Critical Sociology and Authoritarian State Socialism

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas has demonstrated the possibility in the West of a process of democratisation that shows the limits of technocratic rationalisation of polity and economy. Moreover, he has done this (however tentatively) while presenting advanced capitalism as a framework of political and cultural instabilities, potentially crisis- and conflict-laden. It is thus that he has reconstructed Marxism as a critical sociology. However, he has not systematically addressed the problem of the relationship of a Marxist critical sociology to those societies that use a version of Marxism as their ‘ideology’ of legitimation. While it is not necessarily his task or that of his co-workers to produce a theory of the so-called socialist societies, it is nevertheless fair to ask if those approaches and concepts of his that have universal aspiration contribute to such a critical theory. For today most inherited Marxist theory, from Engels and Plekhanov to Lenin and Trotsky (and even Lukács, Gramsci and Sartre), is either powerless in the face of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or worse even contributes to their legitimation. In this essay I shall attempt to investigate the possible uses of Starnberg critical sociology for the study of these societies.