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In a 1967 lecture, "Liberation from the Affluent Society," Herbert Marcuse describes a novel challenge facing then-contemporary efforts at political resistance.¹ Originally delivered at the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation in London, Marcuse's address outlines the rise of what he terms "the affluent society," a social configuration brought about by the emergence of late capitalism wherein inequality and repression occur coextensive with a dramatically increased standard of living for the majority of the population.² Within this context, he explains, any demand for liberation had to be articulated against a socioeconomic apparatus that, despite clearly exploitative effects, was largely succeeding in stultifying the subjective need for opposition among the traditional agents of historical change. This need was being suppressed not only by the widespread satisfaction of vital necessities, but also by the affluent society's distinctly new facility for manipulating needs themselves, or for penetrating the deepest realms of human experience—from consciousness down to the unconscious—and subordinating them to the dictates of capital. Both the critical workings of the intellect and the psychical, emotional, and instinctual impulses comprising the 'soul" had been fully assimilated within the reigning social order. For Marcuse, this remarkable deepening of control demanded a complete rethinking of existing strategies of liberation, as the possibility of resistance seemed to depend on a transformation of the inner, "organic" disposition of the individual, essentially presupposing the emergence of an entirely "new type of man, with a vital, biological drive for liberation…"³

DOI: 10.1057/9781137375230_5

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