The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory

The complicated pathways of Gouldner's thought are hard to predict. Only last year, in his The Future of the Intellectual and the Rise of the New Class, he seemed to have completely broken with the Marxian tradition and to have confined it to the "dustbin of history," but in this book his ideas move again, as they have so often, within a broadly defined Marxian orbit. This book is a lucidly argued and elegantly presented discussion of Marxist theory from within. It is a superb addition to the literature on the subject. While many commentators on Marx, as well as many of those who consider themselves his disciples, have argued that Marx's theory was based on the scientific discovery of the laws of motion of (capitalist) society, and while others have argued to the contrary that such a positivistic interpretation does not do justice to a thinker who was, so they argue, steeped in a voluntaristic as well as a critical tradition, Gouldner contends that Marx's theory was indeed both positivistic and voluntaristic. Positivism and voluntarism stand side by side in the Marxian corpus and define its contradictory character. It behooves the analyst to recognize and analyze these parallel strains rather than to paper them over. Gouldner argues that the positivistic interpretation was largely upheld by the theorists of the Second International and by the dominant tendency in pre-World War I German Social Democracy, while critical Marxism dominated in Russia and the Third World but also among so diverse Western thinkers as Horkheimer, Gramsci, Lukacs, and Korsch. The diversity of theorists here grouped together as critical Marxists gives one pause. Is there really much in common between the thought of Mao or Castro and the highly sophisticated critical interpretations that have come from the pens of Lukacs or the Frankfort school? They all agree on a rejection of purely economic interpretations and tend, as I have argued a while ago, to be voluntaristic, but major differences between them are also pronounced. Rather than relying on currently fashionable binary classifications, Gouldner might have been advised to classify his "critical Marxists" into two subgroupings: intellectuals in relatively underdeveloped parts of the world were moved to a voluntaristic interpretation by the backwardness of societies in which the working class was weak, and industrialization little advanced. Here, for people in a hurry, voluntarism rather than waiting for later stages of development seemed indicated. In contrast, critical Marxists in the highly developed parts of the world were attracted to a voluntarism that was largely rooted in a revulsion from the cultural deprivations, the bureaucratized life-styles, and the lack of human spontaneity in the world of modernity. In this interpretation, despite many similarities, the Russian and Third World Marxists wished to reach modernity as quickly as possible, even if this meant a violation of the Marxian deterministic stages of history, while the Western critical Marxists reacted with romantic fervor against the effects of modernity. Such disagreements aside, I admire much in this book. A life-long immersion in Marxian texts enables Gouldner to read them with a sophistication which blinds him neither to their many anomalies and contradictions nor to their enduring significance. Taking a leaf from Thomas Kuhn, Gouldner argues that Marxist theory, after its initial stages of growth, hardened into paradigmatic forms and attempted to deal with major anomalies, such as the relatively autonomous role of the state and the Asiatic Mode of Production,