Marxism and the Intellectuals

The Real Subject

If Marxism is not the consciousness of the working class, then what is it? For Alvin Gouldner, it is the product of an alienated theoretical elite whose critique of bourgeois society leads them to seek a social basis (the proletariat) with which to achieve their material and ideal interests. This is not to say that the situation of the proletariat described by Marxists is untrue, or even that the particular interests these intellectuals pursue do not have a claim to universality, only to underline that there is a gulf between the theorists of Marxism and the proletariat it theorizes, social strata which Marxists often present as one and the same.

Gouldner disentangles Marxism to identify its three basic elements:

1. a class that is “summoned”—the proletariat.

2. a “summons”—the mission to which the class is summoned—the revolution in which capitalism will be overcome.

3. a “summoner” announcing the mission of the proletariat and calling upon it to perform its historical duty.

Insofar as Marxism conflates these three layers into one, it obscures the special role and distinct motives of its summoning theorists and their sociological difference from the class being summoned. The “fundamental limit on [Marxism’s] reflexivity,” as Gouldner writes, “is that it fails to confront the issue of the summoner. It does not systematically confront the question: who speaks Marxism, who originates it, who calls upon the proletariat to perform its historical mission?”

Instead, the particular role of the summoner is concealed in “the myth that the proletariat’s mission is laid upon it by history itself rather than by some social stratum, who present themselves as the confidants of his­tory.” Marxism’s appearance as science indeed allows its intellectuals to recede into the background, disappearing from view except as “the bearers of necessary ‘theory,’” who “speak only for rationality and justice” without wanting anything themselves, narrators of historical process “whose ambitions for the working class are in no way colored” by their own needs.

This reticence to address how the Marxist intellectual fits into the picture is the limitation on Marxism’s rationality and self-understanding that Gouldner’s auto-critique seeks to overcome. He attempts to demystify the false consciousness that ensues when Marxism thinks of itself as objectively describing history’s impulse toward the self-emancipation of the proletariat, while glossing over, omitting, or denying its own implication that the political and pedagogical leadership of radicalized intellectuals—seeking freedom from their own limitations—is the precondition for this emancipatory act.

Marxism “was not just produced in reaction against bourgeois society and its elites but by them.” It did not emerge from within the proletarian camp, but from a social critique produced by alienated intellectuals, who approached the working class to empower a theory they had already and separately conceived. Less the self-consciousness of the working class, Marxism, as Gouldner writes “was the product of an historically evolving social stratum, a secular intelligentsia which had been committed to a longstanding search for an historical agent, for agents whom it wished to tutor, in whom it wished to develop a correct consciousness, and whom it hoped would transform the social world in desirable ways.”

For Gouldner, Marxism’s designation of the proletariat as the agency of social change is a special case in the history of intelligentsia “shopping for an agent,” a pattern that preceded Marx and which has been continued more recently by post-Marxist intellectuals looking for new historical agents (blacks, students, the exploited third world, etc.) to replace the proletariat in which they no longer believe. In such instances, a theoretical elite’s need for the agency of a mass base drives “a search for power by those who feel that they already have knowledge.” This paradigm of “shopping for an agent” clarifies that not only is the real or imputed interests of the agent important, but also those of the shoppers, the intellectuals whose problem is not the knowledge of what needs to be done, only the mobilization of power needed to enact it.

In his Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, the young Marx “briefly let the cat out of the bag,” in Gouldner’s words, disclosing the summoner-summoned relationship of Marxism by observing that philosophy was to be the revolution’s “head,” while the proletariat was to be its “heart.” Although “this organismic metaphor premises the smooth integration” of theory and practice, intellectuals and workers, knowledge and power, portrayed here as two organs of one body, it nevertheless reveals who is steering the ship. “For however much head and heart are mutually dependent, there is small doubt which Marx thought the proper ruler.”

Marx attempts to smooth over the contradiction between head (middle-class intellectuals) and heart (the proletariat), but his use of “philosophy” to describe the proletariat’s head rather than “philosophers” registers Marxism’s impulse to dissolve the particular presence of its intellectuals into a general theory that exists independently from them. Marxism indeed tends to stress the significance of “theory,” while minimizing the role of the theorists who make it. “Philosophy,” not the particular needs of philosophers, is to be realized by the abolition of the proletariat.

This pattern of “philosophy” overshadowing “philosophers” speaks to an “ineluctable contradiction in Marxism” in which, on one hand, it holds that “theory is absolutely necessary for social transformation,” yet on the other, it suspects “theorists may not be trusted.” This distrust of particular theorists occurs regardless of their class position. If they happen to be working class, without formal training, “Marxism fears they will have the crudity of auto-didacts, a provincial narrowness, and the vulgar susceptibilities of the parvenu to the merely fashionable.” Whereas, more likely, if they are immersed in the bourgeois culture of trained academics, “Marxism fears their accommodation to respectable careers in the University or Civil Service, their middle-class origins, and the seductions of the comfortable life to which they may be exposed.” Marxism’s inherent distrust of “theorists” explains its need to place an ideal form of “theory” above them, but leaves unanswered who, therefore, Marxism authorizes to develop this theory.

Nowhere is Marxism’s fundamental ambivalence about theorists better illustrated than in Marx and Engels’ 1879 letter to Germany’s Social-Democratic leadership protesting reformist elements in their midst. In their “Circular Letter,” Marx and Engels echo their unenlightening observations about class defection from the Communist Manifesto by describing the “inevitable phenomenon” in which “people from what have hitherto been the ruling classes should also join the militant proletariat and supply it with educative elements.” But now emphasizing that all class defectors are not created equal, they add caveats that express their anxiety about the pernicious influence of petty bourgeois intellectuals.

When they bring “real educative elements,” like Marx and Engels presumably do, they may be of use to the proletarian movement, “but with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts that is not the case.” Instead, they produce only confusion in their “attempts to bring superficially mastered socialist ideas into harmony with the exceedingly varied theoretical standpoints which these gentlemen have brought with them from the university or elsewhere.” As Marx and Engels insist, if these campus radicals are to join the proletarian movement, “the first condition must be that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian outlook.” The paradox—“the ineluctable contradiction in Marxism”—however is that the very people supposed to educate the proletariat are inherently “chock-full of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas” owing to their class origin and training.

By reflecting on the need for the Party to discipline or exclude these adulterating elements, Marx and Engels foreshadow the concerns of Lenin, the theorist who with the innovation of the vanguard party confronted and attempted to settle the contradictory role of intellectuals previously concealed in Marxism. In vaunting theory while suspecting theorists, be they workers or academics, Marxism implied that “a very special sort of theorist would have to be created” to enact its version of socialism, “along with the sociological infrastructure that could reproduce them.” Lenin’s formulation of the Bolshevik vanguard was the instrument to accomplish this task.

The vanguard party, as Gouldner puts it, “functions to resolve Marxism’s double ambivalence, toward the proletariat no less than toward intellectuals who construct the needed theory.” On one hand, the vanguard serves to transmit the socialist theory created by an intellectual elite to an unenlightened proletariat in a pedagogical process that secures the former’s influence over the latter. On the other, it responds to Marxism’s distrust of such theorists by constructing an organizational instrument for disciplining and transforming the Marxist intellectuals themselves.

The theorists (the head) win leadership over the proletariat (the heart) by relinquishing their intellectual autonomy to the control system of the party, a third force which serves to insulate necessary theory from the motives of any particular theorist. “Like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which one member helps the other ‘kick the habit,’” submission to vanguard party discipline “helps intellectuals surrender discourse as an end in itself,” while extricating them from the comforts of respectable institutions and bourgeois culture. In one fell swoop, the vanguard promises to solve the “ineluctable contradiction” of Marxism by bringing both its intellectuals and the proletariat under the control of the general, necessary theory embodied by the party.

Although Leninism is often portrayed as some new development or break in the history of Marxism, Gouldner highlights that its vanguardist premises about the intelligentsia were in fact continuous with the Marxism of the earlier period. Leninism did represent a different epoch in the history of Marxism, but only insofar as it openly expressed aspects previously concealed. The earlier Marxism “had repressed/suppressed its distrust of the working class’s theoretical limits, and had hidden its reliance on the intelligentsia,” whereas under the leadership of Lenin, “this once repressed material now surfaced.” “To have its sins forgiven,” said Marx “mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.” In the hands of Lenin, Marxism declared its real relationship to intellectuals, something Lenin, unlike Marx himself, was not ashamed to confess.

Gouldner believed he had removed a limit to Marxism’s self-understanding by stressing that “the class character of Marxism has not varied since its beginnings; it owes at least as much to the intellectuals’ special interests and culture as to the proletariat to whom it pledged allegiance.” Yet there are questions raised by his own response to this conclusion. Like Lenin, he values rather than apologizes for Marxism’s dependence on intellectuals, but he wants to drop its pretenses about the proletariat altogether along with the stifling atmosphere of communist parties. Instead, he positively interprets Marxism as the ideology of what he calls a rising New Class of humanistic intellectuals and technical intelligentsia, a professional class of new “cultural bourgeoisie” whose conflict with the “old class” of moneyed capital he argues is more pronounced and active than the proletariat’s struggle with the latter. In short, Gouldner embraces the New Class, for all of its problems, as a progressive force and the true expression of Marxism, a claim that now seems outlandish several decades later amid so much vitriol directed at the “PMC.”

Thus far, I have sympathized with Gouldner’s project for the negative critical pressure it brings to bear on Marxism’s various mystifications and repressions. Yet I will next criticize the limitations of Gouldner’s own positive conclusions about Marxism as the project of the new class and the extent to which this “new cultural bourgeoisie” is actually in conflict with “the old bourgeoisie.” We have used Gouldner to demystify Marxism; now, perhaps Marx can return the favor.