Herbert Marcuse, a prominent Marxist scholar of the
Frankfurt School,
wrote: “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude.” People need to be conscious of their servitude first, of being oppressed before they can react through revolution, explained Gonzalez.
According to Marcuse, the American worker was never going to overthrow the system because the American worker was too content and too happy with capitalism, Gonzalez said.
Marcuse posited that there would be people of different races and colors who would be the revolutionary base that would rise up and overthrow the so-called oppressive system, but they must be instructed first about their oppression and servitude, Gonzalez said.
Taking responsibility for one’s own life and dealing with one’s problems individually is not what Marxists advocate. They admit that a person can succeed individually but claim that by doing so the person joins a bad system, Gonzalez explained.
Gonzalez said that
Angela Davis, an American communist activist, professor, and intellectual mentor to the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization, openly stated that a person who succeeds in life as an individual joins a “heteronormative, systemically racist” system that needs to be dismantled.
In order to dismantle the system, according to Marxist thought, “you need to be upset,” he said, to feel victimized by the system, and only then will people act collectively.
Therefore, Marxists “don’t want individual improvement—in fact, they militate against all the things that would help the individual succeed in society,” Gonzalez said.
