INTRODUCTION

This term paper is about Herbert Marcuse and His best known and most influential work, One-
dimensional Man wherein he argued that "The Modern "affluent" society" represents even those who are
successful within its while maintaining their complacency through the erzats satisfactions of consumer
culture. In cultivating such shallow forms of experience and by blocking critical understanding of the real
workings of the system. The affluent society condemns its members to a "One Dimensional" existence of
intellectual and spiritual poverty.

Marcuse comments on consumerism, suggesting that the system we live in is controlling in a way that
other individual dictates our perceptions of freedom by only allowing choices to buy happiness. In order to
fulfill actual basic needs, consumers act unreasonably by exerting too much work more than whatever is
needed, by ignoring different psychological destructive effects, environmental damages and by searching for
social connection through material item.

Considering, it is more unreasonable as in the making of new products powers the economy and
urges for more work to purchase more. One person becomes an industrial machine tool and even loses his
sense of benevolence. In addition, advertising sustains consumerism that breaks societal behavior, informs
the mass that happiness can be bought, which is psychologically damaging. Makati city is one of the example
place in the Philippines that having a lot of consumers.

MAIN ARGUMENTS

Marcuse work, which is One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society argues that the modern “1affluent” society 2represses even those who are successful within it, while
maintaining their 3complacency through the ersatz satisfactions of consumer culture. By 4cultivating such
shallow forms of experience and by blocking critical understanding of the real workings of the system,
the affluent society condemns its members to a “one-dimensional” existence of intellectual and spiritual
poverty.

1 Having a great deal of money; wealthy.

2 restrain, prevent, or inhibit
3 a feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, often combined with a lack of awareness of pending trouble or controversy
4
try to acquire or develop
 Meanwhile, Marcuse strongly criticizes 5consumerism, arguing that it is a form of social control. He
suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian in that a few
individuals dictate our perceptions of freedom by only allowing us choices to buy for happiness. In this state
of "un-freedom", consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfil actual
basic needs, by ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, by ignoring the waste and environmental
damage it causes, and by searching for social connection through material items.

It is even more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of
old products, fuels the economy and encourages the need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his
humanity and becomes a tool in the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally,
advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanour, delivered in bulk and informing
the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea that is psychologically damaging.

There are alternatives to counter the consumer lifestyle. Anti-consumerism is a lifestyle that demotes
any unnecessary consumption, as well as unnecessary work, waste, etc. But even this alternative is
complicated by the extreme 6interpenetration of advertising and 7commodification because everything is a
commodity, even those things that are actual needs.

The concept of one-dimensionality identified 8oppressive characteristics of societies in the 1960s,

suggesting that they could intensify over time until few people are able to imagine alternatives. This concept
and its related body of work are largely forgotten today, associated with a time and set of circumstances that
have passed. This article argues that instead of disappearing, one dimensionality has matured and become
commonplace, fulfilling Marcuse's vision of a society that lacks reflexive knowledge and capacity to change.
The article describes three aspects of a one dimensional society—work, aggressiveness, and public affairs—
and asks whether we are trapped in one societal dimension.

On the other hand, Marcuse journal about Marxism and Feminism argues that the connections
between capitalism and women’s oppression through a range of serious and perceptive arguments, finds
Lindsey German, 'We only want women’s rights’ was the slogan on a placard carried by a striking woman
worker in a photo from the early 1970s. Nearly fifty years on from the birth of the Women’s Liberation
Movement, that apparently only too reasonable demand has proved to be much more 9intractable than many
people had thought. The right to social, legal and financial equality - demands to go alongside the demand for
political equality, which was the hallmark of first wave feminism in the years before the First World War -

5
the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers
6
mix or merge together
7
the action or process of treating something as a mere commodity
8
unjustly inflicting hardship and constraint, especially on a minority or other subordinate group
9
Hard to control or deal with.
seemed ones which were all winnable under capitalism. There were indeed some very big changes: the closing
of the gender pay gap, although never coming close to its elimination; the expansion of education for girls;
the opening up of new jobs for women in areas dominated by men; the liberalisation of attitudes to marriage
and single motherhood. Nonetheless, the divisions between men and women endured: paid less; stuck in low-
paid sectors of work; responsible for the vast majority of caring jobs, whether paid or unpaid; and still subject
to a wide range of sexist attitudes in every area of life, as well as to high levels of male violence, women’s
10oppression marked their lives from cradle to grave.

What is the explanation for this? The answer to that question has been debated intensely for the last
nearly half century: it has led to divisions, divorces, splits over strategy, and a whole number of different
approaches to the question of women’s liberation. It has been of particular importance on the left. The late
1960s women’s movement was itself a product of left-wing movements, and asked the question why these
movements had not been able to acknowledge or accommodate women’s demands for equality. Those
women who helped found the movement were often socialist or Marxist feminists, who wanted the social
transformation of capitalism, but alongside it a women’s revolution; a transformation in women’s social
conditions, in attitudes to everything from work to sexuality, and a genuine full equality in every area of life,
not just a paper commitment to formal rights.

This new feminism involved a sometimes sharp critique of Marxism, and it is fair to say that by the
early 1970s not a single left or Marxist organisation remained untouched by the impact of feminism. Both
female and male Marxists attempted to theorise where oppression came from, what was the solution to
women’s oppression and how the feminist struggle connected to the class struggle. This involved a serious
study of the family and of the role of women’s work in the home, contrasting it to the world of paid work.

While from the late 1970s onwards the connection between Marxism and feminism became more
11strained, and sometimes disappeared, in recent years there has been a growing interest in reconnecting the
two. While Marx’s theory was often seen as wanting on this question in the 1970s, it became more relevant
again in a period of 12neoliberalism and economic crisis. At the same time, the claims of some that feminism
had achieved its aims also looked increasingly hollow.

10
prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control
11
Showing signs of tiredness or nervous tension.
12
a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism
 It insists on the centrality of class in any Marxist analysis and on the connection between capitalism
and women’s oppression. This is not for a minute to deny that women’s oppression predated capitalism: most
Marxists would agree that this oppression is a feature not just of capitalism but of class society generally.
However, it does insist that one has to study the capitalist mode of production (and the changes within it) in
order to understand the specific nature of women’s oppression and the relationship between social
production and privatised reproduction.

So, the German Marxist-feminist, Frigga Haug, in an introductory essay, talks of the connection of
women’s domestic labour with the capitalist mode of production. The relations of production which arise
from capitalism in relation to the family and sexuality have been subject to considerable change over the past
century. She refers to how the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote about personal life in the age of
Fordism. Monogamy in the family was highlighted, and abstentionism from pleasure of all sorts was
encouraged; workers being expected to live the sorts of life which would enable them to increase productivity
at work and not be distracted by drink and drugs or sex (prohibition in the US in the years after the First
World War is the most extreme example of this). Today’s family and sexual mores are in great contrast to
this: sexual behaviour has to a large extent been ‘deregulated’, and the family form is much more open, now
including gay marriage and single motherhood. There is an acceptance of much more traditionally ‘male’
behaviour in women, for example drinking large quantities of alcohol or picking up men. In themselves, while
many of the changes in attitudes are welcome, they do not necessarily challenge the structure of the family or
women’s oppression.

Indeed, they can perhaps best be seen to illustrate the adaptability of capitalism: the family form can
change dramatically, as can attitudes towards women, but women’s oppression, closely connected to the
exploitation which is at the heart of the system, endures. One could argue that the role of women in the
twenty-first century is one where capital is freer to exploit female labour than ever, while maintaining a system
of privatised social reproduction which ensures women’s continued oppression.

The Marxism which most informs this collection appears to be derived from forms of Maoism, and
assumes the existence of a capitalist patriarchy. This allows it to separate questions of exploitation and
oppression analytically, and to assume a dual-systems approach to oppression. The separation of class
exploitation from oppression is in my view a mistake: we don’t have to look further than class society, in this
case capitalism, to be able to identify a system where class exploitation helps to shape, create and recreate the
various forms of oppression. However, there is much within this collection which is valuable and timely.
 There are several broad introductory sections followed by a series of essays on keywords to do with
feminism and oppression. These essays are varied but raise a number of important and useful questions. One
of the major issues they identify is race. Himani Bannerji’s chapter four, on race and Marxism, argues that
there has to be a conception of class struggle in the broadest sense, i.e. including struggles over social
reproduction or racism. She argues that to do otherwise separate oppression from class and creates a danger
of identifying race and gender with liberal politics; rights and citizenship rather than socialist struggles. It also
separates class politics from a critique of imperialism over issues such as war.

The chapter on intersectionality is also thought provoking. Delia D. Aguilar is critical of some
current formulations of the theory, seeing them as symptomatic of an academy which has become
corporatised and of the de-radicalisation of present day feminism (p.203). She is also critical of the tendency
in academia to a projection of Marxism as a theory which is simplistic and collapses everything into class,
which she describes as ‘an unquestioned premise’ (p.206).

Aguilar considers the various approaches to intersectionality theory, looking at the importance of the
origins of the theory in considering legal cases, for example rape and domestic violence. She is highly critical
of approaching the question without understanding the primacy of class, or of failing to make reference to
capitalism when looking at oppression and domination. She argues that this leads to a downplaying of class as
a central explanatory cause of oppression, making the point that class is not just one other oppression, but
that intersectionality studies now look more at race and gender than at class. She quotes Meyerson as saying
‘oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not’ (p.213).

This approach to class runs through much of the book and is a riposte to the ideas either that there is
no connection between ideas and material reality, which has been so dominant in academic and often left
thinking for several decades; or to the mainstream liberal approach to feminism which sees it as about
empowerment, education and rights. In this scenario oppression is seen as being just about ideology and is
lacking any concrete basis in reality. As Bannerji’s chapter on ideology points out, this allows feminism to be
incorporated into state bureaucracies and corporate agencies, creating the sort of narrow feminism so
acceptable in institutions such as the EU, while leaving basic inequalities untouched.

There are attempts to grapple with questions of labour power and reproduction, which consider
work in both their paid and unpaid forms. These questions have taken an increased importance in recent
years as younger feminists have rediscovered issues such as the wages for housework debate from the 1970s,
as materialist feminism has placed much stress on social reproduction theories. Helen Colley’s chapter on
labour power considers the way in which capitalism turns even the most personal and emotional aspects of
our lives into commodities. Marx’s theory argues that workers under capitalism have to sell their labour
power and that the products of their labour are taken from them. The process of exploitation means that the
wages a worker receives only cover the costs of her or his reproduction, the remainder, in the form of surplus
value, goes to form the profits of the capitalist.

This is a unique relationship at the heart of capitalism. Paid labour is therefore of a different
character from unpaid labour. There is, for women in particular, a connection between the two. Yet domestic
labour on its own, while making a vital contribution to capitalist economy through the reproduction of labour
power, does not itself produce profits but rather produces use values. However, it is also labour which
contributes to the reproduction of labour power itself. It can therefore be argued to be indirectly productive
of surplus value. It is not wage labour in itself. That means it has to be regarded differently from paid labour.
Such a distinction was not made traditionally by the theorists of wages for housework, and there is a tendency
to blur this distinction today. This comes sometimes from autonomist ideas, which want to lessen the
distinction between paid and unpaid work, and to move away from a class analysis towards one based only on
the division of labour. Colley argues that this downplays the central role of class exploitation.

There are many other issues dealt with here, such as democracy, ideology and standpoint theory.
While the reassertion of class politics is strongly argued and refreshingly clears, there seems to me to be still
an ambiguity about patriarchy theory. The essay on this considers the history of the term, critiques a number
of them, and shows that the term was in some senses replaced with gender, intersectionality, and difference.
There is a debate about whether this is a phenomenon which now exists only in parts of the world, for
example in Islamic-majority countries. It seems to me that it is impossible to separate class and oppression, or
indeed to separate capitalism and imperialism. The particular manifestations of oppression in different parts
of the world can be explained by these phenomena, and the combined and uneven development which
accompany them, rather than a new or reconstituted patriarchy.

We should also reject the idea that women’s oppression is a thing of the past or much less significant,
in western countries rather than in those of Africa, Asia or the Middle East. This collection is very clearly
rooted in a tradition which is highly critical of the role of imperialism. It rejects a feminism which is prepared
to accommodate to the structures of class exploitation and oppression. There is much in it to recommend
and, even where one disagrees with the analysis or conclusions, it raises questions to which all those who
consider themselves Marxists or feminists need to try to find answers.
CONTEXTUALIZATION

The Philippines is a developing country and because of this, Filipinos constantly complain privately
and publicly about poverty, malnutrition and expensive education. However, if you go to malls, you will be
surprised at how jam-packed the stores are. One would swear that it’s payday every day and the excessive
consumerism is contradictory to the obvious poverty that exists in the barangays that surround these
oversized malls. Consumerism has enveloped Filipinos. The Philippines is one of the poorest countries in
Asia but it is the home to three of the ten largest shopping malls on earth. The number of shopping malls and
condominiums continue to increase in major Philippine cities and this construction fools Filipinos into
believing the economy is growing thus coercing them to buy goods or homes that they cannot afford. Like in
Makati city, this place has a lot of malls that accessible to consumers and multiple business man like Chinese
and Korean have their own company in this city.

The urban cultures in major Philippines cities are shaped by shopping malls. As a Filipino, when you
ride an MRT or LRT, most stations are connected to a mall. When you work at a BPO company that employs
thousands of Filipinos, you will find a number of restaurants and shops next to your place of work, enticing
you to purchase their goods. Within the same perimeters, you will find new residential suites next to shopping
malls and near your office, inviting you to buy or rent. Wherever you go, you are always presented with
something to buy as if you’re a walking wallet. Fortunately for retailers, there is so little marketing required
because Filipinos love to spend their money.

Filipinos may have different reasons for purchasing but Cid Jr.’s comments are not fact. Foot traffic
is heavy in malls when the retailers cut their prices. Small budgets ensure that Filipinos will only purchase
specific goods when the items are marked down fifty to seventy-five percent. Even if the goods are
unnecessary purchases, Filipinos will brag of the money they saved.

It is common for us to see a very attractive man or woman on billboards that then cause people to
think that they should look the same. Those who own capitalism benefit from this kind of thinking of
consumers because people will strive to look like the people on advertisements and this will help the
capitalists to increase their profits or income money.
 Emilio Aguinaldo College-Cavite

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Congressional East Avenue, Brgy.Burol Main, City of Dasmariñas, Cavite

Performance Task In Understanding Culture,

Society, And Politics.
Social Critism
Herbert Marcuse

Submitted By
Michael Luis R. Malabanan
Mark Jerald A. Enciso
Georgia Gayuma
Quelvin A. Trinidad
Gwyneth Gabrielle O. Dellomas

STEM 12- Makisig

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