With his most famous book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse contributed something to the false thesis that Western capitalist democracies and Soviet-style dictatorships were, alike, ‘totalitarian’. This passage from the book’s opening chapter sums up the line of thought:
For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a “pluralism” of parties, newspapers, “countervailing powers,” etc.
The ‘manipulation of needs’ thesis plays an important part here, because it is the theorist’s judgement that the needs being met are foisted upon a population not in a position to know any better – to know what its true and authentic needs are. One of the strengths of advanced capitalism, however, has been its ability to meet perfectly genuine needs, as well as to create interest in new types of product that are, in themselves, unobjectionable and make people’s lives easier and/or more enjoyable. That these benefits are not distributed fairly is a serious shortcoming, but it doesn’t undo the fact that the thesis about manipulating needs is misleadingly one-sided, at best. Marcuse, furthermore, also put forward the idea of ‘repressive tolerance‘, according to which even the overt political virtue of liberal pluralist societies could be seen as self-cancelling because of the way in which tolerance of dissent serves to blunt and absorb ideas critical of the status quo. If Marx’s Capital is on sale in attractive and affordable paperback editions, this supposedly demonstrates the power of capitalism to ‘take over’ the very cultural outputs aimed against it.
Of this you can find some account here by Peter Thompson. In one point, though, Thompson goes too far. He writes:
Constitutional liberty and equality was all very well, he [Marcuse] argued, but if it simply masked institutionalised inequality then it was worse than useless.
‘Worse than useless’ is a conventional phrase, but although Marcuse was certainly responsible for eliding the differences between real totalitarianism and pluralist democracy, he did not negate them altogether by saying that constitutional liberty and equality were worse than useless:
Still, for the administered individual, pluralistic administration is far better than total administration. One institution might protect him against the other; one organization might mitigate the impact of the other; possibilities of escape and redress can be calculated. The rule of law, no matter how restricted, is still infinitely safer than rule above or without law.
It is an insufficient qualification of Marcuse’s main argument, but a qualification is what it is.