Vincent Geoghegan (1981) Reason & Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse, London: Pluto.

In questions over the viability of a revolutionary subject, Henri Marcuse famously ties together the personal and the political taking into consideration what people do, especially to eachother, at all levels as political acts. There is a hint of Deleuze and Guattari in Marcuse in the power of sexuality and desire to unsettle the repressive work ethic that sustained capitalism. 

The waning potential for revolutionary praxis might thereby be seen as a psychological problem (not just latent class consciousness but the influence of psychanalysis that the Frankfurt School brought to bear on social theory) like repression as a way of reconciling a larger disillusionment and uncertainty with the rise of fascism, and existing 'socialism' in 1930s Russia. He maintained: 'Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth not vice versa.' (Geoghegan 1981: 37; from Reason and Revolution, London: Routledge 1969: 322). Marcuse argues that the proletariat cannot fulfill their historical role as agents of revolution because they have ceased to be the negation of domination, and lacking an object to turn against (class enemy). This leads Marcuse to the concept of the 'Great Refusal' (or 'absolute negation' in dialectical terms) to describe the ideas and actions that reject current reality in favour of superior life  (that includes art, philosophy and sexuality). 

Art, have a privileged position in Marcuse's thinking with both a critical and anticipatory function tying it to politics. According to Marcuse, and somewhat controversially as it is a somewhat romantic position, art has autonomy outside of the intentions of the artist, and can be used to engage politics, and is not reducible to ideology having certain universal properties. 
Technology is considered totalitarian in contrast. The opening of the first chapter of One-Dimensional Man reads: 'A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.' (Geoghegan 1981: 73; Marcuse 1972: 16) This is the triumph of what Marcuse calls 'technological rationality'. Art and technology express different tendencies in that the rarefied and individualised high art can be seen as positive next to the mass culture of organised capitalism where individualism is destroyed. Like Adorno, popularity was taken as uncritical.  

This position is somewhat apparent in his approach to work and how this relates to the realm of alienated and non-alienated labour. To Marcuse, labour expressed and realised the essence of the human species. Although the human subject is always forced to work, elements of freedom are expressed in some forms of labour more than others; such as intellectual work (and in particular in the arts and sciences). He says labour can never be totally unalienated: 'In labor one is always distanced from one's self-being and directed toward something else; one is always with others and for others' (Geoghegan 1981: 9; from 'On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor Economics', in Telos 16, 1973: 17). However, in play, the subject is somewhat freed from the alien quality of objects: 'While playing, one does not conform to the object' (ibid 1981: 10; in 1973: 14-15 ). His interest in sexuality (in Eros and Civilisation, 1972) might be seen in this context as non-work or leisure, with so-called 'perversions' such as narcissism and homosexuality potentially acting as a challenge to the exploitative organisation of labour as expressed in procreative sexuality that stands for social reproduction (Geoghegan 1981: 53-4). In Marcuse's terms 'Eros' had to be unleashed and not partial or directed onto normalised objects. Play allows for this, as does the dialectical potential of total automation where labour is no longer required: 'The elimination of human potentialities from the world of (alienated) labor creates the preconditions for the elimination of labor from the world of human potentialities.' (Geoghegan 1981: 57; in Eros and Civilisation, 1972: 83) Present reality is slavery that eros unleashes. More precisely, he is drawing upon Marx in the Grundrisse who predicts the end of capitalism through automation, wherein the exploitation of labour is undermined (1981: 83).