If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident Rudolf Bahro (author of Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus [trans. James Chevedden made a written complaint to the Superior General of the Jesuit Order Peter-Hans Kolvenbach regarding the promotion of the ideology of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse at the 1998 California Jesuit Province Social Pastoral Conference. His work for the OSS involved research on Nazi Germany and denazification.

Active in the United States after 1934 his intellectual concerns were the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and modern technology. and internationally.