Found accidentally in an old issue of Partisan Review (Winter 1970-71) Marcuse’s letter to French critic Lucien Goldmann not only summarizes what the author himself thought of the main points of his book One Dimensional Man but puts forth a precise response to some of the criticisms voiced about his theories by other Marxists.
This short letter has ramifications for our present moment in relation to the recent surge of intellectual interest in accelerationist discourse, and the upcoming publication of Gilles Chatelet’s To Think and Live Like Pigs (translated by Robin mackay) by Urbanomic/Sequence. Like Chatelet, Marcuse balances his promethean stance with serious cautions about what he calls the unification of capitalism’s dialectics in “technological rationality”. Another important point in the text is how Marcuse embraces something very similar to Delueze’s notion of control society when he speaks about radical changes in the “social system” after the decline of industrial proletariat.