Appendices to Part I

APPENDIX ONE

As I have already noted, the thesis that there are diverse and dissonant dimensions of Marxism, that there are Two Marxisms (or more), is scarcely original to this writer. It began emerging most articulately after the Bolshevik revolution had failed to be accompanied by a successful revolution in central, industrially advanced Europe, and as part of a critique of the parliamentarism, the revisionism, and the deterministic evolutionism of the Second International. The thesis of the "Two Marxisms," was fully articulated by Karl Korsch in 1923:

I described the dialectical materialist, critical revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels in the 1840's as an "anti-philosophy" which yet in itself remained philosophical . . . "anti-philosophy" developed in two separate directions. On the one hand, socialist "science" became positive and gradually turned away from philosophy altogether. On the other hand, a philosophical development occurred, apparently in conflict with the former but in fact complementary to it. This is first to be found in the late 1850's, in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, and then later in those of their best disciples—Labriola in Italy and Plekhanov in Russia. Its theoretical character may be defined as a kind of return to Hegel's philosophy and not just a return to the essentially critical and revolutionary 'anti-philosophy" of the Left Hegelians in the Sturm and Drang period of the 1840's. . . . Labriola and Plekhanov developed this Hegelian philosophical trend, which is to be found in every line of their writings. It also persisted in Plekhanov's pupil, Lenin.1

Clearly, then, Korsch saw one of the Two Marxisms—Scientific Marxism—as a scientizing, positivistic impulse hostile to philosophy in general and to Hegel in particular. He saw the other Marxism as a reaffirmation of the critical philosophical and Hegelian grounding of Marxism. Korsch's own work "aimed to re-emphasize this philosophical side of Marxism." It also cautiously rejected the "fundamentally dogmatic and therefore unscientific procedure of the 'orthodox' who make it a completely self-evident and unshakeable article of faith that the 'doctrine' produced by the two Church Fathers was absolutely consistent," while rejecting any view of the ideas of Marx and Engels that one-sidedly treated them as "completely at variance."²

The Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti also develops his own version of the thesis of the Two Marxisms, focusing on a convergent distinction between Marxism as science and as critique:

There are two possible lines of development in Marx's own discourse, expressed respectively in the title and subtitle of Capital. The first is that which Marx himself advances in his preface to the first edition, the postscript to the second edition, in which he presents himself simply as a scientist. Marx, according to his own account here, is performing in the field of the historical and social sciences a task that had already been performed in the natural sciences. . . . The title of Capital spells this direction out. It promises that political economy, which started with the works of Smith and Ricardo but remained incomplete and contradictory in them, will now become a true science in the full sense of the term. The sub-title of the book, however, suggests another direction: a "critique of political economy.". . . Lenin would certainly have rejected the idea that Marxism was a critique of political economy; for him it was the critique of bourgeois political economy only, which finally transformed political economy into a real science. But the sub-title of Capital indicates . . . that political economy as such is bourgeois and must be criticized tout court. This second dimension of Marx's work is precisely that which culminates in his theory of alienation, and fetishism.³

The French phenomenological Marxist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1955 analysis of Les Aventures de la dialectique, also formulated a distinction between what he calls "Western Marxism" and "Leninism" convergent with our own distinction between Critical and Scientific Marxisms. Holding that this "is already found in Marx as a conflict between dialectical thought and naturalism," he speaks of a "communist eclecticism" which is

''thought without candor . . . that unstable mixture of Hegelianism and scientism which allows the orthodoxy to reject, in the name of "philosophical" principles, all that the social sciences have tried to say since Engels, and yet allows it to reply with "scientific socialism" when philosophical objections are raised. . . . On the theoretical plane, it means closing off any attempt at "comprehension" as, on the plane of action, it means replacing total praxis by a technician-made action, replacing the proletariat by the professional revolutionary.⁴

Raymond Aron has also stressed the essential instability and oscillatory quality of the two Marxisms:

La mode Parisienne oscille entre les Manuscrits economico-philosophiques et la protostructuralisme de l'lutroduction a la Critique de l'economie politique et du Capital: d'une part la version hegeliano-existentialiste, l'odyssee de l'humanite entre la chute dans la lutte de classes, l'alienation et le salut revolutionnaire, la reconciliation de l'homme et de la nature, de l'essence et de l'existence, d'autre part, la version scientifique des lois naturelles selon lesquelles fonctionne et se transforme le mode de production capitaliste abandonne a lui-meme. Cette oscillation trouve son explication, sinon sa justification, dans les incertitudes de la synthese marxiste elle-meme.⁵

Again, the Yugoslavian philosopher, Mihailo Markovic in an essay of 1969, stressed a similar distinction between Scientific and Critical Marxism:

Marx developed a theory which is both scientific and critical. However, in most interpretations and further developments of his thought either one or the other of these two essential characteristics has invariably been overlooked. . . . To the latter group (who stress criticism) belong . . . various apologists of post-capitalist society who develop Marxism as an ideology and . . . those romantic humanists who consider positive knowledge a form of intellectual subordination to the given social framework. . . . To the former group belong all those scientists who appreciate Marx's enormous contribution to modern social science, but who fail to realize what fundamentally distinguishes Marx's views from those of Comte, Mill, Ricardo and other classical social scientists, as well as from those of modern positivists, in his constant criticism of both existing theory and existing forms of social reality.⁶

The American philosophers, Dick Howard and Karl Klare, also note the existence of Two Marxisms, of a split between Scientific and Critical Marxism, holding, however, that the latter, Critical Marxism is the true Marxism, and that it has been repressed by the former, untrue Scientific Marxism For them, then, Critical Marxism is the "hidden and unknown dimension." "Marxism, in short, is other than what we know it as," writes Karl Klare, and "the theoretical currents that make this clear have had, for reasons of political history, an underground existence within Marxism."⁷

I should reiterate here that, in my own view, "real" or "true" Marxism is no more "critical" than "scientific." Both are equally real in Marxism and both are authentic to it. The contradiction within Marxism is not that of an incorrect versus a correct reading of Marxism. The contradiction is made up of alternatives which are both truly Marxist. Finally, I would add that the contradictions of Marxism are internal and essential to it, rather than artifacts of an external, contingent "political history."

Critical Marxism, stresses Klare, is concerned with aspects of what once were deprecated in Scientific Marxism as the ideological superstructure. Wilhelm Reich, for example, stresses the significance of the authoritarian structure of the patriarchical family and of the character structure it produces, as well as the ideological implications of its repression of sexuality. Again, Antonio Gramsci focuses on the importance of morality, regional differentiations in culture, differences in types of intelligentsia, the importance of the bourgeoisie's ideological hegemony for its domination of society. The Frankfurt School's further studies of the authoritarian character structure, of its stress on ideology critique, and of its recent emphasis on communication and language, are of a similar import.

The main feature of the unknown Marxism, for Klare, is that it restores "human consciousness, human subjectivity, to the heart of Marxism and rejects as a 'vulgar' Marxism the view that 'consciousness' is strictly determined by the economic realm."⁸

A Critical Marxism that rejects all forms of economic determinism and reductionism, is seen as an essentially Lukacsian theory of the "totality," as opposed to positivism, allying itself with continuing efforts to develop Marxism in the light of modern social science developments, particularly - those having an opening to philosophy. Thus Lukacs is the pupil of Max Weber and George Simmel; Sartre bases himself on Freud and Husserl; Marcuse on Heidegger and Freud; and Gramsci has roots in Croce. Critical Marxism, then, is seen as open to other theoretical communities and not as having dogmatic closure.

What has long been called "vulgar" Marxism also entailed an incipient distinction between the Two Marxisms. This involved a focal and negative critique of Scientific Marxism—which is what is termed "vulgar," from the standpoint of a Critical Marxism that was still only tacit and untheoretized. The idea of a "vulgar" Marxism is a rejection of Scientific Marxism that leaves the grounding of this rejection tacit, so that the other, Critical Marxism remains "hidden" or only residual.

The convergence between vulgar Marxism and Scientific Marxism can be seen in the formulation of vulgar Marxism made by the English Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm:

vulgar Marxism embraced in the main the following elements:

1. The "economic interpretation of history," i.e., the belief that "the economic factor is the fundamental factor on which the others are dependent" . . . on which phenomena hitherto not regarded as having much connection with economic matters depended....

2. The model of "basis and superstructure" (used most widely to explain the history of ideas) . . . this model was usually interpreted as a simple relation of dominance and dependence . . . mediated at most by

3. ''Class interest and class struggle."

4. Historical laws and historical inevitability" downgrading accidents and the role of the individual in history.⁹

In that sense, then, a Scientific Marxism, is structuralistic, a Critical Marxism, voluntarist. To put it another way, Scientific Marxism conceives of men as other-grounded, i.e., as produced objects, as products of society, or of society's structured contradictions and of the blind laws expressing these. Scientific Marxism is fused with the technological pathos characteristic of modernism. Critical Marxism, however, stresses that men are doers and producers. In accenting the self-groundedness of men, it fuses with recurrent social movements toward a cultural revitalization that is a romanticized'' opposition to the "mechanization" of the modern world, resonating inhibited "spiritual" sentiments.

The last case to be discussed here is Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism.¹⁰  Having chosen to use Merleau-Ponty's terminology (i.e., "Western" Marxism), Anderson might have been expected to, but does not, refer to Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism in the sense used here and, indeed, in the whole tradition of discourse outlined above. Anderson's is a negative case that conflates Scientific and Critical Marxists and plainly exhibits the corresponding intellectual loss of not making some such distinction. Anderson's method is that of an informal generation (or cohort) study in which the generations are treated primarily in relationship to each other, but are not linked systematically to their differing political and economic environments comprehensively conceived. The different historical character of each Marxist generation's social milieu remains unclarified with the singular exception that, understandably, much is made of the effects of the October Revolution. The study is thus in the tradition of the old history of ideas, where one idea is related to others but not to the surrounding historical situation except that here, instead of ideas, the unit examined is the generation.

Anderson's attention is essentially focused on Western Marxist theorists whose work appeared from about 1920 to the present. This, of course, has the effect of locating such otherwise diverse theorists as Gramsci and Althusser, or Della Volpe and Horkheimer, in the same school.  For Anderson, they are all Western Marxists. Having asserted that they are members of the same generation and category, Anderson then seeks common attributes they may be said to have, thus diverting analysis from the substantial differences they also have. The very title of the study starts by promising to focus on Marxists distinguished by their common origins or cultural orientations—i.e., Western—and then makes a 180 degree turn and sorts them out by generation. Anderson's method of the intergenerational study of isolated generations thus focuses on the similarities of the post-1920 generation, as these become visible when contrasted with pre-1920 generations. Most especially, Anderson holds that one of the main, common themes of Western Marxism is its pessimism.

A first problem is whether this conclusion is correct. Is it really true that Marxist pessimism begins only after 1920 with those he calls Western Marxists? It does not seem so. Such pessimism is already fully manifest even before World War I in Georges Sorel, who was clearly the first and foremost pessimist among Critical Marxists, having condemned the very doctrine of "progress," which he viewed as an ideology of a privileged elite who justified their advantages by promising that everyone else would, in time, enjoy the privileges now enjoyed only by themselves. Anderson is able to define pessimism as post-October Revolution only because he ignores Sorel, whom he mentions only once and in passing.

Anderson wants to account for this pessimism as due to the failure of the revolutions in central Europe and their inability to rescue the October Revolution from subsequent bureaucratization and deformation by Stalinism. In effect, Anderson wants to account for pessimism among Western Marxists as due to the political defeat of Marxism, that is, as due to events extrinsic and only contingently related to Marxism itself. If pessimism is to be explained by the failure of the October Revolution, it must therefore be allowed to make its appearance only after that Revolution. Actually, however, Marxist pessimism precedes that failure and contributes as much to it as it receives from it. Marxist pessimism is central to Bolshevism. Lenin's fundamental doctrine of the external origins of socialist consciousness—that it must be brought to the proletariat by bourgeois intellectuals, and that it is not a consciousness natural to the working class—is a profoundly pessimistic doctrine for a Marxist. Certainly it is every bit as pessimistic as those other doctrines Anderson regards as pessimistic: e.g., Althusser's belief that socialism does not overcome ideology and its false consciousness, or Marcuse's doctrine of the uni-dimensional society which can coopt all resistance to it.

Anderson is twice mistaken: first, about the timing of Marxist pessimism and, second, about its origins. In Chapter Five, I related part of this pre-revolutionary pessimism to the "long depression" of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to its failure to result in an economic crash that brought down capitalist society, to the growing strength of the capitalist class, and to the growing parliamentarianism of social democracy. As an outgrowth of these developments, Bernstein's revisionism flatly held that Marx's political economy was wrong, and that there would be no crash produced by the internal and necessary laws of the capitalist economy. It is this that is the grounding of prerevolutionary, Marxist pessimism. This, too, is part of what leads Lukacs to assert that the essence of Marxism is not the priority of the economic factor but the primacy of the "totality," and which intensifies the development of a voluntaristic Critical Marxism, where "will" and political determination are to substitute for the results Scientific Marxists once expected from capitalism's internal contradictions. This, too, is one of the main sources of other common characteristics Anderson attributes to Western Marxists, that is, their rejection of theoretical work in economics, their focus on aesthetics and ideological superstructures, and their "methodism."

Anderson's difficulties are essentially grounded in his impulse to salvage Marxism. He wants to be loyal to Marxism, but does not say what this requires. Although he clearly sees that Marxism's difficulties are not simply due to its lacunae but also involve "mistakes," he thinks that Marxism's basic structure provides a suitable corpus for a surgery which will permit amputation of the mistakes, allow new transplants, and suture sundered parts. Yet it is not helpful to be told that Marxism made mistakes but is fundamentally adequate, if we are never told what Marxism's fundament is. Above all, the idea that Marxism has its own internal contradictions is a thought that Anderson will not contemplate.

But if, as Anderson relates in a candid "Afterword," Marxist theory, politics, and economics have gained surprisingly little from extensive recent developments in Marxist historiography; if Marx never produced a coherent account of the bourgeois state and political structures; if he manifested "an incomprehension of much of the nature of the later epoch through which he lived," never registering the new international state system and underestimating the continued vitality of nationalism; and if Anderson also has doubts about Marx's very theory of value, the lynchpin of his economic theory; and if Marxism was also born lacking a political theory; if all this is wrong, it is difficult to understand what is the sound fundament of Marxism to which Anderson wishes to remain loyal. Indeed, given this blossoming of a hundred doubts about the most basic aspects of Marxism, it is understandable that Anderson wants to proceed with his fundamental critique of Marxism in a manner that is full of "courage and calm" but it is astonishing, that he wishes to remain "resolutely revolutionary in political position" (p. 118). It is altogether perplexing why anyone should want to remain a resolute revolutionary if his whole theory of history admittedly has the most profound defects, except on the premise that theory and practice no longer have much to do with one another. Indeed this is just what Anderson says in declaring that there is an "inherent scissiparity between knowledge and action, theory and practice." (p. 110).

For Anderson, then, there are no inner contradictions of Marxism itself; only contradictions between generations of Marxists. In short, Anderson tries to solve the problem of the internal contradictions of Marxism in much the same manner as those who want to split Marx and Engels, or split the young and old Marx, assigning acceptable elements to one side and rejected elements to another, only this time the split is made between different generations of Marxists. With this strategy, the problem is soluble by writing off Engels in one case, the young Marx in another, or, in Anderson's case, writing off Western Marxism. For linking it as he does with the failure of the October Revolution, tarring all Western Marxists with the brush of pessimism, and never asking which parts of their work retain validity and should be preserved, Anderson must end with the liquidation of modern Marxism and the return to a critically reappropriated earlier generation. Most notably to Trotsky's reading—although this too, is seen as defective. At bottom, although he wants to return to an updated, critically purified Trotskyism, as a pure unbureaucratized Leninism, Anderson's solution is intellectually regressive and, what is worse, manifests a failure of nerve. What he fails to understand is that Trotskyism is the defeated underside of Leninism, a close kin of Stalinism itself—playing Yin to its Yang—and that all three share a common elitism.¹¹

Looked at closely, however, Anderson does admit tacitly the distinction between Scientific and Critical Marxism, so central here, when he acknowledges that Louis Althusser's writings do have features distinguishing them from other schools (whose description converges with our Critical Marxism). Anderson thus remarks of the Della Volpean and Althusserian schools, "Their hostility towards Hegel . . . demarcates them most obviously in a tradition otherwise predominantly drawn towards Hegel. Together with this, they shared an aggressive re-emphasis on the scientific character of Marxism."¹²

Yet, insists Anderson, such differences do not allow us to divide post1920 European Marxism into two "antithetical camps nor even warrant speaking of a more subtle or continuous spectrum . . . For the attitudes of individual theorists have often coincided or overlapped in disconcerting ways." This is the authentic but archaic voice of "public school," British empiricism and comes with the porridge. The intellectual Ulysses has wandered home from his adventures abroad, settling snugly into his old hearth after wenching with foreign theories, and returns to the sound ways of his fathers, his old dog Empiricism at his feet. What Anderson has not got clearly is that Scientific and Critical Marxism are analytical distinctions, like "bureaucracy," the "state," even "class," and thus concrete persons or specific groups will inevitably have "scores" on both dimensions. (Thus even "bald" persons may have some hair or the hirsute may have "high foreheads.") There will always be some, however, who score so high on one dimension and so low on the other that that it will be reasonable, as a kind of shorthand, to speak of them as ''Scientific Marxists" or "Critical Marxists," even though we know perfectly well that each has some of the other in him. Notice, too, that the same is true of those Anderson terms "Western Marxists," and those he distinguishes from them, their predecessors. If they are all not so much distinguished by when they were born (and even here there is a "subtle, continuous spectrum") but by what they believe, there is much overlapping among them. The point, then, is that Anderson has confused analytic categories with concrete things, having gotten the flea of his old dog on him.

NOTES

1. K. Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1970), p. 95.

2. Ibid., p. 108.

3. Interview with Lucio Colletti in the New Left Review, July/August 1914, p. 18.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 64. In Merleau-Ponty's version of a Critical Marxism, however, there is not, as in Lukacs's, a Hegelian tendency to assimilate the Other or to have the "subject" annihilate and ingest the object. Merleau-Ponty had a more Durkheimian sensitivity to the real constraints imposed by the Other; he views the Other as evidencing its own reality by the external constraints it imposes—the "heaviness" of history. Merleau-Ponty holds that "it is this feeling of the objective world's weight, which is acquired only in contact with things."

5. Raymond Aron, "Equivoque et inepuisable," in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought, Social Science Research Council (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 37.

6. Mihailo Markovic, "Marx and Critical Scientific Thought," in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought, pp. 155-67.

7. Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 4.

8. Ibid., p. 7.

9. Eric Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to Historiography," in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought, p. 197-211.

10. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).

11. That is a theme I have developed elsewhere. See Alvin W. Gouldner, ''Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,'' Telos, Winter 1977-78, esp. pp. 20-26. See also the pointed and succinct argument by Philip Corrigan, Harvey Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).

12. Anderson, p. 71.