"Marcuse’s collection of revolutionary forces is a list so familiar in radical circles that we must be careful not to miss its extreme heterogeneity: the student movement in the United States, the black population of the urban slums in the United States, the Chinese cultural revolution, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Cuba. There are three elements in this collection: there are first the genuinely aspiring poor of America and peasants in Vietnam and elsewhere, who must not be confused with their self-appointed spokesmen; there are the middle-class whites of the SDS and their counterparts in Britain, Germany, and France, who in their combination of insurrectionism and anarchism exemplify what Lenin diagnosed as leftwing communism, an infantile disease; and there are the representatives of the Communist bureaucracies in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, who represent right-wing communism, an oligarchical disease. These forces have only one thing in common: they are in conflict with the governments of the advanced industrial societies. But, as both Marx and Lenin knew, to be in conflict with the established order is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation."
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Academics from ScotlandPhilosophers from ScotlandHistorians from Scotland20th-century philosophers21st-century philosophers
Original Language: English
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"On Marcuse", New York Times Review of Books, October 23, 1969. (Reprinted in Marcuse (1970), p. 89.)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre
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Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (12 January 1929 – 21 May 2025) was a Scottish-American philosopher primarily known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy but known also for his work in the history of philosophy and theology.
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