Showing papers by "Alvin W. Gouldner published in 1974"

The metaphoricality of Marxism and the context-freeing grammar of socialism

Abstract: Whatever may be said of the failures of Marxism, these are essentially intellectual and theoretical failures-for example, the failure of its predictionsthat are, quite properly, important to intellectuals and scholars. Yet Marxism has in no realistic sense been a failure as a politics. For if by "politics" we mean the struggle for power in the state, then Marxist politics has had an historically unparalleled success. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the revolutions of the twentieth century without seeing the role that Marxism and Marxists have played in them. In about half a century something like half the world has come under the governance of those defining themselves as Marxists. No other system of thought in human history has ever had so extensive a success, let alone in so brief a period.

Marxism and social theory

Abstract: Marx's treatment of ideology and ideologues has certain symptomatic silences. It possesses a "dark secret" in which the existence of the secret itself lays hidden. Having focussed its analysis on what is hidden in other theories and in bourgeois society, Marxism may seem to some the embodiment of a healthy candor that has no secrets of its own. The accusor, of course, classically diverts attention from his own guilt by accusing another. That his accusation has this self-protective function, however, does not mean that it was intended to do so, nor does it mean that his accusation is untrue.