History vs. Prophecy

...I am a victim of the same condition...

...Occasionally, though, he is carried away by his own imaginative exuberance, as when he notes that Marx fathered an illegitimate child at the same time that he was "pregnant" with the "illicit" idea of the autonomy of the state advanced in The Eighteenth Bru-maire...

...He counterposes Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Toennies and Parsons to Marxism, but alludes only briefly to Max Weber, who more than anyone else saw the very interconnections he suggests among the Asiatic Mode of Production, the state and classes, and civil society...

...He concludes that "the AMP as a topic was repressed [by Marx and Engels] because it was anomalous from the standpoint of Marx's primary paradigm...

...Anomalies" and "paradigm" are, of course, terms borrowed from Thomas Kuhn, whose account of stability and change in theory-making Gouldner employs with great subtlety and fertility...

...the proletariat, caught in the cunning of history, is the servant of that higher destiny...

...Do we really need another demonstration of its presence in Marxism...

...and the "event-generated"—those caused by the momentous changes in the world since the death of the two founders that are so difficult to square with expectations derived from their theory...

...Scientific Marxists draw their major theoretical sustenance from Capital and the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy...

...He can even be seen as having applied Robert Michels' fa-mous"iron law of oligarchy" in creating first a party and then a state...

...Deng is, in fact, much more representative of Third World Marxism than the ideological vaporings of Mao and Castro: Marxism has long appealed to underdeveloped countries as a road to economic development through forced-draft industrialization where no bourgeoisie exists to promote development by capitalist means...

...Gouldner distinguishes between two kinds of anomaly: the "research-generated"—those emerging from the historical research and analysis carried out by Marx and Engels themselves...

...The growth of private property and of a proprietary class, leading ultimately to the bourgeois society based upon them, may therefore have represented the fundamental "break in history": "From a standpoint that assigns strategic significance to the shift from landed property to capital, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie may not be as historically significant as the emergence of capitalism...

...One may be able to move to something higher than capitalism on the scale of human freedom only by preserving the civil society, the public sphere and, in the broadest sense, the bourgeois individualist ethos that made capitalism itself possible...

...However, if Lenin was vol-untaristic with reference to the workings of the "objective" economic forces so stressed by Scientific Marxists, he was at the same time a strict organizational determinist...

...Scientific Marxism is deterministic and regards "objective conditions" governed by economic "laws of development," rather than political action, as the major source of social change...

...Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and the neo-Hegelians of the Frankfurt School are the fount of Critical Marxism...

...The present book is the third in a series entitled "The Dark Side of the Dialectic" and the first in a planned trilogy on Marxism...

...But the Chou-Deng faction now in power has surely always been equally voluntaristic in equating socialism with state-directed modernization, even though the goal is an "economistic" one rather than the creation of "new men" purified of selfish, materialistic strivings...

...The first and longest section of Gouldner's new book, where he develops the distinction between the "two Marxisms" of the title, does not quite manage to make me forget my fatigue, despite its sharp perceptions, able textual scholarship and lively stylistic flourishes...

...The doctrines of the Second International and the official creed of the Soviet Union exemplify Scientific Marxism...

...I think Gouldner makes a much more valuable contribution here in moving beyond the largely "hermeneutic" analysis of the theory's contradictions in the first part of the book...

...Gouldner's last three books have moved in a Marxist ambience, although only this one takes Marxism as its essential topic...

...The remaining two sections, however, and especially the final one, do succeed in dispelling my ennui by identifying with precision and originality the persistent theoretical blockages and ideological blindspots that have eroded inexorably, if in fits and starts, the credibility of all versions of Marxism in the present century...

...One of their number once dismissed Maoism—to Gouldner the most pronounced form of Third World Critical Marxism—as the reduction of Marxism to the level of Asiatic peasant superstition...

...It also fulfills the promise made in his best-known work, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), to subject Marxism to the same critical analysis he directed there against "academic sociology," especially the work of Talcott Parsons...

...The discussion of the first kind of anomaly includes one of the best analyses I have ever read of the different senses in which "economic determinism" is present in the work of Marx and En-gels...

...critical Marxists are nourished by the Paris manuscripts, the Theses on Feuerbach and the Grundrisse...

...If 1 didn't know that Gouldner started his career as one of the very first sociologists to make use of Weber's concept of bureaucracy in his research, I would be tempted to apply to him Frank Parkin's brilliant quip that "inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Web-erian struggling to get out...

...All this is pretty well-trodden ground by now...

...Next, he moves on to the concept of "civil society" that Marx shared with the fathers of sociology and, in effect, "rediscovers" the origins of sociology, completing the circle that he began a decade ago in The Coming Crisis...

...The classification of Third World Marxism—or should it be Marxist "Third Worldism"?—as Critical Marxism strikes a particularly discordant note...

...If this is a nightmare for Marxism, to some of us, even to some who continue to call themselves Marxists, it is no more than what we have long known, or at least felt, in the depths of our being...

...Gouldner concludes: "In this nightmare scenario, it is the West that is the true agent of historical development...

...Gouldner forces too much that is diverse onto the Procrustean bed of his dualism...

...The affinity between Lenin and American organizational theorists was remarked upon 20 years ago by Sheldon Wolin in Politics and Vision...

...And a new despotism...

...author, "Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses" Alvin W. Gouldner's intellectual productivity is extraordinary...

...Gouldner here converges with a number of sophisticated marxisant intellectuals in both Europe and America who came to Marxism in the '60s, although he, of course, is an older man who has always been "for sociology" and cannot be accused of reinventing the wheel...

...from a comparative perspective on the stagnant Asiatic Mode of Production, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie may appear to be a perilous experiment threatening a new stagnation...

...The second nightmare is more original and represents, as Gouldner says, "an even deeper dragon of the mind that stirs fitfully within it...

...The two Marxisms are distinguished by their relative stress on determinism and voluntarism, the principal contradiction in the original work of Marx and Engels because both emphases are present...

...One sighs a little at the prospect of two more books on Marxism, even by this author...

...More importantly, by now there are many Marxisms abroad...

...The first is that it has become no more than "another religion of the oppressed—a revolutionary messianism, as Georg Lukacs once described his own Marxism...

...Thus Lenin's vanguard party and Stalin's "revolution from above" have provided models for the backward countries, rather than for the advanced capitalist world, to emulate...

...The debate over determinism and voluntarism is, as Gouldner acknowledges, one of the major antinomies of Western thought, with roots in Christian theology, and central to all social theory...

...After all, the founding fathers of Critical Marxism—Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno?were men steeped in German high culture who could scarcely have been less preoccupied with the concerns of non-Western societies...

...Gouldner recognizes that Lenin was a voluntarist in practice, but says very little about Stalinism, presumably saving it for the one of the later books in his trilogy...

...Critical Marxism, on the other hand, gives primacy to the collective will to overthrow capitalism and to the critique of ideology over economic analysis, it stresses human choice rather than the constraints of social structure and questions the subordination of consciousness, culture and all noneco-nomic institutions to the economy...

...In contrast to several of his earlier essays, where Gouldner had proclaimed Maoism to be the "most realistic Marxism," here the importance of Maoism is played down, doubtless in recognition of events in China since Mao's death...

...He then reviews in detail the relationship between State and Class in Marxism, a subject of almost obsessive concern to contemporary Western Marxists...

...Rein-hard Bendix complained a few years ago that he was suffering from "Marx fatigue," an occupational ailment he compared to the "metals fatigue" that often afflicts certain classes of industrial workers...

...True, Third World Marxism is "vol-untaristic" and, as Gouldner notes, both Mao and Fidel Castro extolled ideological fervor over economic incentives in the "building of socialism...

...Gouldner is very good, to be sure, in criticizing previous discussions that have identified the distinction over-concretely as one between Marx and Engels, between the "young" and the "old" Marx, between Marxists from more economically advanced and more backward regions, or between the generations of Marxist thinkers preceding and following the Bolshevik Revolution...

...Yet the high point of the book is the section on the second kind of anomaly, essentially on how history has confounded the original Marxist prophecy...

...It is that socialism without the civil society that arose uniquely in the West, instead of liberating mankind, is merely a reversion to the Asiatic Mode of Production in all of its centralized tyranny...

...He also discovers all sorts of fascinating hidden correspondences between a commitment to one or the other Marxism and a variety of apparently unrelated matters...

...It is surprising that Gouldner, who specialized in organizational analysis before he turned to theory and the sociology of knowledge, should overlook this affinity in his discussion of Leninism and Third World Marxism, both of which he associates with Critical and not Scientific Marxism...

...The last half of The Two Marxisms deals with the "anomalies" revealed when the Marxist "paradigm" is applied to the real historical world...

...I wish that he could be persuaded to develop further the substantive themes in the last section of The Two Marxisms, using Marxism as one resource among others instead of making it his main topic...

...This is the conclusion reached by Leszek Kola-kowski in his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (a work, incidentally, that seems to reduce the urgency of the need for Gouldner's additional volumes, at least as he describes them...

...Gouldner is obviously saving something for the future volumes of his proposed trilogy...

...He likes to write books in overlapping sets of three...

...Gouldner's final chapter argues that contemporary Marxism is haunted by two nightmares...

...Gouldner reviews Marx and Engels' scattered writings on the Asiatic Mode of Production, noting that they are far more sparse and fugitive than has often been suggested by later Western interpreters trying to account for, or explain away, the monstrosities of Stalinism that were justified in the name of Marxism itself...