"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"
I don't think it makes sense to bracket out the question of the *truth* of Marxism's predictions about the future when looking at the question of the extent to which vanguardism was "implicit" in pre-Leninist Marxism. Marx and Engels predicted the world would become more or less completely polarized into bourgeois vs. proletarian with the shrinking of other classes like "petit-bourgeoisie" along with higher-paid professional work, and also predicted an increase in the "immiseration" of the proletariat, so that basically everyone who wasn't a member of the bourgeoisie would be receiving bare subsistence wages. In a hypothetical world where this had turned out to be the case, it would make perfect sense to think a revolution would very likely occur with or without guidance from an intelligentsia, and Marxist intellectuals could reasonably conceive of their role more just as speeding the process along slightly, and helping the emerging working class movement to sidestep certain errors (like Lassalle's idea of manufacturing workers having the 'right' to 100% of the consumer goods they made, which Marx criticized in Critique of the Gotha Programme since it would leave nothing left over to give to workers not making consumer goods) which they would have figured out by trial and error anyway, even if might have taken a little longer. It's only really in the 20th century when Marxists saw that these predictions weren't coming true, and also became focused on fomenting revolution in peasant-dominated countries that Marx's original theory said were not ripe for socialism, that the socialist intelligentsia naturally starts to take a pre-eminent role. It seems ahistorical to project this back onto Marx and Engels, as if they somehow knew that these predictions would fail but were just in denial.
Seriously tho, seems like Gouldner manages to identify a true contradiction in Marxism and then succumb to hand waving to explain it away (at least thats what your summary here makes it sound like).
I think we should all be aware that Alvin Goulder once beat the shit out of a grad student who had drawn a satirical cartoon of him. I suspect this lends credence to his argument though I am unsure how to prove that.
All this crap would even or foremost apply to Marx and Engles of course, so regardless the pseudo intellectualism of Gouldner doesn’t mean shit so long as the social systems actually or ultimately incorporate Marxist principles. Gouldner’s arguments end up belonging to armchair academia far more than any Marxist theorist ever could.
"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"
I don't think it makes sense to bracket out the question of the *truth* of Marxism's predictions about the future when looking at the question of the extent to which vanguardism was "implicit" in pre-Leninist Marxism. Marx and Engels predicted the world would become more or less completely polarized into bourgeois vs. proletarian with the shrinking of other classes like "petit-bourgeoisie" along with higher-paid professional work, and also predicted an increase in the "immiseration" of the proletariat, so that basically everyone who wasn't a member of the bourgeoisie would be receiving bare subsistence wages. In a hypothetical world where this had turned out to be the case, it would make perfect sense to think a revolution would very likely occur with or without guidance from an intelligentsia, and Marxist intellectuals could reasonably conceive of their role more just as speeding the process along slightly, and helping the emerging working class movement to sidestep certain errors (like Lassalle's idea of manufacturing workers having the 'right' to 100% of the consumer goods they made, which Marx criticized in Critique of the Gotha Programme since it would leave nothing left over to give to workers not making consumer goods) which they would have figured out by trial and error anyway, even if might have taken a little longer. It's only really in the 20th century when Marxists saw that these predictions weren't coming true, and also became focused on fomenting revolution in peasant-dominated countries that Marx's original theory said were not ripe for socialism, that the socialist intelligentsia naturally starts to take a pre-eminent role. It seems ahistorical to project this back onto Marx and Engels, as if they somehow knew that these predictions would fail but were just in denial.
Seriously tho, seems like Gouldner manages to identify a true contradiction in Marxism and then succumb to hand waving to explain it away (at least thats what your summary here makes it sound like).
I think we should all be aware that Alvin Goulder once beat the shit out of a grad student who had drawn a satirical cartoon of him. I suspect this lends credence to his argument though I am unsure how to prove that.
All this crap would even or foremost apply to Marx and Engles of course, so regardless the pseudo intellectualism of Gouldner doesn’t mean shit so long as the social systems actually or ultimately incorporate Marxist principles. Gouldner’s arguments end up belonging to armchair academia far more than any Marxist theorist ever could.