Abstract
Marxism and theorists of the Marxist community have been divided, it has long been noticed,’ into roughly two tendencies: one conceiving Marxism as “critique” and the other conceiving it to be some kind of social “science.” Marxism has been divided then between Critical Marxists and Scientific Marxists, as I shall call them here.
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Notes
See Werner Sombart, Le Socialisme et le mouvement social au XIX Siècle (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1898), pp. 108–10.
See the pithy discussion by N. Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 412ff.
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authorized English edition of 1888, supervised by Engels, published by Charles H. Kerr, Chicago.
Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” Telos, Spring 1973, p. 11.
Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” New Left Review, January/February 1966, p. 56. See my own discussion of this dualism in sociology in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 51ff.
For further discussion see Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 121–22.
George Lichtheim’s well-titled From Marx to Hegel (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), deals directly with the conflict between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian Marxisms, as well as with the development of the former into the Critical or Frankfurt School in the work of Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Lichtheim always knew who the players were and situated them deftly. The very breadth of Lichtheim’s scholarship, his even-handed treatment of conflicting standpoints, his insistence on clarity even from Germans, and his feeling for the historically concrete—all these are substantial virtues which make this book, with the exception of its last and very dated essay, useful reading for students of Marxism.
“This basis-superstructure metaphor,” we are reminded by Hal Draper, “sometimes treated as a late invention by Engels, was first set down in [their 1846] The German Ideology: ‘The social organization, evolving directly out of production and commerce … in all ages forms the basis of the state and of the rest of the ideological superstructure. …’ ” Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Part I: The State and Bureaucracy (New York: (Monthly Review Press, 1977), vol. 1, p. 252.
Russell Jacoby, “Politics of the Crisis Theory,” Telos, Spring 1975, p. 48. Italics added.
Philip Corrigan, Harvey Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 10. Italics in the original. A very able study written with great economy.
It has seemed to me that precisely this attitude prompted the denunciation of Thomas Kuhn’s careful critique of “normal” science, even though the critical facet of Kuhn’s view of science is greatly muted. See the volume edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
For details see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 53ff.
In this respect, Maoism represented the extension of Lenin’s emphasis on the initiatives of the political organization to a voluntarism stressing the initiatives and importance of the military. While Lenin had “regarded the use of armed force for revolutionary purposes as legitimate at all times and as crucial in the hour of decision, he never viewed it as means of gaining mass influence or of bringing about the revolutionary crisis” (Richard Lowenthal, “Soviet and Chinese Communist World Views,” in Donald W. Treadgold, ed., Soviet and Chinese Communism: Similarities and Differences, Seattle: University of Seattle Press, 1967], p. 383). Mao’s political strategy aimed at using “protracted armed struggle … as a means for reversing an originally unfavorable relation of forces between a revolutionary minority and an apparently strong regime” (Ibid., p. 385).
Robert Jay Lifton, America and the Asian Revolution (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970), p. 153.
Richard R. Fagen, “Cuban Revolutionary Politics,” Monthly Review, April 1972, p. 27.
E. L. Wheelwright and B. MacFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 221.
Michael Kosok, “Review of Wheelwright and MacFarlane,” Telos, Spring 1971, pp. 127–43.
In this vital respect, academic social “science” makes exactly the same claim and for much the same reason. See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 3–6, 8–13, 16–19, 34–35, 55, 57, 112–17, 216.
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© 1980 Alvin W. Gouldner
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Gouldner, A.W. (1980). Marxism as Science and Critique. In: The Two Marxisms. Critical Social Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16296-3_2
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