I have not commented on Marcuse's work for the US govt; what is striking of course is that he contributed to the stabilization of exactly that liberal form of govt in Germany he rails against in his American writings as the new kind of totalitarianism. There seems to be an important contradiction here between theory and praxis, mentioned by Bronner in a footnote in his excellent book on critical theory.
In terms of the orthodox theory of the class struggle, let's isolate two elements quickly.
First, only after Marx was historical progress understood to be follow from the conquest by the laboring class of new freedoms and rights. Sismondi had attributed the unique freedoms of the Occident to popular struggles but Marx developed the insight and took us beyond a world of kings and great men. This is developed in Grossmann's Evolutionist Revolt Against Classical Economics, part II,
Second, Marx emphasized that he had not discovered the class struggle but only uncovered the historical roots of this antagonism, while demonstrating scientifically that capital not only produces and intensifies this antagonism but provides also the material base for overcoming it (see Geoffrey Pilling, Marx's Capital).
Now you are correct that this leaves under determined the subjective dimension of the workers' struggle for a new form of society. Perhaps the theorists you lean on will provide insight; perhaps the autonomists of Negri, Cleaver, the Open Marxists (Holloway,Bonefeld) will open the field; perhaps we need to return to Korsch and Lukacs and Gramsci. I began reading Bruce Fink's book on Lacan but have not worked out my ideas on Lacan or jouisannce yet. I have to admit that after reading Andreski's comments on Lacan in Social Science as Sorcery I was pretty skeptical but I live with a big fan of Zizek.
>In other words - Marcuse's Great
>Refusal - an emphatic refusal - is part and parcel of a Hegelian
>praxis vs. a positivistic analysis of political economy. But
>don't worry, don't let philosophizing get in your way
If Patrick Murray has Hegel's influence on Marx's conception of science right, then the late Marcuse's Great Refusal represents a severing in that Marcuse no longer understands science as the searching out of reality's capacities for upheaval and for the satisfcation of previoulsy unmet needs and aspiration; that is Marcuse has given up the model of change through self contradiction that impels Hegel's Phenomology. See Patrick Murray profound Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge.
Cf Colletti's Marcuse critique in From Rousseau to Lenin, p. 137ff
To this I would add the rather prosaic point that Marcuse's favored agents of change simply did not have the latent social power to change society. There is little hope in a critical ideology that simply does not muster the material power with which to counter the material power of capital
Murray quotes Marx as follows in order to show how the practical potency of Marx's type of immanent science compared to German idealism's listless apprehension of empirical reality:
"But it seems rather than philsoophy, precisely because it was only the transcedent, abstract expression of the given state of affairs; on account of its transcedence and abstraction, its *imaginary difference* from teh world, must have fancied itself to have left the actual state of affairs and actual men far beneath it; that on the other hand, because it did not *actually* differentiate itself from the world, philosophy could not let fall any *actual* judgement on it, could not bring to bear any real differentiating force against the world, and thus could not *practically* intervene in the world." Holy Family.
Now I admit to my having learned about the Marx/Hegel relation, especially in terms of the former's appropriation of the latter's logic of essence to understand the value form, from Murray, not Marcuse.
best, rakesh