In the 60s we used to make a distinction between the New Left and the old left. The old left was still around. They were old men who had admired Marxist-Leninism in the 20s or who had considered themselves communists and admired the Societ Union before it was obvious what "Uncle Joe" Stalin was up to. They continued to hold the values of universal brotherhood, considered the working class to be mainly saints, and were antagonistic to the capitalist class. Their political aspirations were mainly the pipedreams that old men dream or regrets for what might have been.
The New Left was different. We were going to make it happen - revolution that is. Thousands of college kids were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. A cultural and sexual revolution was under way. Someone told me, "Bellbottoms are revolutionary," and I better get rid of my straight-legged jeans. On the left everyone was a brother or sister even if you hadn't met them before. The Black Panthers were our heroes. Che Guevara was a hero. Country Joe and the Fish sang "And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." Mario Savio instigated the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley by using the F word liberally.
The father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, was teaching at the University of California San Diego where I was a graduate student. (By the way, Herbert and I share the same birthday.) Marcuse was a German Jew who had escaped Hitler, come to America, worked for the CIA and finally wound up in Academia. He was a philosopher who had written several up to then not very widely read books. Marcuse was a Freudian-Marxist, someone who combined the revolutionary ideas of Marx with the revolutionary ideas of Freud. In appearance he seemed rather grandfatherly, certainly professorial and a kindly old man. He was in his seventies when he lectured in German philosophy at UCSD. Hegel's dialectic was on the menu. I enjoyed every minute of his lectures so much I didn't want to miss anything so I never took notes. I wasn't taking the course for credit anyway.
I was a graduate student in the Applied Physics and Computer Science Department and wanted to do my thesis on voting systems and social choice theory as I thought, if you were going to replace all the institutions of society in one fell swoop by having a revolution, you should at least have some idea, some theoretical underpinning, of the kind of society you wanted to replace it with. As such I was an ambivalent revolutionary. The Applied Physics and Computer Science Department was eager to get rid of me as I was the only student in engineering that had radical views and thought that, instead of proceeding with business as usual, we all should be doing everything we could to bring the war to an end. Toward that end a meeting had been arranged between Marcuse and me to see if it might be a good idea for me to switch departments and become his student. When I told him about my interest in applying information theory to voting systems and conflict resolution, he said, "Don't give them a blueprint." Well, I thought the most I could do was to provide a road map, not a blueprint, but I did want to proceed with my technical aspirations for societal architecture rather than writing diatribes about the labor theory of value which I had done more or less as a hobby but which I didn't consider to have any lasting value.
Marcuse had written a book, "Eros and Civilization," which was my Bible along with Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death," and Wilhelm Reich's "Mass Psychology of Fascism." Reich's book was actually banned in the US at that time so we considered it a revolutionary act to steal a copy out of a Canadian library and reprint a hundred copies which we gave away for free, of course, to anybody that was interested. Marcuse's basic oeuvre as a Freudian-Marxist was that repression of the instincts (primarily the sexual instinct) led to all sorts of right-wing impulses such as hate, greed and war. This was also the basic belief of Brown and Reich. Marcuse advocated in circumlocutory English (it was obvious he thought in German) the "liberation of the instincts." The general idea was that, if people were unrepressed and sexually fulfilled, this would lead to a world of brotherly love which would be filled with non-greedy people willing to share what they had with others. From this a society based on the principal "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" would actually be possible and could actually be built.
Hence, the motto "Make Love, Not War" was seen as an admirable weltanschauung. The problem, which can now be seen with 20-20 hindsight, is that the Freudian-Marxist central tenet did not turn out to be correct. Liberation of the instincts (which was probably more due to Hugh Hefner than Herbert Marcuse since I'll wager more people read Playboy than "Eros and Civilization") certainly did take place. But it didn't reduce the amount of hate and greed in the world. In fact just the opposite. Hate and greed were liberated as well. This was borne out as the criminal population soon took advantage of all the free love and brotherly and sisterly trust. College girls hitchhiking down the coast to UCSD pretty soon started to be assaulted by those taking advantage of the love fest.
Charles Manson, more than anyone, put an end to the era of love and trust by killing a pregnant Sharon Tate. People started to get more conservative in their values. It was "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" all over again. The commercializers and predators moved in on the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury hippies started turning into street people still believing "Love is all you need" and that their brothers and sisters would be happy to share their spare change with them. In a massive counter-revolution, mainstrean America elected Nixon President in 1968. In the eighties Reagan led us all to believe that "greed is good." We needn't repress our urges to be greedy and selfish. Private property was good. Communal living was unAmerican. Sharing was bad.
In the final analysis liberation of the instincts did nothing to bring about a more just, equitable or loving society. People are certainly less repressed than they were, say, in the fifties - less repressed sexually and less repressed psychologically with respect to all the emotions especially anger, egotism and greed. So whether society is better or worse off, it is certainly a mixed bag. In some ways society is better off; in some ways, worse. However, liberation of the instincts did not lead to a change in the structure of society as envisioned by Marcuse et al. But Marcuse had an out, theoretically at least, something he called "repressive desublimation" which explained why liberation of the instincts might not lead to an ideal society. Irregardless of the theoretical fig leaf, I think that whatever changes there have been in societal structure or in the realm of politics have generally been in the opposite direction from the one Marcuse and the other Freudian- Marxists envisioned.
