Researching my paper for the International Herbert Marcuse Society Annual Conference at Salisbury University next week, I came across this provocative quote:
To the degree to which liberation presupposes the development of a radically different consciousness (a veritable counter-consciousness) capable of breaking through the fetishism of the consumer society, it presupposes a knowledge and sensibility which the established order, through its class system of education, blocks for the majority of the people…. The sweeping concentration of power and control in the nationwide political and military Establishment necessitates the shift to decentralized forms of organization, less susceptible to destruction by the engines of repression, and more expressive of the divergent and dispersed nuclei of disintegration.
Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972)