SOC251 Week5 Marcuse

Freud and Marx

Freud’s concepts are reified and ahistorical; Marx’s are dialectical and historical

Freudian concepts

The external world faced by the growing ego is at any stage a specific socio-historical organization

错误的地方：

• Freud generalized a specific historical form of reality to a reality pure and simple

• He sees historical contingencies as biological necessities

正确的地方：

• A repressive organization of the instincts underlies all historical forms of the reality principle in civilization

压抑是存在的并且是文明的约束，但弗洛伊德并没有把它放在历史社会的框架下进行区分（忽略了历史背景的重要性），而是把历史形成的压抑要求统一归类为生物本能的必然

they must be supplemented by a socio-historical component：

• Freud: the reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle

• Marcuse: PERFORMANCE PRINCIPLE - the prevailing historical form of the reality principle

Surplus repression

• The (extra) restrictions imposed by social domination - reality principle之下额外的

• Distinguished from basic repression (modification of the instincts necessary in civilization)

Scarcity

The world is too poor for the satisfaction fo human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay. So for the duration of work pleasure is ‘suspended’ and pain prevails → reality repression

However, he neglects the socio-historical dimension of “scarcity,” that scarcity is also a social phenomenon, a consequence of how societies are organized by forms of SOCIAL DOMINATION.

• Enforced and intensified by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity and labor [= CLASS STRUCTURES]

Domination

“exercised by a particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged position”

“the specific historical institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination introduce additional controls → Surplus Repression

• patriarchal family

• Hierarchy of labor

• State control

The pleasure principle was dethroned

• not only because it militated against progress in civilization, whose progress perpetuates domination and toil 享乐原则不仅阻碍“文明进步”，也阻碍统治秩序的维持

• under class conditions, the necessary labor or work for sustenance is transformed into ALIENATION, the expropriation of value by capitalists and so on 为了生存&文明进步所必需的劳动，在阶级条件下被异化了；劳动者创造的价值被资本家等统治集团拿走