Benjamin Serby writes about the intellectual and political history of the postwar United States. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Honors College at Adelphi University.
Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.
Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there was Vito Marcantonio: East Harlem’s socialist congressperson, who fought for justice for Puerto Rico, sweeping civil rights, and a more radical New Deal.