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

by Alvin Ward Gouldner

Book Overview

From the back cover: In The Two Marxisms sociology and Marxism complement and confront one another in a book that provides for Marxist theory what The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology did for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195030664
• ISBN13: 9780195030662
• Release Date: March 1982
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of Gouldner's last.

The influential 20th century sociologist Alvin Gouldner divided contemporary Marxists into two camps, humanistic and scientific. Gouldner's dichotomy is certainly not the only way to clarify distinctions among Marxist thinkers, activists, and revolutionaries, but it corresponds closely to the better known classification scheme that characterizes Marxists as either humanists or determinists. Consistent with Gouldner's categories, the humanists are interested in philosophical issues such as alienation, the perversion of human beings' near-infinite capacity for development and self-acutalization by an alien context fraught with oppression and self-defeating ideology. The humanists take great interest in Marx's early writings, especially the Economic and Philosophic Manuscsripts of 1844. This document provided an important departure for the critical philosopher Herbert Marcus, author of the oft-cited classic One Dimensional Man. Though a humanist, Marcuse's focus was on a social system that was structured to trick people into believing they were free by providing a seemingly endless list of choices in the form of opportunities for consumption. Rather than enabling people to realize their near-infinite potential for development, for self-realization, for transcending the status quo, technology-intensive productivity and readily available credit created a kind of person who was incapable of going beyond things as they were. Freedom, in this view, was nothing more than freedom to participate in a pre-determined way that maintains late capitalism. The trap of repressive desublimation -- undisciplined material and sexual consumption in the guise of freedom -- provides a conceptual link between freedom and determinism. Individuals make choices, but once again, the choices are contextually determined. During the relatively prosperous period from 1946 through 1972, Marcuse's interpretation seemed especially compelling. That's one reason why he was an iconic figure during the 1960's. The turn to Gouldner's scientific Marxism can best be construed as a shift in emphasis. Scientific Marxists are little concerned with any concrete individual, focusing instead on a rigidly deterministic contextual framework wherein the notion of free will makes no sense except as a plausible and convenient fraud. In this latter view, people exist only as manifestations of relationships, and in capitalist society these relationships are, first and foremost, exploitative relations of production, with capital extracting surplus value from labor. For scientific Marxists, efforts at piecemeal reform are hopelessly misguided. Transforming an entire social system is the only way to make life better. Moreover, they are convinced that they know how to do it. For them, after all, Marxism is an established science that has produced demonstrably useful knowledge, not merely a philosophical perspective or conceptual framework for further research. For scientific Marxists,