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Recalling Marcuse, Supporting Occupy Wall Street

Proposals for Classrooms and Community Discussions:

Labor, Power, Decommodification

Human Rights, and EducationA 90 minute panel, four presenters 15 minutes each, with 30 minutes comments and questions

Charles Reitz, Marcuse and the Workforce as Resource

Stephen Spartan, The Great Refusal:Decommodification

David Brodsky, Charter 2000:A Transitional Program for Labor

Patricia Brodsky, Reclaiming Public Higher Education for

the Public:A Case Study

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Workforce:A Resource! With Programmatic Power!

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We are recalling Marcuse's

strengths, most radical elements,undeterred

by our former criticisms

his theories of play and art.

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Laboroccurs in social relationships:

Communal project of social beings

to meet human needs;promote human flourishing.

Marcuse 1933: Labor is ontologically significant

human mode of being in the world:

Artists, researchers, intellectuals do work.

As Kellner points out citing Marcuse:

the qualitative difference between the free and unfree society,is that of letting the realm of freedom appear within the realm of necessity

in labor and not only beyond labor.

-- The End of Utopia Marcuse, 1970

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labor as the key activity

by which humanity exteriorizes and expresses itselfand also humanizes the world.

Marcuse re-thinks a critical philosophicalanalysis of labor and the human condition

and builds an alternativeVision for Labor!

Marcuses Labor Theory of Humanism

-- Humanist Theory ofLabor

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What is the future for labor?What is labor's vision?

What makes critical theory critical?

What makes radical pedagogy radical?

Thesis #2:No critical theory or radical pedagogy without

labor theory of social action and social ownership!

Social Labor,

Social Wealth:

Only labor forceas a group

has legitimate

ownership

Just because

they stole it

doesn't mean

they own it!

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Class War: Transferring Wealth Upwards, 1984-2007Prelude to 2008 crash

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1991

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2006

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2007

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2007

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Though it is an often underestimated dimension

of his work, Marcuse early on addressed

the deep roots of the capitalist systems functioningand its crisis:

the commodificationof labor.

The production apparatus developed under capitalism,

propelled by wage laborwithin

the existing form of the division of labor,

perpetuates the existing forms of consciousness and needs. . . .

the revolutionary working class . . . alone has the real powerto abolish existing relations of production

and the entire apparatus that goes with it.

-- 33 Theses Marcuse, 1947 (emphasis added)

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Manufacturing sector produced $2,274,367 million in value added.

Workforce income: $607,447 m. Income to capital: $1,666,920 m.

(36.4%) (63.6%)

Financial and Insurance sector (2005) produced $1,029 billion

Workforce Income (2007): $494.5 b. Remainder income to capital

(roughly 50%) estimated proportions (roughly 50%)http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/11statab/banking.pdf

(Discontinuing

publication

2013)

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U.S. cut and sew apparel workers:

Added value produced $7,385 million

Workforce income: $3,075 m.

Income to capital: $4,310 m.

California garment factory

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To create the subjective conditions for a free society

. . . [we must] . . . educate men and women who are

incapable of tolerating what is going on,

who have really learned what is going on,

has always been going on, and why,and who are educated to resist and

to fight for a new way of life.-- Brooklyn College Lecture, Marcuse 1968

Refusing

the Counterrevolution's

Intensifying Inequalities / Terror War

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