The Limits of Gouldner

Marxism's New Class Alienation

Like Marx himself, Alvin Gouldner is a thinker more valuable for his critical negativity than his positive conclusions. His unique and persuasive critique reveals the limitations on Marxism’s rationality stemming from its own suppressed contradictions. Yet it is when Gouldner asserts his own vision that the limits of his analysis come into view. Gouldner is at his sharpest when discussing the pivotal but often concealed role of middle-class intellectuals in the making of Marxism. Less compelling, however, is his extrapolation from this that middle-class intellectuals at large—guided by the spirit of Marxism—have become history’s true revolutionary subject, a “new class” poised to overtake the old bourgeoisie.

For all of Gouldner’s criticisms of the middle-class nature of Marxism, it is surprising to find him embracing middle-class intellectuals as “the best card that history has presently given us to play.” Particularly in his book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), Gouldner portrays an emerging class of humanistic intellectuals and technical intelligentsia (academics, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, etc.) as “the most progressive force in modern society” and “a center of whatever human emancipation is possible in the foreseeable future.” Although “badly flawed” for concealing its partial interests, this new class, in Gouldner’s story, contains historically progressive features that portend its rise to power.

Gouldner distinguishes professionalized intellectuals for their possession of scientific knowledge, technical skills, and a shared commitment to universal rationality embodied in their self-reflective “culture of critical discourse.” Further, they have supposedly obtained a level of control over their work environment in which they perform their technical expertise “with dedicated concern for the society-at-large” without the “motives of commercial venality” that guide the old capitalist class. Thus, they have “no motives to curtail the forces of production and no wish to develop them solely in terms of their profitability.” For Gouldner, this all adds up to a “a new cultural bourgeoisie” actually poised, unlike the hopeless proletariat, to supplant the old ruling class.

Gouldner’s analysis of the new class anticipates contemporary fascination with the professional-managerial class, something that makes his continued obscurity all the more baffling. But unlike critics of the much-maligned PMC today, Gouldner, writing four decades ago, sees it as a progressive historical development over the bourgeoisie, even if he is also sensitive to its flaws.

Whereas the right might demonize this social stratum as cultural Marxists or lament its “managerial revolution” à la Burnham, Gouldner does not consider the rise of the new class as an evil. And unlike disillusioned leftists who might attempt to differentiate PMC ideology from Real Marxism, Gouldner takes the unusual approach of viewing, without disappointment, this “new class” as the true expression of Marxism. Gouldner’s problem with Marxism, after all, is not that it represents the middle-class intellectuals who create it, only that it pretends that it doesn’t under the guise of “the self-emancipation of the proletariat.”

Gouldner does not merely uncover the class nature of those intellectuals who happen to be Marxist. He goes so far as to claim that Marxism is the consciousness of the new class as a whole, and argues it is this class that contests the rule of the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, which is only “the radicalized intelligentsia’s metaphor for a variety of goods and values it has sought” on its own behalf. More than it is the liberation of the proletariat, “Socialism is the final removal of that limit” the old class sets on the blocked ascendants of the new class, which must swell the bureaucratic apparatus of the state to eclipse money capital with its own cultural capital—the technical expertise and culture of critical discourse it acquires through education.

In short, socialism’s growing power of the state assures incomes for both categories of Gouldner’s intellectuals. State control of the means of production spells economic independence for humanistic intellectuals within the university, “the state’s source of ‘staff’ experts and of culture resources, of ideologies no less than technologies.” Furthermore, by expropriating private ownership into state investment, Marx’s socialism promises “a liberation of the forces of production from capitalist venality,” thereby also liberating “the technical intelligentsia, the bearers of the new technology, from that same limit.” Marxism, for Gouldner, is thus not a literal theory of proletarian revolution, but rather the ideology of a new class of intellectuals, on whose scientific knowledge and technical skills the future of productive forces depend.

Gouldner’s critique of Marxism’s class paradox has stood the test of time, yet history has undermined his positive assertions about the intellectuals as an autonomous, ascendant class poised to displace the old bourgeoisie. Such claims fall short in two main respects: firstly, Gouldner exaggerates the level of conflict between the new class of professionalized intellectuals and the old bourgeoisie; secondly and relatedly, he overstates the educated professional’s revolutionary fervor and their political power to effect the replacement of money by cultural capital, something Iván Szelényi calls an “empty metaphor.”

Because “intellectuals under a market capitalist economy have highly qualified and artificially scarce labor power,” they may command higher incomes as advantaged employees on the labor market. But this cultural capital “cannot overrule the logic of reproduction and accumulation as governed by money capital” and neither, as Szelényi writes, is its possession “sufficient to prove that professionalized intellectuals in the West are becoming a new dominant class.”

Indeed, the decades since Gouldner examined the new class have not seen professionalized intellectuals emancipate themselves and society at large from the limits of the old bourgeoisie. If anything, this period has demonstrated the degree to which Gouldner’s “new class” is integrated with the “old class,” whose limits it works to naturalize not overcome. The supposed revolutionary potential of the professional intellectuals has evaporated into their true role as the cultural managers of capitalist society. In short, Marx still has lessons for Gouldner.

Whereas Gouldner sees a split in which “the hegemonic elite is separated from the means of culture,” recent decades have further verified Marx’s insight that a society’s ideas and culture depend upon the class that controls the means of material production. Gouldner argues for some special autonomy of the intellectuals, in their self-managed labor, their freedom from commercial motives, and their ability to produce ideas separately and in conflict with the bourgeois establishment. Yet the new class’s increasingly pronounced intellectual symmetry with the old class in formulating and promoting ideology shows that its supposed freedom of critical discourse is constrained by the political economy in which it professionalizes and receives its incomes.

One point where the contradictions of Gouldner’s argument come to a head is the question of censorship, opposition to which he claims is inherent to the new class due to its reliance on communication. Unlike the old class, which has the resources to buy or enforce conformity with its interests, the new class “gets what it wants primarily by rhetoric, by persuasion and argument through publishing or speaking.”

The political and economic interests of the New Class, then, are uniquely dependent on their continuing access to media, particularly mass media, and upon institutional freedoms protecting their right to publish and speak. Impairment of these rights—that is, censorship—is a basic liability in the New Class’s effort to advance itself. Since its ascendance depends greatly on its access to free communication, its opposition to censorship is one of the main struggles that has united it historically, as in the period prior to the French Revolution, and even today.

For Gouldner, the new class’s role as “a center of opposition to almost all forms of censorship” embodies “a universal societal interest” that demonstrates its broad rationality and transcendence of the old class’s commercial venality. The only problem with this is that not only have intellectual workers not maintained their supposed opposition to censorship, they have often been the ones narrowing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Indeed, the professional intellectuals today have generally been counted on to demonize any deviation from progressive liberal orthodoxy as racist, sexist, fascist, anti-vax, etc. Especially within their stifling home base of academia, the humanistic intellectuals’ supposed commitment to free speech and a “culture of critical discourse” is nowhere to be found beneath a dogmatic regurgitation of leftist clichés.

This question of censorship highlights Gouldner’s false consciousness in asserting the autonomy of the intellectuals as an independent class capable of producing ideas and culture on its own terms, much less executing a revolution against the old class of money capital. The lines of conflict between petty bourgeois intellectuals and the property-owning class are, after all, not as distinct as Gouldner would have us believe.

Recent decades have instead shown the former operating as the “conceptive ideologists” Marx writes about in The German Ideology, who positioned on one side of the bourgeois division of mental and material labor, “make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood.” Within this larger bourgeois camp, the cleavage between mental and material elements may “develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts,” yet when push comes to shove, this supposed collision “automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class.”

Generally speaking, then, Gouldner is correct to emphasize Marxism’s emergence from alienated middle-class intellectuals, but he is mistaken to leap from this fact to conclude that professionalized intellectuals at large constitute a revolutionary class unified by some kind of intentional consciousness directed toward social transformation. It is clear today that the intellectuals—competing for limited opportunities and resources—are self-seeking conformists far more committed to securing whatever income and prestige they can than they are in organized political action to overthrow the ruling order and implement “new class” rule.

Gouldner views professionalization as enhancing the revolutionary potential of the new class, yet “the more professionalized intellectuals are,” as Szelényi writes, the more they are “incorporated into the the social and cultural system of capitalist society.” “Professional rewards are accumulated by those intellectuals who are willing to adapt to market capitalism,” and those who are unable to toe the line of the liberal institutions are increasingly isolated from status and incomes.

Despite Gouldner’s depiction of the new class as a unified political agent guided by the false consciousness of Marxism, this cleavage between those intellectuals willing and able to conform to the ideological function of their professions and those who are not better explains Marxism as the consciousness of certain alienated middle-class intellectuals who have been isolated from professionalization, not that of the new class as a whole. In other words, the Marxism that is bold enough to cut against the conformity of the liberal professions is created by and attracts those intellectuals who are in the process of being estranged from those professions.

We must remember, as does Gouldner himself, that what set Dr. Marx on his radical path was his experience as a rejected academic and editor, that is, his alienation from a new class profession. State censorship “intervened repeatedly in ways damaging to the practical interests and intellectual pursuits of the young Hegelians,” something seen in Marx’s case, first by censors blocking his path to a university career, then by their suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung under Marx’s editorship.

“Prussian censorship thus destroyed all of the young Marx’s chances of a conventional career within the system. It quite literally forced him out, destroying any ‘material’ basis that might have inhibited his further radicalization.” Marxism, as Gouldner concludes, “may be as much grounded in a career disappointment—in Marx’s own blocked ascendance (and indeed, in that of larger sections of the New Class of intellectuals and intelligentsia)—as in anguish for the proletariat’s suffering.”

Gouldner sees Marx’s blocked ascendance as an early example of the intolerable limitations the bourgeoisie sets on the new class, which would eventually inspire its growing but stifled ranks of educated manpower to conduct a revolution against the old class under the guise of the proletariat. But of course, the new class has not unified to resist censorship and the downward pressure on its overabundance of cultural capital. Instead, it fights for what the old system of money still provides, competing to earn incomes as its managers and ideologists—even as the house Marxists of capitalist society—with only those defeated and atomized intellectuals isolated from such avenues to professionalization left to pursue a Marxism old enough to address their alienation from the new class.