If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are about it.
Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.
It saddens me that this was downvoted, because it's entirely true. It doesn't just apply to LGBT people, though. There are all kinds of minority groups that are treated as second-class citizens in modern Western (and Eastern) cultures.
"You are required to be totally compliant with what (leaders of) society demand, on pain of really bad stuff."
Or: a system where [people, as distinct from bureaucracy, hostile memeplexes, corporations, etc] have virtually no authority and [bureaucracy et/vel al] wields absolute control of every aspect of the country, socially, financially and politically.
What is the power of a person, separate from a group? When there are three hundred million people, how much individual power can there be? Or should there be? The accumulation of power in structures is inevitable.
Moreover, the fact that this is even an open debate suggests that calling the current state of affairs totalitarianism is a bit exaggerated. There are multiple groups currently vying for control of every aspect of life, with no single group having complete control, and people throw in with the one they feel closest to. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't match totalitarianism.
This line of reasoning dilutes the term “totalitarian” too much.
Any given group being intolerant of contrarians is not “totalitarian”, it’s just a group following group instincts. Otherwise you might as well argue that most animals are totalitarian, which is 1) patently absurd and 2) dangerous (since you are effectively arguing that totalitarianism is the natural state of any society).
Totalitarianism is not just about reaction to dissent; it requires a proactive side with structured ideology and a conscious effort to fashion all elements of life (public and private) after such ideology. Whether you really have something like this in Western society, is very debatable. Consumerism might get close, but you can still live and thrive without being a consumer, if you really want, and you won’t be jailed for it.
When you say “subtle totalitarianism”, you are highlighting some elements of Western life that could fit a totalitarian environment, but you are also ignoring all the rest that points in the opposite direction: organised dissent, freedom of expression, tolerance and survival of alternative lifestyles, and so on. This is normal: a lot of sociological constructs are not binary. But you cannot say that a society is totalitarian if it fits only a few of the characteristics of observed totalitarian systems.
I might concede that, after 1990, Western societies have somewhat sleepwalked into something closer to a “totalitarian capitalism” than they were before; but I think we are still far from the excesses of actual totalitarian societies.
These words don’t need to be attached to a state. most private services, even ostensibly serving as public forums, are de facto authoritarian—the authorities just want us to like them. States with monopoly of violence have no such constraints, but we still must live by the dictates of powerful people (often with interests deeply contrary to our own) we have no access to.
The USSR. East Germany. Syria. The Sudan. Pretty sure you haven't lived in any of them. If you've ever been in real oppression, you wouldn't say that western society is legitimate oppression.
If you look around and see poverty and oppression in your own culture/country and your answer is "you should be grateful you're not in [worse country]", then you are part of the problem.
Right-wing seem to like playing this card -- "If you haven't lived in [whatever country we feel to be fundamentally opposed to 'Western' values at the moment] then you have nothing to say on the matter" -- yet I have many, many close contacts from those countries (including quite a few who have had serious run-ins with the authorities in those places), and I can't imagine of them saying that Western societies do not have "legitimate oppression".
If anything what keeps coming up is that it seems strange to them that we think we're all that different from those countries (as if we're on a higher plane, basically).
> Pretty ballsy to proclaim western society and economic coercion as not "legitimate oppression".
Those are 2 claims, in which neither makes sense to me, probably due to a lack of detail. Did they make sense to you when you wrote it?
If it's 'legitimate', are you referencing the oppression of the majority as a proxy for western society?
Economic coercion - The threat or act by a sender government or governments to disrupt economic exchange with the target state, unless the target acquiesces to an articulated demand.
It's possible that 'economic coercion' is now a misnomer, having been used to mean something else specific, initially. I have referenced a definition, for simplicity. Feel free to audit. As it stands, it is not oppression, unless any given demand is supposed to equate to the status of oppression?
You can survive without participating in the economics, it just benefits you more to participate, where lifespan and pleasure is concerned. That isn't coercion any more than checking the material you put in your mouth is biological oppression, it's a linear optimization you're free not to make.
I don't struggle with that concept much; literature and popular usage conditions us to certain meanings and associations of words - when I read Marcuse's book I was actually almost as surprised as you seem to be, though Marcuse goes to pains not to trivialize the situation in those places we would describe as "totalitarian" by the kind of standard outlined in 1984 or by the example of Nazi Germany. Marcuse's point stems from the concept of totality, it's like looking at totalitarianism from the other way round - to me that was extremely refreshing.
Similarly, I think we've made strides in thinking about what oppression means - what allows us to say that those non-"1st-world" places are oppressive but ours are not? Is it a matter of quantity or quality? The language here is not merely hyperbolic (though this feature does remarkably well in being provocative, which is the point of activism - Marcuse was a lifelong activist), it's substantive.
When you appeal to the the "basis of Western society" in your comment, it reads more like normalization - how could such a thing be totalitarian, after all, it's the basis of Western society. That's actually the point I'm making, this basis conditions us to see only the worst examples as totalitarian/oppressive/"bad". The unspoken point seems to be that because it is the basis then we can't describe it as totalitarian. To me, that's not a logical conclusion.
>Marcuse’s engagement with the issue of totalitarianism relies on the understanding of the transformation of reason and for him this transformation is exemplified by the emergence of positivism as the dominant means of making sense of the world. He argues that the totalitarian character of advanced industrial society and its concomitant ‘totalitarian rationality’ (Marcuse 2001 [1961]: 52, 55) have specific, potentially devastating, consequences for the members of that society. Most important here are what Marcuse conceptualizes as ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘psycho-logical neutrality’, and ‘repressive desublimation’.[0]
>In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.”
So he's redefining a word with a well-established meaning based on its etymology to say... what, exactly?
These kinds of word games are what turns me off of philosophy. Like the argument that there isn't a multiverse, since "universe" includes everything and would include alternate realities. Congratulations, you know Latin roots. That is all I have learned.
Marcuse's aim wasn't merely to redefine, one of the purposes of his book was to find out how these words came to be defined in industrial society as they are, and how these words (words considered also as what they signify) influence our thought. Marcuse would actually agree with your point here - how is it that these word games came to be defining of the concepts which they signify in modern society?
>I have already referred to the self-validating hypothesis as propositional form in the universe of political discourse. Such nouns as "freedom," "equality," "democracy," and "peace" imply, analytically, a specific set of attributes which occur invariably when the noun is spoken or written. In the West, the analytic predication is in such terms as free enterprise, initiative, elections, individual; in the East in terms of workers and peas-ants, building communism or socialism, abolition of hostile classes. On either side, transgression of the discourse beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different. In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies; actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference.
> "In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life."
Interesting thread, and worthwhile commentary, mostly improved by your post -- but this one sentence is kind of a trainwreck. By "without" did you mean "that"?
We don't describe it as totalitarian or oppression because, by looking around the world, we've seen real oppression and totalitarianism, and they weren't just an economic system. I mean, look at the Uighurs in China. That's oppression.
Note well: I am not saying that the economic system does not have its oppressive aspects. I am not saying that those aspects should not be improved. But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian". There's real things that the word applies to, and stretching it to apply to the economic system may help make your point, but it also hides the difference between the economic system and real totalitarianism. And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
(Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world.)
>by looking around the world, we've seen real oppression and totalitarianism, and they weren't just an economic system
This just dances around the core question, though: you say we've seen "real" totalitarianism, but by what do you judge that standard other than the uncritical ideological framework that's most common? Of course the treatment of the Uighurs is totalitarian, but that says little about what is and isn't totalitarian. Marcuse's claim isn't that "economic system" totalitarianism is the only kind, he's saying that the limiting of the concept in today's world is a result of technological and instrumental rationality, just as is the limiting of various other concepts - we conceive of totality, freedom, peace etc. within our rationalities, but Marcuse is saying that our very conception of what is rational changes in the advanced industrial age just as it changed in past ages more obviously (e.g the early Rennaisance moral opposition to a tradesman collecting profit other than by remuneration for his work of doing the transport).
>But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian".
Why couldn't it be the opposite - that the limited construction of the folk (generally uncritical) concept of totalitarianism is a restriction which works well to serve the interests of advanced industrial society?
>And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
Marcuse (nor any of his followers) argue that the forms of totalitarianism are qualitatively the same - in fact to do so would be self-defeating, because they want to draw a distinction between folk concepts of totalitarianism and critical concepts - and that is only possibly by accepting there is a difference between, for instance, the treatment of the Uighurs and economic totalitarianism.
>Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world
Marcuse is not strictly referring to philosophical logical positivism, since even by the time he was writing this application of the concept was waning - he is reacting against the "positivist" sociology which was dominant at the time (and some scholars would argue still is). The dispute (the "Positivism Dispute") refers to the debate over the notion of "historicism" and in particular revolves around Karl Popper's criticisms of critical theory methodology.
It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.