Ecology and the Critique of Society Today: Five Selected Papers for the Current Context

Herbert Marcuse’s late-period writing featured a “green turn,” not otherwise undertaken in Frankfurt School critical theory, with his essays “Ecology and Revolution (1972)” and “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society (1979).” Marcuse found that environmentalist criticisms of extractive and polluting economic policies implicitly or explicitly involved system-negations. He recognized the importance of ecology for the revolutionary movement and the importance of the revolutionary movement for ecology. Marcuse held that the restoration of nature depends upon human liberation; both are feasible yet blocked within the established framework. The enduring value of his strategy for revolutionary ecological liberation is that system negation can have the appeal of a new general interest–offering a constellation of feasible (i.e. not utopian) goals–racial equality, women's equality, the liberation of labor, the restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace, that can bring together a global alliance of transformative forces. The key is the emancipatory universalization of resistance–the revolt of youth as a global phenomenon– today against guns, war, and militarism, women’s oppression, racial animosity, labor force precarity and exploitation, LGBTQ stigmatization, and the devastation of the earth, solidarity with immigrants, and for socialism.