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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
The many mass protests that have taken place since 2011 have been characterised by an unmistakable need to challenge, overthrow and destroy the prevailing political representations without proposing new ones. The protests are not concerned with replacing the current government or leader with others, and thus getting a better version of what we already have. Instead, they refuse all leaders, including the most critical opposition leaders: these protests are about dismantling the need for leaders. More and more people are coming to the view that it is not possible to manage the many crises within the framework of the political institutions we have today.
The new protests are political acts that are neither class struggle nor the establishment of an opposition to those in power. Rasmussen argues that we should understand these protests as the emergence of a new kind of revolutionary action that is as much an anthropological as a political transformation: it is an attempt to break free from all the traditional notions of how the social context that we call society and the nation-state is organised.
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Seitenzahl: 114
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Quotes
Notes
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Notes
2 The Globalization of Protest
Notes
3 The New Movement
Notes
4 Refusal
Notes
5 Aphasia
Notes
6 The End of Reformism
Notes
7 Anti-Politics
Notes
8 The Workers’ Movement
Notes
9 The Socialist Horizon and Beyond
Notes
10 Dissolution
Notes
11 Refusal of the Refusal
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Quotes
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Alfie Bown, Post-Comedy
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Mladen Dolar, Rumors
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Hydrojustice
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, The Refusalist International
Gerald Raunig, Making Multiplicity
Helen Rollins, Psychocinema
Avital Ronell, America
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal
The Refusalist International
A Theory of the New Protest Cycle
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
polity
Copyright © Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen 2025
The right of Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press Ltd.
Polity Press Ltd.65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6829-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025935952
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
How do I do it and where do I start? Surely everyone knows this better for oneself than anybody else ever could: no more leaders, no more teachers, no more students, here comes the time of inventing new mediations between people.Claire Fontaine1
Find the self, then kill it.Amiri Baraka2
Notes
1.
Lines from
Human Strike Has Already Begun and Other Writings
, by Claire Fontaine. Published in 2013 by Mute. Reprinted with permission.
2.
Line from ‘New Black Music’, in the collection Black Music, by Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (William Morrow, 1967). Reissued in 2010 by Akashic Books. Reprinted with permission.
Acknowledgements
Numerous people and groups have helped bring this book into being, too many to name, but special thanks to Kieran Aarons, Joshua Clover, Carsten Juhl, Dominique Routhier, Katarina Stenbeck, the group at Fredag Aften, the Ill Will cohorts, as well as the team at Polity, most notably Manuela Tecusan, John Thompson and Lindsey Wimpenny.
1Introduction
The stakes were high. Late capitalist society’s powers of absorption seemed only to grow. Everything appeared as if the working class, still toiling in the centres of accumulation, had finally been integrated through consumerism, a rising standard of living and the culture industry.
The publication of One-Dimensional Man in 1964 found Herbert Marcuse at his most pessimistic: advanced industrial society, he claimed, was the culmination of a historical dynamic in which the oppression of humankind increased in lockstep with its technological development, which in principle could have liberated it, but did not. The atom bomb, which presented the threat of total annihilation, was emblematic of this situation. At the same time the new society exerted an almost complete ideological control over human subjectivity, and in consequence effectively integrated the proletariat.
Marcuse gazed out upon a society that appeared to transcend the contradictions of capitalist economy. One-dimensional society was industrially advanced; it had soaring productivity and a staggering growth rate that enabled the material improvement of the lives of most people (at least in the West). It signalled a metamorphosis of capitalism in which living standards might continuously improve for the middle and working classes, which no longer had any reason to oppose the system. An ever-increasing tide of goods enabled people’s smooth integration into a classless class society.
But this new society was still a capitalist society characterized by unsolvable contradictions. The changes were merely quantitative: human beings had exchanged the possibility of a free, self-determined future for high living standards and access to cheap commodities. Yet if the working class was no longer the obvious, or even the plausible spearhead of a socialist revolution, it was not easy to identify a lever that could transcend capitalist society. Marcuse could no longer muster belief in the proletariat. As he put it, ‘dialectical theory is not refuted, but it cannot offer the remedy’.1
It was not easy. Marcuse was a Marxist philosopher. He was living in the United States, where he had accepted a professorship in philosophy at Brandeis in Massachusetts, and was now in his mid-sixties. As a young man he had taken part in the German Revolution of 1918–19 as member of a soldiers’ council in Berlin, having been enthused by the words and deeds of Rosa Luxemburg and the other Spartacists. The revolution was brutally crushed by the combined forces of the German Social Democratic Party and proto-fascist Freikorps troops, an experience that left a lasting impression on the young Marcuse. The necessity of a total historical rupture with the money economy and the state form would remain a constant feature of his thinking: there was no place for any social democratic compromise, he had seen first-hand the consequences of that in 1919 – including the murders of Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. After studies with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the late 1920s, Marcuse was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and ended up in the United States. There he participated in the exiled Marxist ‘think tank’ that was the Frankfurt School before becoming a professor at Brandeis.
One-Dimensional Man may be read as Marcuse’s attempt to keep the dream of the German Revolution alive. This would prove to be an uphill battle. Everything looked as if the money economy in Western Europe and North America had found a way to supersede its internal crisis tendencies. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Marcuse wrote the book, what we now call les trente glorieuses (the Glorious Thirty) felt as if those years (1945–75) could last forever. The post-war economic boom enabled the ruling classes in the West to leverage welfare and culture as tools for a bloodless pacification of the toiling masses. The capital–labour relation not merely was consolidated but appeared set in stone.
Marcuse’s analysis in One-Dimensional Man is bleak. The possibilities for radical social transformation appear to be voided. However, towards the end of the book, he nevertheless gestures towards the possibility of radical critique, or what he calls ‘a radical refusal’:2 insofar as people can refuse, ‘denying the positive’, they can still break free from existing society and emancipate themselves.3 Once human nature has been absorbed into the system of capitalist commodity production, the only alternative lies in a wholesale refusal. If one-dimensional society constitutes the materialization of ideology, its negation would need to be ‘the pure form of negation’.4 The only possible opposition, therefore, lies in an abstract refusal, a total negation of the existing order:
All content seems reduced to the one abstract demand for the end of domination – the only truly revolutionary exigency, and the event that would validate the achievements of industrial civilization. In the face of its efficient denial by the established system, this negation appears in the politically impotent form of ‘the absolute refusal’ – a refusal which seems all the more unreasonable the more the established system develops its productivity and alleviates the burden of life.5
The dialectical movement of history has broken down. The gravediggers of capitalism, the proletariat, have been transformed into consumers. But it is still possible to refuse. The refusal of marginal groups in bourgeois society might still trigger a revolutionary process whereby the working classes in the advanced industrial countries could become Klasse für sich (class for itself), that is, become the revolutionary subject.
The cards were stacked against Marcuse. The more the worker became integrated into class society, the more unreasonable radical critique seemed to be. Why contest affluent society, if it was ameliorating everybody’s lives in the West, if workers had access to jobs, housing, education and culture – in other words, if they could share in the affluence of industrially advanced societies? Part of the challenge here concerns the integration of the superstructure into the productive sphere, thanks to the increasing entanglement of culture and economy. The consumer economy, Marcuse writes, creates ‘a second nature [for] man’, libidinally lashing human beings to the commodity form. One-dimensional humans voluntarily subject themselves to the demands of consumption. The revolution therefore necessitates the development of new desires, ‘which might precondition man for freedom’.6 The struggle for a new society would be the struggle for new passions.
Marcuse refers here to the French author and literary critic Maurice Blanchot, who had written about the need for refusal in a short text published in 1958, at the height of the Algerian Revolution. Marcuse highlights the abstract and total character of Blanchot’s refusal: it is necessary to refuse without grounds, Blanchot insists. Marcuse, however, interprets the claim slightly differently, situating it in a Marxist framework: if the refusal was abstract, this was because it signalled a rejection of reification. If Blanchot’s refusal amounted to an evacuation or a refusal of politics (which, for Blanchot, coincided with de Gaulle’s assumption of power), Marcuse’s was a historically specific refusal of the consumer economy, of the integrated society of advanced capitalism. One-dimensional society was a society without opposition: this was the challenge Marcuse sought to face up to. There were still classes, of course – the bourgeoisie and the working class – but they were no longer agents of historical transformation. Both materially and ideologically, the working class had been integrated into the capitalist system, which effectively debunked the Marxian concept of revolution. Capitalism seemed to have found a way of escaping the perils of class structure; the proletariat was nowhere to be seen. Its integration into the capitalist system was achieved not merely through the dynamism of the production process itself but also because it shared the needs of capitalism. The historical subject that could bring an end to capitalist exploitation – and, with this, to prehistory more generally – was lacking. In such a situation, the idea of a blanket refusal provided Marcuse with a much needed internal–external opposition to the ‘affluent’ one-dimensional society.
In conditions of almost unprecedented prosperity, the revolutionary perspective assumed the form of a radical refusal of the new life proffered by the consumer society. For Marcuse, emerging subcultures such as those of the hippies were an example of people ‘refusing to play the game’.7 These were small groups that had broken with the familiar. They were rejecting routine ways of doing things, experimenting with new modes of living, creating new forms of political affect.
Whereas previous historical forms of critique could count on forces within capitalist society to bring society down from within, this was no longer the case. As Marcuse put it, ‘[t]he struggle for the solution has outgrown the traditional forms [of revolution]. The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the
