediate experience of things to their mathematical logical structure, philosophical thought leads from the immediate experience of existence to its historical structure: the principle of freedom'. 7 Note that Marcuse does not claim that one of these two modes of knowledge is superior. He writes, 'no method can claim a monopoly of cognition', but only the study of existence is politically relevant. 8 Marcuse interprets the Manuscripts as an experiential ontology in terms of concepts such as these. This quasi-phenomenological approach leads to some unusual results, three of which I will mention here.
According to Marcuse, nature in the Manuscripts is not scientific nature and Marx's categories are not causal categories, nor is the mere fact that human beings can be counted among the things of nature philosophically significant. Such a common sense reading of the Manuscripts misses the point.
Marcuse distinguishes the nature of natural science from what he calls the concept of '"nature" in the wider sense given to this concept by Marx [in the Manuscripts], as also by Hegel'. 9 By the 'wider sense' of nature, Marcuse means nature insofar as it is implicated in human activity. In one early essay, he attributes this distinction to Lukács, writing, 'Lukács did indeed clearly recognize the duality of the being of nature-completely ahistorical as an object of physics, historical as the life-space of human Dasein'. 10 What is significant is the lived relation of the human being to nature. This encompasses the body as it relates to nature through feeling, need, and the senses, binding it to experiential nature. That nature belongs essentially to the being of the human subject.
Marcuse interprets Marx's concept of species-being as access to the universal, that is, to the meanings of objects. There is an echo here of Heidegger's concept of openness to being. 11 Such openness is the specificity of the human being, revealing potentialities that go beyond the immediate state of things. Those potentialities are taken up by labor through which human faculties are objectified in nature. Through objectification nature is made to conform to humanity. But note: objectification is not just something human beings do, but is an essential mode in which human beings participate in nature. 'The reality of man consists in "bringing out" all his "species powers" in real objects, "the positing" of a real…objective world'. 12 The reference to objectivity signals the cognitive role of objectification, which discloses the true being of nature. Raw nature, prior to its objectification, is incomplete, not yet fully 'actual', in the Hegelian sense of the term. Labor allows natural objects to achieve their true form, to 'become real objects', revealing aspects that only come to light through human activity. 13 As Marcuse later writes, '"truth" is attributable to nature not only in a mathematical but also in an existential sense. The emancipation of man involves the recognition of the such truth in things, in nature'. 14 All this leads Marcuse to a new interpretation of alienation and revolution, but these concepts lie beyond the scope of this paper.

Three Critiques
Marcuse's interpretation of the Manuscript underlies his later work, including his critique of science and technology. His writings in the 1960s contain three different critiques of technology, all of which are still relevant. The first critique argues that technology has become ideology, instituting a new kind of legitimation process different from the role of religion or bourgeois ideology. It is the actual material world itself that now legitimates the system by prescribing all needs and hopes. Technology frames a way of life in a modern society concerned above all with consumption. The individuals seek fulfillment in private possessions and accept their place within a technocratic society they cannot understand, and do not need to understand. Where ideological discourse used to fool the masses, now concrete technical achievements do the work of reconciling them to the injustice they suffer, more or less unaware.
Those injustices and their consequences are now treated as technical problems which experts can handle far better than the public. Technology is not only the material culture of the society but also a mode of thought; technical problem-solving within the given framework replaces normative political concerns that might lead to fundamental social change. Habermas explains Marcuse's argument succinctly: 'At the stage of their scientific-technical development, then, the forces of production appear to enter a new constellation with the relations of production. Now they no longer function as the basis of a critique of prevailing legitimations in the interest of political. . . enlightenment, but become instead the basis of legitimation. This is what Marcuse conceives of as worldhistorically new'. 15 The second critique concerns Max Weber's concept of rationalization and its application to industrial society. Capitalism is a rationalized society in the sense that techniques of calculation and control organize production, distribution and administration. These rational methods are embodied in management and the management science which explains how to organize effective collective action.
Marcuse argues that Weber's concept of rationalization is uncritical. Rationalization as Weber understands it presupposes control from above, a characteristic requirement of capitalism, not of rational methods as such. Weber's rationalization thesis describes how things actually work under capitalism, but it masks the bias of capitalism toward domination. 'The separation of the workers from the means of production. . . (as) a technical necessity requiring the individual and private direction and control of the means of production. . . The highly material, historical fact of the private-capitalist enterprise thus becomes. . . a formal structural element of capitalism and of rational economic activity itself'. 16 Socialism, conceived as the democratic organization of collective action, is eliminated as irrational at the outset by a conceptual slight of hand.
The bias of rationalization also affects technological design under capitalism. Technologies of control and domination are privileged over technologies that favor democratic engagement by workers. Control from above requires designs that pace work, surveil workers, and control the labor force. The assembly line is an example of such a biased technological design. The exorbitant role of military technology was particularly salient during the 1960s. Marcuse explained its role under capitalism in writings on the war in Vietnam. 17 The third critique develops these social arguments in a more complex ontological framework. One-Dimensional Man follows Husserl in claiming that science arises from the lifeworld from which it draws concepts it refines into instruments of scientific knowledge. 18 Science constructs an object, the world as matter in motion, that is adjusted to mathematical and experimental methods. When everyday consciousness takes that object for reality, experience is limited to those same parameters. Marcuse uses the term 'one-dimensional' to describe the kind of thinking that results from the intrusion of what are properly scientific ideas about the nature of reality into everyday experience. He explains this in terms of his unique synthesis of phenomenology and Marxism.
In modern times, physics has become the paradigmatic science which establishes the nature of reality. Physics works with the 'primary qualities' of objects, aspects that can be measured and quantified. It eliminates 'secondary qualities' in order to get to what it can use as facts and data in its work. Marcuse does not contest the cognitive value of science, but he also agrees with Heidegger that these facts and data belong to a technological conception of reality adjusted to a specific type of instrumental control. 'Science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man'. 19 Heidegger's term for this is 'Gestell', the framework that frames the world. The word Gestell in German can signify 'skeleton': a technified society has an underlying scientific skeleton.
Capitalism strips the world of its own sources of development, making it available for any purpose that human beings impose upon it. Marcuse explains this by reference to Sartre's concept of 'project', which is drawn in turn from Heidegger. A project in Sartre's sense is not a particular plan but rather it is a scene on which plans can be devised and implemented. Capitalism is a civilizational project in this sense and defines a specific lifeworld in which nature is reduced to raw materials to be exploited and dominated. Scientific concepts emerge out of this world and reflect it as do technological designs. Marcuse writes, 'When technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality-a "world"'. 20 'World' in this passage should be understood in terms of Marcuse's version of the similar phenomenological concept. Lived experience is now 'entwined' with the 'world' created by capitalist technology.
What happens when experience is shaped by such a quasi-scientific ontology? Marcuse argues that the potentialities of nature and human beings are occluded. In his early Hegel book, potentiality is treated as a 'second dimension' of experience, distinct from factual existence. Potentiality in this sense is a familiar concept, relevant to a variety of everyday phenomena. We see nature and other human beings in terms not only of what they are in the moment, not only in terms of what we could measure, but also in terms of what they can become and this perception is normatively informed. For example, children grow, we learn, the farmer's fields flourish, labor transforms natural objects into useful artifacts, and so on.
Potentialities such as these belong to a spontaneous teleological metaphysics science rejects. The notion that nature's potentialities are real, that nature is a subject in its own right, could serve as a guide to human action. But when science becomes the dominant understanding of reality, when it forms the implicit ontology of the society, potentialities are increasingly eliminated not just from science but from experience as well. They are now considered merely subjective, products of our psychology, our background and culture, and as such they lack normative force. The lifeworld is impoverished by the loss of a robust sense of potentiality.
Marcuse's ontological critique does not attribute a particular ideological bias to modern science and technology, but rather argues that their very 'neutrality' with respect to the distinction between mere preferences and objective potentialities ties them to the established powers. Since potentialities can no longer guide human action, the only effective values are those of the dominant powers, that is, the corporations and the government agencies that act for them. The potentialities eliminated from science and experience no longer influence the actions of those powers. The technology they deploy differs from all previous forms because it views the world as fungible resources rather than as a bearer of potentialities that could be actualized with help from human skill. We see the consequences today in the destruction of the environment.

A New Science?
If science is bound up with capitalism, then socialism would seem to require a different science, a successor science. This was Marx's conclusion in the Manuscripts. 'Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material-or rather, its idealistictendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become-albeit in an estranged form-the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie'. 21 Marcuse follows up this astonishing claim on the basis of his own idiosyncratic phenomenology. Husserl and Heidegger seek the transcendental ground of modernity in the scientific worldview. While Marcuse takes up their critique of the scientific ontology, he proposes a more concrete historical perspective based on the epochal character of modes of production. He differs, for example, from them in arguing that the privilege of instrumental control has a social origin: the capitalist lifeworld. This in turn suggests the possibility of ontological transformation through political change. Socialism, as an epochal alternative to capitalism, would have an original ontology. With this, the transcendental argument is brought down to earth where it converges with Marx's demand for a new science.
Marcuse argues that under socialism a new science will reflect a changed lifeworld. It will valorize the secondary qualities, including potentialities. Domination is not the only form of instrumental action. Cultivation and artistic creation are alternative forms that will be privileged in a socialist society.
In the Manuscripts Marx writes that unlike animals, bound by need, 'Man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty'. 22 Marcuse repeats this phrase and argues that through art nature can be freely re-imagined, revealing life-affirming potentialities. These potentialities are not merely subjective but reflect growth and natural flourishing. Our experience of norms such as beauty and compassion and our sense that nature is violated through destructive acts belong to a different, non-scientific form of objectivity.
If art and science could merge, then science would no longer be confined to the onedimensional world of primary qualities but could incorporate the sensuous secondary qualities. Marcuse writes, 'The "sensuous basis of all science" means something more and other than empirical verification by sense certainty: it means that the scientist, without in any way abandoning the logic and rigidity of scientific method, is guided in his research by the (emancipated) sensuous needs for the protection and amelioration of life. If the satisfaction of these needs, instead of being a mere by-product of science (a by-product which seems to become increasingly rare and feeble), would become the rationale of science, it may well lead to a different conceptual foundation of the natural and human sciences'. 23 It is not easy to make sense of this notion. Marcuse understands that there can be no modern society without modern science, and he therefore rejects regression to a qualitative science like that of Aristotle. The new science will continue to employ quantitative methods based on precise measurement and empirical facts, while also incorporating potentialities into its structure.
But there is no way for a formal science such as physics or chemistry to incorporate the secondary qualities from which it is abstracted. Modern science is based on equations, unlike earlier sciences based on generalizations and analogies. Equations have no room for concrete experience. Consider a simple equation such as distance equals velocity times time: distance traveled is a function of the speed and time of travel. Nothing concrete enters into such a scientific formula. It can only specify the variables relevant to the equation, for example, the measured distance between point a and b. That distance cannot include the esthetic qualities of the houses and trees encountered along the way. The formula repels such concrete qualities and sticks rigorously to its abstraction. Concrete data cannot be incorporated into an equation, but equations are what science is all about. 24 Marcuse wants a different ontology to emerge with a different social world but it is difficult to see how that can happen so long as natural science is treated as the ontological foundation of modernity. Why would Marcuse have made this assumption? Two reasons occur to me. Since Descartes and Kant, science has provided the model of pure reason. It was only a matter of time before the rationalization of society revealed the dark side of that model. The conflation of modern reason with science in the theories of Husserl and Heidegger continues to influence Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man.
The social context also suggests an explanation. In the early 1960s science and technology were idealized in the United States to an unusual degree. Everything seemed to depend on science, confirming the arguments and fears of Husserl and Heidegger. Only in the late '70s does the environmental movement gain broad public impact. By then Marcuse was nearing the end of his life. He argued that the struggle for nature belonged to the struggle against capitalism, and did not have to wait the achievement of socialism. 25 This new approach based on environmentalism has implications for Marcuse's critique of science and technology, but he did not go back and revise his earlier theories in response.
Had he done so, he might have developed a theory of the politics of technology. Despite problems with his notion of a successor natural science, it introduced several useful concepts that can be applied to environmentalism and other forms of struggle over technology. True, Marcuse did not anticipate this application, but I think he would have approved. In the remainder of this paper, I will offer some comments on this alternative.
One-Dimensional Man proposes a concept of translation, derived from the French philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon. The objects of science and the designs of technology can be said to 'translate' concepts and demands elaborated in the lifeworld. In this way secondary qualities can appear within the sciences in a form compatible with their formal structure. Marcuse writes: 'The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks-the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization. Moreover, the new ends might assert themselves even in the construction of scientific hypotheses-in pure scientific theory'. 26 This is objectification by another name applied specifically to modern science and technology, and offering a plausible path to a theory of scientific and technological change.
A similar concept was developed in Science and Technology Studies 30 years later. Bruno Latour for example describes the translation of norms in technical design as 'delegation'. 27 He uses the example of a speed bump in the road, which translates or delegates the normative principle 'go slow' into the agency of the material world. This approach becomes obvious to everyone studying science and technology by the 1990s, but the concept is there in Marcuse in 1964 where it is given a political application. On these terms technology can incorporate values and potentialities.
It is less clear how the concept of translation applies to 'scientific hypotheses', however, Marcuse's concept of object construction explains his intention. The objects of the sciences were traditionally viewed as natural kinds, but Marcuse argues that these objects are historically contingent. They are not out there like the bones of the dinosaurs, awaiting discovery, but must be constructed imaginatively. He thus historicizes Husserl's claim that the lifeworld is the source of scientific concepts. When the lifeworld changes, the object of science changes as well. Marcuse concludes One-Dimensional Man by trying, to my mind unsuccessfully, to define the new object of a successor natural science under socialism.

The Politics of Technology
I have pursued the concepts of successor science, translation and object construction in my work on technology. 28 Applied to the technical disciplines that organize social life, these concepts are the basis of a theory of technical politics. Technical disciplines are far more permeable to social demands than is natural science and their objects are far more ambiguous. Marcuse treats only one of these disciplines, management science, which is socially constructed in accordance with capitalist assumptions. He shows that what we call management is a conceptual object belonging to a certain history; that object would be conceived differently in a society based on cooperation rather than control from above.
Marcuse's critique of management can be extended to all the technical disciplines that structure our world, the management sciences that administer us, food science that determines our diet, engineering which builds roads and automobiles, medicine that takes care of our physical health, interior architecture which construct the spaces in which we live, computer science which designs the Internet, and so on. These disciplines use scientific methods in a variety of specific social contexts. Their objects, like 'management', are socially constructed in accordance with the demands of social actors.
This universal technification involves a mediation Marcuse failed to theorize. Scientific methods are as indifferent to potentiality as he argued, but those methods only enter the social world through the translation of potentialities in the object constructions of the disciplines. Those object constructions vary widely depending on the politics of design, with a correspondingly wide range of social consequences. With this mediation we can build on Marcuse's experiential ontology to explore the politics of the disciplines and the technologies they ground.
That politics takes place against the background of the capitalist heritage. We already have disciplines and technologies that materialize the values of capitalism, and these values are contested in terms of the lifeworld experiences of ordinary people caught up in failures of technology. Since the 1970s, political struggles have emerged around nuclear issues, medicine, the environment, and the Internet. For example, the feminist movement resisted traditional childbirth procedures and demanded changes in obstetrics. Pregnancy was no longer to be a 'disease' but became a life experience. The movement of gay people around AIDS resisted the established methods of experimental medicine. Experimental subjects were no longer just objects of science but also became collaborators. Various environmental movements address concerns about nuclear power, air and water pollution, toxic waste dumps and eventually of course the biggest of them all, climate change. In each case a natural or technical phenomenon was redefined in terms of its wider connection to human life and this in turn led to scientific-technical change. Such controversies were rare in the early 1960s when Marcuse developed his theory, but today there is much criticism of science and technology, some justified, some unjustified.
We are now used to social movements altering and changing the many technical disciplines that determine social life. Struggles impose new potentialities on the disciplines, the objects of those disciplines, and the designs of technologies they support. Reform takes place not through changes in the general ontology of physical nature but in the regional ontologies of the disciplines as the social world changes around them.
Technical politics crosses the gap between the lifeworld and the technical disciplines in both directions. For example, public concern about the health effects of air pollution arose from both personal observation and medical opinion shared with the public. This concern eventually reached politicians and regulators, causing automotive engineers to reengineer the automobile to take account of air quality. The change is both symbolic and material: until recently, the automobile was seen as a means of transportation and a marker of status, but it has added a new dimension and become a new kind of object both for consumers and engineers, an environmental object. In order to turn the automobile into this new object the engineers had to modify their discipline, adding chapters to their textbooks on catalytic converters and fuel injection, and now electrical propulsion as well.
This pattern appears over and over again. A two way process of communication between the lifeworld and science grants meaning to experience and changes the object of science and the design of technology. 29 In the case of climate change, for example, we understand what is happening as the result of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our conception of the climate is influenced by science, but science is also influenced by pressures from the lifeworld to mitigate these effects. In both cases the object 'climate' has been transformed. For us it has taken on properties known to science while also continuing to concern us as a future environment containingor destroyingpotentialities favorable to human life, depending on our actions. For science, the climate is no longer simply an object of observation and prediction, but has become a manipulable object of technical control. 30 Struggles over science and technology have gradually reconfigured the public sphere. The objects of the technical disciplines are altered by lifeworld concerns and public protest based on those concerns. These successor technical disciplines are not as radically different as Marcuse's imagined new natural science, but they are different enough to improve the quality of life in our technified society. And most importantly, the emergence of these political struggles promises to keep open the future, which, we now know, depends on science and technology. This is the most important point: Marcuse was not hostile to natural science as such, but concerned by the influence of its ontological presuppositions on the lifeworld under capitalism. That influence has diminished since the 1960s as contestation challenges technocratic pretensions. This is an enormous change Marcuse could not have anticipated although it is consistent with his emphasis on the role of science and technology in society. There are dangers in this new situation as the anti-vax movement demonstrates. But public involvement in the last 75 years has brought huge beneficial changes in fields such as medicine and the environment. These changes are not as visible as the anti-vax movement because the consequences of successful struggles come to be seen as routine scientific achievements. Today no one doubts that clean air is desirable, but not so long ago automobile manufacturers were busy spending millions of dollars lobbying governments to block 'expensive and unnecessary' pollution controls.
The notion that there is interaction between the historically changing lifeworld and the sciences is fundamental to Marcuse's thought, but it has now become a practical reality as well. At the time he elaborated his theory, the legitimating power of technology appeared to be uncontested and uncontestable. Indeed, it was very unusual for publics to engage with the sciences and technologies that affected their lives. Marcuse believed that science had taken on an ontological role that would change only after a socialist revolution brought back a sense of the potentialities lost in the one-dimensional dystopia of advanced capitalism. In fact, there is no such dystopia, at least no longer. The ontology underlying our sense of reality in modern capitalist society is inherently unstable, liable to fractures and recoveries at any time. The lifeworld under capitalism has retained a sense of potentiality to a greater degree than Marcuse believed likely or possible, motivating struggles to preserve and protect both human beings and nature.
Where this will lead we do not know. Will struggles over science and technology culminate in socialism? Whether, as Marcuse supposed, the realization of the potentialities of nature is incompatible with capitalism only time will tell. He writes, 'To drive ecology to the point where it is no longer containable within the capitalist framework means first extending the drive within the capitalist framework'. 31 Insofar as the environmental movement and the environmental sciences function in a capitalist society, they are necessarily ambiguous. Even the most radical movements cannot escape this fate. Marcuse writes, 'Objective ambivalence characterizes every movement of the radical oppositionan ambivalence which reflects at one and the same time the power of the Establishment over the whole, and the limits of this power'. 32 In our contemporary context, Marcuse's thought provokes a new look at Marxism, science, and technology. The concept of nature is central to Marx's Manuscripts and long sections of Marx's Capital concern technology and its harms and potentials, but these aspects of his work are overlooked, especially, it seems, by contemporary Critical Theory. Today it is obvious that technology is involved in the struggle for nature and the transformation of society. But technology has now spread so widely over the whole surface of society that it is no longer largely confined to factories as it was for Marx. Thus, the demand for technological change is to some extent independent of labor as Marx understood it. Marcuse's theory illuminates the many resulting struggles over science and technology.