The Contradictions of Marxism

Introduction to an Auto-Critique

This site’s “Marxist critique of leftism” has attempted to rescue the former from its submersion in the latter. By applying the tools of Marxist analysis to the left, it has aimed to separate Marx’s ruthless criticism from the leftist intellectuals and activists who mystify reality and rationalize progressive liberalism in his name. Yet even as I have demonstrated classical Marxism’s historical and theoretical antagonism with the utopian socialists and romantic anti-capitalists that have typically comprised the left (and lately, the right), I have maintained that the leftists who make a mockery of Marxism in the present are not fake Marxists, “are not some unreal deviation but the real result of Marxism’s history.”

Thus, despite the unique critical resources that attract me to Marxism, I have remained open to the possibility that there are certain unresolved contradictions, problems, and inadequacies inherent to this tradition that have contributed to its trajectory and its miserable present state. To say this is not a condemnation of Marxism, only an honest recognition that, like everything else it examines, it too is a contradictory social and historical product, not an absolute metaphysic.

As I have argued elsewhere, for Marxist critique to live up to its own premises, it must turn inward the same criticism it would apply to any other social aspect. Such an auto-critique is necessary for any method that claims to be the ruthless criticism of everything existing, but even more so for Marxism considering the additional fact that history has yet to fulfill its promises for a new society and doesn’t appear to have any plans for doing so anytime soon.

After criticizing leftist anti-capitalism as well as its echoes on the right, I am increasingly unsatisfied with any effort to leave Marxism itself out of the picture. Claiming leftist Marxism is some kind of unfortunate aberration that can be dismissed with appeals to the real Marxism of Marx is inadequate. Marxism itself must be subjected to critique, as the potential for its present state must in some way reside within itself. In other words, the travesty of Marxism in the present cannot be bracketed off from its own history, and in turn, this history must not be shielded from Marxist critique. Instead, Marxist criticism can only become worthy of itself in the ruthless criticism of Marxism.

Benedict Cryptofash @BCryptofash

The greatest use of Marxism today is against the Marxists.

It is not simply a matter of recovering a pure Marxism that has been co-opted and perverted by opportunists, “grifters,” or the capitalist class in general. Such talk is always the impressionistic cope of losers, in denial of reality, too weak to face the complexity of the situation. It is indeed an ideological “solution in the mind to contradictions which cannot be solved in practice.” The Marxist critique that interests me does not moralize or make excuses to protect itself from its own conclusions. Self-pitying rhetoric about betrayal, how the other side hasn’t played by the rules, how things could have turned out differently if not for this person or that event takes part in a process of social mystification, when what Marxist critique demands is a demystification of Marxism.

This is all a prelude to a new approach that will grapple with the problems of Marxism via a selection of critical sources that confront certain unresolved and repressed contradictions always lurking within this tradition.

What are the sociological origins of Marxism? What, after all, makes Marxism an expression of the working class? How have the intellectuals who formulate Marxism fit into its theory of class struggle? Is Marxism deterministic or does it also make voluntaristic assumptions? Do the writings of Marx suggest two contradictory Marxisms (of the early and late periods)? Why has Marxism, against its own theory, only won state power in less developed economies? Has conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat in fact been the decisive class struggle of the last two centuries, the engine of revolution? Does the revolutionary proletariat stand up as a historical-material phenomenon or did it emerge as a metaphor, only to be later backfilled with empirical content to conceal its romantic origins? Despite its recurring polemics to the contrary, is Marxism itself utopian?

These are the types of questions raised by the texts I will explore. It must be said that the sources of interest are not altogether hostile or shallow dismissals of Marxism by liberals or conservatives out to bury a threatening theory. Instead, they are typically those rare works that have some deep understanding of or sympathetic attachment to the Marxist tradition, but are not content with the self-satisfied stories it tells about itself, and are willing to apply a method of ruthless criticism to Marxism itself. As we’ll see, I do not agree with everything about these texts, but I do accept their premise that a Marxist critique of Marxism is justified, even required by Marxism’s own theory and history.

Any such effort is bound to walk a tight rope, since a ruthless critique of Marxism risks the appearance that one is taking sides with the dominant social forces against which Marxism supposedly struggles. Simply discussing the possibility of contradictions, irrationalities, or inadequacies inhering in Marxism would seem to play into the hands of the anti-Marxist right or the postmodern left, the latter of whose theories have been animated for decades by a need to “move beyond Marx,” to “supplement” Marxism with whatever multiculturalist discourse of “difference” the academy is lately cooking up.

Far from joining them in dismissing Marx, this auto-critique deliberately passes through Marxism’s dark night of the soul, what the sociologist Alvin Gouldner calls its “nightmare,” to emerge on the other side better equipped to explain its deepest anxieties and to account for its enduring problems. In short, it critiques Marxism to strengthen its responses, to sharpen it against itself, to demystify it and get to its rational core. As Gouldner understands, a critique of this kind “is a lapidary act: it strives to discern and strike off from Marxism its flawed, erroneous, and irrational parts, so that it may rescue its productive and rational side, polishing and resituating this in a new intellectual setting.”¹

My Marxist critique of Marxism will begin with the late-career efforts of Gouldner, for they exemplify such a reflexive approach to Marxism. Although I do not necessarily endorse his own conclusions, the four books that Gouldner prepared in the final years of his life—The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976), The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), The Two Marxisms (1980), and Against Fragmentation (1985)—represent, as a series, the sharpest historical elaboration of the unresolved contradictions of Marxism and the most compelling auto-critique of that tradition produced in recent history.

Before moving onto other sources in this vein, we will spend quite some time exploring the many problems Gouldner raises for Marxism: such as his analysis of the paradoxical class origins of Marxism; the often unspoken connection between Marxism and the radicalized intellectuals of what he calls the New Class; and the irresolvable tension between a critical, voluntaristic Marxism and a scientific, deterministic Marxism.

To set the scene, my next article will take on the first volume in Gouldner’s critical project on Marxism (The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology) by examining his method of auto-critique first expounded in that text, the reflexive “Outlaw Marxism” he opposes to its self-satisfied “Normal” orthodoxy.

P.S. Please share in the comments any suggestions you have for sources that fit the scope of an auto-critique of Marxism, that is critical historical-materialist accounts of Marxism itself.

1. Goldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 17.