Note: This piece was originally written as an essay for PHIL 593/GERM 365: Marxism and Critical Theory, a course at KU. It has since been further edited and refined.
What Marcuse’s Counterrevolution Can Teach Us about Treatlerites
“If socialism is so good, why is almost every country capitalist?”
Even if asked in good faith, this question is misleading, as it implies that socialism and capitalism are locked in an abstract, fair ideological battle. In reality, whenever an anti-capitalist force rises, the hegemonic capitalist order deliberately suppresses the potential for both imaginative and practical revolutionary action. Indeed, as Herbert Marcuse observes in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt, “the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad.”1 Under our highly-advanced stage of capitalism, the potential for revolt in the imperial core has plummeted while the violence of empire continues to spread. The counterrevolution secures these dynamics in a number of ways, but perhaps most insidiously, it makes Westerners apathetic to the consequences of capital.
Capitalism has not always looked the way it does today. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin described imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism.” In 1965 Kwame Nkrumah described neo-colonialism as “the last stage of imperialism.”2 Today, surveillance capitalism, neoliberalism, and other such developments have arguably made these absolute “last” and “final” descriptors obsolete. Still, in the most advanced stage of capitalism at the time Marcuse was writing, the term Gross National Product (GNP), now referred to as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was becoming a mainstream metric to evaluate the health of ‘the economy’. Marcuse laments this statistical model as a farcical way to evaluate social wealth and progress, as that number and its upward trajectory is constant justification for capitalist exploitation at the cost of poor people.3 Herein lies a key characteristic of the counterrevolution: it uses the simplest means to justify itself. It is far more challenging to constantly and compelling justify the legitimacy of a system that is so exploitative as late-stage capitalism, and it is not as easy to regularly cull vast swaths of the domestic population as it is to do in other countries, so capitalists have developed ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ ways to prove their superiority; if the number is big and rising, things must be good, including for workers.
While such justifications may not be compelling for those in the hyperexploited Global South, they have evidently been compelling enough to the working classes of the most advanced capitalist countries. For those far from the imperial core, their labor is expropriated and made to create wealth for those at the top of the imperial hierarchy. In contrast, despite being subject to exploitation, by virtue of their proximity to empire, workers in the imperial core experience some of its benefits and return of its extraction, often in the form of better pay and consumerist accommodations. It is “no wonder then, that where the capitalist technostructure still preserves a relatively high standard of living and a power structure virtually immune to popular control,” the working classes there are “apathetic if not thoroughly hostile to socialism.”4 As such, “the highest stage of capitalist development corresponds, in the advanced capitalist countries, to a low of revolutionary potential,”5 with the benefits of proximity to empire being enough to sate the appetites of enough workers to effectively suppress revolutionary potential. In this sense, then, counterrevolution can simply entail sating the worker’s appetite for freedom with what will be termed here as ‘little treats.’
Internet-focused news site The Daily Dot explains that the term “Treatler” is “a portmanteau of the words ‘treat’ and ‘Hitler’ and is used as a pejorative against people who excessively indulge in consumer luxuries.”6 The term, which is clear comedic hyperbole, was originally coined in response to those who overindulge in personal food delivery services like Doordash and Grubhub, acting like little fascists towards their delivery workers, but it since has come to refer more broadly to those who are willing to overlook the objectively terrible and unnecessary conditions which produced their many petty consumer goods.
Notably, Marcuse addressed this same phenomenon half a century earlier. As he describes it,
Capital now produces, for the majority of the population in the metropoles, not so much material privation as steered satisfaction of material needs, while making the entire human being – intelligence and senses – into an object of administration, geared to produce and reproduce not only the goals but also the values and promises of the system, its ideological heaven.7
These “treatlerites,” then, do not emerge simply by virtue of their consumerism, but because capital has oriented them towards doing so. With each new opportunity for extraction of value and exploitation of labor, the worker is driven further into the ground while the consumer’s endless appetite is temporarily satiated. Of course, the worker and the consumer here are the same person, yet they increasingly define themselves by their position as the latter rather than the former. Their appetites are only endless because of the ideology ingrained into the consumer identity they prize. As such, when their little treats are threatened, they support the counterrevolution – even if it means mowing over their fellow workers in the process. All the while, the capitalist becomes richer and the worker becomes poorer. Yet even as both the worker’s thoughts and senses, mind and body, are constantly assailed by the consequences of their exploitedness, they refuse to revolt. Their apathy is palpable.8
In Counterrevolution, Marcuse is highly cynical about the chances for genuine revolutionary action among Western workers. For him, their proximity to empire and its spoils means that the basis for revolution cannot simply be a matter of meeting the vital material needs of the people.9 As such, “the established mode of production can only sustain itself by constantly augmenting the mass of luxury goods and services beyond the satisfaction of vital material needs…, which means augmenting the consumer population… capable of buying these goods,”10 giving the consumer the means to acquire more little treats without giving the worker the means for their liberation. It is hard to convince an individualistic consumer who is satisfied enough with their position being such, and who is sufficiently fearful of losing access to their little treats, that they are a worker who ought to fight for their class’ liberation as such.
Marcuse also remarks on the success of the counterrevolution in its mundane forms, like convincing the masses of the virtues of its more aggressive forms, like fascism. Just as there are higher stages of capitalism, there may also be higher stages of fascism – stages which are brought to fruition far more unassumingly than Hitler’s Germany. As Marcuse remarks, “the potential mass base for social change may well become the mass base for fascism: ‘[Americans] may well be the first people to go Fascist by the democratic vote.’”11 Given the massive technological and economic resources of the US, this possibility is terrifying. And with an army of treatlerites standing by, ready to do nothing as it happens, it would be dishonest to speak of this American fascism as purely hypothetical.
However, the roots of this movement, which we see materializing today under Trump, have existed for quite some time. For instance, Marcuse speaks to a particular response to the Kent State Massacre, in which four students were gunned down by the US National Guard in May of 1970 for observing a protest of the Vietnam war 300 feet away. After the killing, a mother of three students who were present at the massacre was interviewed by a researcher about her thoughts on the matter. Despite them playing no active part in the protests, the mother did not simply condemn her sons, but outright said that they should have been shot. What’s more, the only condition she placed on her open endorsement of the killing of her own children was them not following orders. She also stated that anyone present at the protest with long hair, dirty clothes, bare feet, or lazy tendencies “deserve[d] to be shot.”12 Such an active rejection of the humanity of even one’s own children on the basis of what we may call today ‘culture war issues’ and aesthetic, sensational, petty gripes is the product of an alienation from one’s self, one’s family, and one’s morals under a decaying late-stage capitalist system. It is this malignant, overtly-violent apathy which the submissive, passive apathy of the treatlerites enables.
While fascism can be fueled by an outright willingness to bring harm to one’s fellow people, for the counterrevolution to be successful, the variable sections of the population must either outright aid in the project or remain idle. While allies in ideology and goals are certainly beneficial for a counterrevolutionary movement, much of that is found in the ruling class. What remains, then, is for the class consciousness of the working class to be kept far below the threshold of revolution. In this case, it entails the continuous dangling of access to little treats over the heads of Western workers, who have enough to fear losing it but do not have enough to change their class position; they are comparatively-wealthy workers, but they are workers nonetheless. Fascism through apathy, omission, and indifference is the mark of successful counterrevolution. After all, there was a word for members of the Nazi party who didn’t really agree with its messaging but joined in anyway, be it because they got swept up in the hype, wanted economic stability, or feared what the future held for their country. That word was Nazi.
To find solutions to this counterrevolutionary plague, Marcuse looks to ongoing movements towards revolution and against counterrevolution but finds them entirely insufficient. In fact, he dedicates multiple sections to critiquing the “exceptionally weak” New Left, lambasting their false consciousness, wrongful intellectualism, and failure to act in a principled manner.13 In his text “The New Radicals in the Multiversity,” New Left student activist Charles Kerr speaks to this criticism by noting that the New Left, particularly its student adherents, engage with “Marx’s favorite motto – doubt everything” and that “the only way we can answer [questions of theory] is in practice.”14 Thus, while one can reasonably argue the New Left had a “lack of a coherent ideology and strategy for social change,” it can be simultaneously true that there remains potential in their organizing strategies and philosophies.15 Indeed, Marcuse himself spoke favorably of student organizing in a series of correspondences with his colleague and fellow critical theorist Theodor “Teddy” Adorno. In reference to unrest and protest over free speech and expression at UC Berkeley, Marcuse argued that, “in certain situations, occupation of buildings and disruption of lectures are legitimate forms of political protest” and that “the students know all too well the objective limits of their protest,” pointing to the potential in their organizing, even despite its limits.16 Marcuse sees there being some hope in the future, noting that “the next revolution will be the concern of generations,” which may take a hundred years or more.17 In the meantime, however, movements continue to flounder and lose their way, with the counterrevolution marching on.
The counterrevolution is one which infects the mind of the worker, telling them that they are better off as they are now – ordering food from personal serfs via UberEats, passively endorsing whatever the ruling class wants for their promise to keep the price of eggs down – than they would be as a revolutionary. And without their starving belly or an unobscured anguished conscience to tell them otherwise, most every consumer believes it. The contradictions Marcuse speaks of, and indeed propagates himself to an extent, in the apathetic hopelessness of the working class for a better world exist in different forms than they did in the early 1970s, yet they exist today all the same.18 From doomerism to Capitalist Realism, the Western working class, particularly younger workers, feel today powerless to change ‘the system’. So many desperately find justifications to preserve the succulent morsels of wealth that have seeped in from the bourgeois imperial well because any alternative feels impossible.19
Still, even as they actively acknowledge the extent of ideology in those around them, Marxists must remain optimists on revolution. The final battle the counterrevolution must win is that of imagination, and so as long as some dare to envision alternatives, to reject treatlerism, and to refuse apathy to capital, there remains the potential for liberation. To forget this is to give in to the bourgeoisie’s siren call of a meager living at the expense of workers not so proximal to capital.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodore and Herbert Marcuse. “Correspondence on the German Student Movement.” 4 June 1969
Davidson, Carl. The New Radicals in the Multiversity: And Other SDS Writings on Student Syndicalism (1966-67). C.H. Kerr, 1990.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books, 2022.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917.
Marcuse, Herbert. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Beacon Press, 1972.
Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism. 1965.
Walsh, Bryan. “Fighting Back against the Pessimism of Doomers.” Vox, Vox Media, 20 Mar. 2023
Endnotes
- Marcuse, Herbert. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Beacon Press, 1972. p. 1
- Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917 ; Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism. 1965
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 4
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 4
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 5
- Weedston, Lindsey. “‘I’m a Fancy Treat Boy, Look at My Treat!’: The Internet’s New Diss, ‘Treatler,’ Explained.” The Daily Dot, 10 Jan. 2025
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 14
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 22
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 18
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 19
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 25
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 26
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 29; sections IV-VII
- Davidson, Carl. The New Radicals in the Multiversity: And Other SDS Writings on Student Syndicalism (1966-67). C.H. Kerr, 1990. p. 5
- Davidson, Multiversity, p. 5
- Adorno, Theodore and Herbert Marcuse. “Correspondence on the German Student Movement.” 4 June 1969
- Marcuse, Counterrevolution, p. 134
- Foster, John Bellamy and Gabriel Rockhill. “Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue.” Monthly Review, 1 Mar. 2025
- Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books, 2022; Walsh, Bryan. “Fighting Back against the Pessimism of Doomers.” Vox, Vox Media, 20 Mar. 2023
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