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Marxism as Dogma, Ideology, and Theory in Contemporary Political Sociology*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
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- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 1976 , pp. 654 - 667
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1976
References
1 Birnbaum, Norman, “The Crisis in Marxist Sociology,” in Dreitzel, Hans P., ed., Recent Sociology: No. 1 (London, 1969), 42Google Scholar
2 For an assessment by a Marxist political sociologist of the debilitating effects on the theoretical development of Marxism (as well as its practical application) wrought by the slavish adherence to a Soviet-dominated common political position by Communist parties, see Miliband, Ralph, The State in Capitalist Society (London, 1969), 115–18.Google Scholar
3 “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, Vol. I (Moscow, 1962), 405:xi
4 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bonaparte, Louis, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, Vol. I (Moscow, 1962), 247Google Scholar
5 Marxism: A Historical and Critical Study (New York, 1961), 394, 395
6 Ironically, Marx himself provides excellent examples of this kind of practice in his own lifetime; e.g., “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstitions in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” Marx and Engels, Vol. I, 249–50
7 Bauman, Zygmunt, “In Memory of Julian Hochfeld (1911–1966),” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 14:2 (1966), 5–7Google Scholar
8 Warsaw, Poland
9 Hochfeld, Julian, “The Concept of Class Interest,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin 15:2 (1967), 5–14Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 6
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 7
13 Ibid. Hochfeld cites Engels in support of his position: “Only among the working class does the German aptitude for theory remain unimpaired. Here it cannot be exterminated. Here there is no concern for careers, for profit-making, or for gracious patronage from above. On the contrary, the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of the workers. The new tendency, which recognized that the key to the understanding of the whole history of society lies in the history of the development of labour, from the outset addressed itself by preference to the working class and here found the response which it neither sought nor expected from officially recognized science. The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy.” Engels, , “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, Vol. II (Moscow, 1962), 401–2Google Scholar
14 Hochfeld, “Concept of Class Interest,” 7–8
15 Ibid., 8
16 E.g., “… false consciousness is a dangerous concept, for if we define interests totally independently of the orientations of those concerned, ‘religious mania alone speaks here’.” Dahrendorf, Ralf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Palo Alto, Calif., 1959), 75Google Scholar
17 Hochfeld, “Concept of Class Interest,” 9. This is a theoretical position by no means unique to Hochfeld – Engels, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, and Lukács have espoused similar views. More recent examples drawn from Canadian scholarship in the Marxist tradition are Leo A. Johnson, “The Development of Class in the Twentieth Century,” (141–83) and Bourque, Gilles and Laurin-Frenette, Nicole, “Social Classes and National Ideologies in Quebec, 1760–1970,” (185–210), both in Teeple, Gary, ed., Capitalism and the National Question (Toronto, 1972).Google Scholar
18 Lipset, S.M., Political Man (Garden City, N.Y., 1960), 282Google Scholar
19 Ralph Miliband, State in Capitalist Society, 4, 269
20 Ibid., 43
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 44
23 Ibid., 54
24 Although he does equivocate on this issue, Miliband is on solid ground when he stresses the lack of political significance in a downward shift in the class origins of occupants of elite positions. This is a welcome antidote to the innumerable studies in the past two decades making claims to the contrary; e.g., that the bureaucracy is more “representative” on the grounds that no longer are senior government officials overwhelmingly from upper middle class and upper class backgrounds.
25 Ibid., 64–5
26 Ibid., 272–3
27 Ibid., 161
28 Ibid., 70–1
29 Ibid., 276–7
30 Ibid., 17. Other examples of Marxian interpretations of reform which preclude class polarization can be found in Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; and Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York, 1963).Google Scholar
31 Marx, Karl, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Bottomore, T.B. and Rubel, M., eds., (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1963), 197–8Google Scholar
32 Touraine, Alain, The Post-Industrial Society – Tomorrow's Social History: Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society (New York, 1971), 8–12Google Scholar
33 Mann, Michael, Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class (London, 1973), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Ibid., 68
35 Ibid., 69
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 70
39 Ibid., 71
40 Ibid., 71–2
41 Ibid., 73
42 Ibid., 72
43 Ibid., 73
44 E.g., Werlin, Robert J., “Marxist Political Analysis,” in Effrat, Andrew, ed., Perspectives in Political Sociology (New York, 1972), 152–82Google Scholar; Zeitlin, Irving, Marxism: A Re-Examination (New York, 1967), 92–4Google Scholar
45 Coleman Romalis, “Political Values and Sociological Analysis: Some Further Reflections,” in Effrat, Perspectives, 267–74
46 For an interesting and perceptive critique of Marx's references to the state and, related to it, the conditions which facilitate or retard the autonomy of the state bureaucracy, see Pappaioannou, Kostas, “Marx and the Bureaucratic State,” Dissent 16 (May–June 1969), 252–62.Google Scholar
47 Feuer asserts, in his Introduction to a collection of the Writings of Marx and Engels that “as a political sociologist… as an analyst of the class content of historical movements, Marx remains the master. Most contemporary political sociology consists of glosses to Marx.” With some allowance for hyperbole, particularly in the last sentence, Feuer's comment is quite typical of the kind of references that have appeared in publications of various kinds in the fields of both political sociology and social stratification over the past two decades. Feuer, Lewis S., “Introduction by the Editor,” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings in Politics and Philosophy (New York, 1959), ix–xxiGoogle Scholar
48 “Crisis in Marxist Sociology,” 42