Outlaw Marxism

Gouldner's Marxism of Marxism

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner is most remembered in his native field for works like The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), yet I am concerned with the later books that extend his method of self-critical sociology to an ambitious auto-critique of Marxism. Gouldner’s sharpening focus on the contradictions of Marxism in the years leading to his early death crystallized an ambivalence about Marxism dating back to his disillusionment with the Communist politics he engaged as a young man. But even as the many hundreds of pages he devoted to prodding at Marxism’s most sensitive nerves might appear to be an assault on a tradition he had abandoned, Gouldner nevertheless maintained that this critique flowed from Marxism’s own premises. Hence, he remained in some sense a Marxist, albeit one isolated from its “normal” forms.

Gouldner outlines his unorthodox approach to Marxism, and his theory of its auto-critique, in the introduction to The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976), a work that foreshadows his final, more exhaustive critical accounts of Marxism (The Two Marxisms; Against Fragmentation). Responding to the question of his relationship to Marxism, Gouldner writes, “if I am Marxist at all, I belong to no Marxist community, and certainly to no Marxist establishment. If my own view is solicited, I would have to label myself as a Marxist outlaw.”¹ Since this “outlaw” Marxism underpins Gouldner’s auto-critique of Marxism as well as my own, it is important to grasp his brief articulation of this theory.

The Marxist outlaw, for Gouldner, is essentially concerned with “a demystification of Marxism” based on “the assumption that Marxism today—as a real historical movement—has not produced the human liberation it had promised.”² Paradoxically, what makes him an outlaw is his insistence on “using one law for all,” and it is this consistent, universal application of Marxist principles that leads him “to use the dialectic to study Marxism itself.”³

Whereas most Marxists “reject the idea that they and their theory are the bearers of contradiction, false consciousness, and mystification,” the Marxist outlaw is “characterized by the fact that he also speaks about Marxism; that he is reflexive about Marxism and that he does not simply view Marxism as a resource but also takes it as a topic.”⁴ In short, such a “Marxism of Marxism” is what banishes the outlaw from what Gouldner calls “normal” Marxism. By following the law of Marxism universally, to the point of applying it to itself, the reflexive Marxist is certain to be viewed with suspicion.

There are many reasons why normal Marxists “do not hurry to their rendezvous with a Marxism of Marxism.” For one, “reflexive efforts at historical self-understanding are often taken as narcissistic,” supposedly paralyzing the Marxist’s efforts to change the world.⁵ Even worse, in the act of pursuing a critical self-consciousness, the outlaw is inevitably charged with serving the enemy. “If you critique me, warns the normal Marxist, you are ‘objectively’ giving aid and comfort to the dominant bourgeois establishment.”⁶

Ultimately, a critical understanding that Marxism is itself a contradictory historical and social product is unacceptable to those Marxists who fashion themselves as enlightened social scientists untainted by the contradictions they diagnose. Such self-satisfied “normal” Marxists set their infallible science apart from the social world around them, which they regard “as their ‘topic,’” while viewing themselves as the transcendent “‘resources’ that will clarify, transform, and set it right.”⁷

Normal Marxism, in other words, conveniently leaves itself out of the messy social-historical process in which it situates everything else. As Goulder observes, it “wishes to raise itself above what it critiques” motivated by a mistaken understanding of “‘contradiction’ as a deplorable or stigmatic condition.” To “speak of the contradictions of Marxism is, in their view, to attribute a defect to it; it seems to say that Marxism shares the defective existence of the way of life it wishes to abrogate.” But without lapsing into the subject-object dualism it purports to overcome, Marxism cannot bracket itself off from the contradictory process it criticizes and must instead recognize the “important continuities between the critic and the criticized, between the subject and the object,” between itself and class society.⁸

Indeed, Gouldner argues a “reflexive, nonnormal Marxism” that does not shield its own contradictions from criticism is in fact authorized by the very premises of Marxism. Justification for such a demystification of Marxism “is not alien but intrinsic to Marxism itself. For the first commandment of the dialectic is contradiction, negation, critique.”⁹ Contradiction is therefore not a dirty word, something which inheres only in the defective objects of Marxist negation and critique. It is a universal feature of the social reality described by Marxism, of which the latter is also a part.

“From this standpoint, then, Marxism will be seen as possessing its own contradictions, and contradiction will not be understood simply as a stigma of Marxism’s enemies.” A consistent, auto-critique of Marxism follows this logic in insisting that the history of Marxism contains its own internal contradictions that are at once “a living part of Marxism even today” and “an essential key to its present condition and future prospect.”¹⁰ The only productive future for Marxism, in other words, lies in its own self-criticism.

Emphasizing Marxism’s justification for a “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” including itself, the outlaw reveals the Socratic dimension of Marxist reflexivity. “The Marxist outlaw’s insistence on the absoluteness and inescapability of contradiction, his insistence on a critique grounded in such a universalism, means that the Marxist outlaw is a Socratic, or a Marxist Socratic.” Neither Marxism’s supposed transcendence of contradiction, nor its antagonism with “the dominant bourgeois establishment” is enough for the Socratic Marxist, who never surrenders “his right to criticize” for the sake of a positive agenda.¹¹

The Socratic’s function is “to help persons bear bad news concerning their most cherished projects” rather than comforting them with established dogmas or illusions of victory around the corner.¹² “Not preaching any positive doctrine, the Socratic will not exchange one unexamined life for another, and he therefore subverts both the present and the antipresent,” both the bourgeois establishment content in its power and the critique of that power satisfied by its righteousness.

This refusal to exhaust Marxism’s commandment for contradiction, negation, and critique is, after all, what makes the Socratic an outlaw. “Being the critic of all positive doctrines, searching out their limits, the Socratic is necessarily suspect in the eyes of all who offer (and all who ache for) a positive doctrine.”¹³ Thus, the Marxist Socratic is outlawed for prosecuting Marxism under the terms of its own law.

This is what we will do next through a Marxist analysis of the sociological origins and class nature of Marxism itself.

1. Goldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), xii.

2. Gouldner, Dialectic, xii.

3. Goudlner, Dialectic, xiv.

4. Gouldner, Dialectic, xiv.

5. Goldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 10.

6. Gouldner, Dialectic, xv.

7. Gouldner, Dialectic, xiv.

8. Gouldner, Dialectic, xv.

9. Gouldner, Dialectic, xii.

10. Gouldner, Two Marxisms, 12.

11. Gouldner, Dialectic, xv.

12. Gouldner, Two Marxisms, 26.

13. Gouldner, Dialectic, xv.