A Contribution to the Critique of Academic Marxism: Or How the Intellectuals Liquidate Class Struggle John Horton The Problem of Class Unconsciousness: ‘Academic Marxism: 1960-1977 Academic Marxism in the U.S. has meant an almost total absence of class analysis, and complete failure to understand that the famous union of theory and practice was not a philosophical problem, but 2 practical, historical task of working class parties. In the United States, in contrast to Europe and Japan, academic Marxists for the most part have expanded in splendid isolation from Leninists, that is to say, from the workers movement and proletarian parties, and have formed their own professional Marxist journals and organizations without any viable relationship to the American working class. The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was the academic model of theory and practice, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), the model of a left research collective, and the Insurgent Sociologist, the model journal of left eclecticism, SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 78CLASS CRITIQUE OF ACADEMIC MARXISM all existing in the limbo of entrepreneurial leftism. For example, members of the Insurgent and their friends began a tradition of West Coast Socialist Social Science Conferences which by 1976 could draw up to 600 people. These conferences created a marketplace of ideas (usually excluding Leninism) where groups and individuals could come together to exchange their special versions of Marxist theory and research without achieving any intellectual or political coherence beyond the marketplace. Least of all did they ask themselves who they were in class terms or what their activities had to do with class struggle. Nevertheless, academic Marxists in the early 1970s did draw pseudo-class battle lines, using the rhetoric of class and class analysis to describe their struggles within the competitive divisions and lines of oppression within their own petty bourgeois institutions. Thus, students aspiring to be professors and small professors ‘aspiring to be big professors or students and teachers in non-elite schools jealous of elite privileges or women wanting to hold academic positions equal to men tended to turn their alienation into rage against elite students, professors and most especially males. In this game the underdogs of the petty bourgeois intellectual stratum imagined that they were the working class fighting the upper class. But these battles within petty bourgeois radical organizations differed from the hustling of non-radical academics only in their ‘super-politicized hypocrisy. While the academic Marxists on university faculties and in graduate schools failed to comprehend the import of class stand, particularly proletarian class stand, conservative professors and administrators have no particular difficulty judging Marxism and Marxists in class terms. Of course, ‘they speak in the class-free, technocratic language of professional competence, but the result is that Marxists are rewarded or punished according to the strength or weakness of their proletarian worldview. "Reasonable" academics, sympathetic to the underdog and the cause of human liberation in the abstract, while extraordinarily hostile to any practical manifestation of social conscience have managed to purge activists and communists, replacing them with more professionally inclined "Marxists" and "radicals." Similarly, minorities with close ties to theit working class communities are being replaced by individuals with 2 Commitment to their petty bourgeois careers. In both cases, academic institutions have refused to tolerate a link between revolutionary ideas and revolutionary practice. SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 9CLASS CRITIQUE "Marxism" has been tolerated only so long as it is a version amenable to being transformed into a commodity ‘exchangeable for jobs, promotion and the ideological task of reproducing capitalist class relations. Unfortunately, Marxists working in academia are not always as astute as their promotion committees, deans and presidents in evaluating academic Marxism from a Merxist perspective. Academic Marxists are forever debating the real. meaning of Marxism and the relation between intellectuals and the working class, as if words made a social movement. But Marxism is not a set of texts and dogmas, but a highly organized and successful method for the production of knowledge and social change. Intellectuals are Marxists to the degree that they are part of that organized method for the economic, political and intellectual practice ‘of class struggle. Wherever they work in the capitalist division of labor, they become Marxists to the degree that they are linked to the working class struggle by a proletarian worldview and by ties to a proletarian party with the fighting capacity to produce change. Only academic Marxism can be produced over cocktails at the Hilton and in ‘opulent conference rooms where professors compete and pontificate in exchange for applause and promotion. Academic Marxism practiced in isolation from the working class movement is a fraud. As the workers! movement grows more militant in response to the increased attack on labor in the U.S., intellectuals will be increasingly judged by ordinary class-conscious working people. They will simply ask: In all your prattling about the essence of Marxism and the onerous task of giving knowledge to the workers, did you in fact serve the working class, or did you serve only your careers and fight to maintain your privileged position over workers? By now every academic Marxist has heard about Gramsci's distinction between traditional intellectuals in the service of the ruling institutions and organic intellectuals of the working class. They know that an important problem in the transition to socialism is simultaneously producing working class intellectuals and transforming traditional intellectuals of the petty bourgeois class into intellectuals serving the working Class. Much less clear is precisely what is practically involved in the latter process, or indeed what it is about the traditional intellectual which must be changed. This essay addresses one thing that has to be changed, the traditional intellectuals' petty bourgecis class perspective. Everyone knows that the petty bourgeois is, SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 80CLASS CRITIQUE "Marxism" has been tolerated only so long as it is a version amenable to being transformed into a commodity ‘exchangeable for jobs, promotion and the ideological task of reproducing capitalist class relations. Unfortunately, Marxists working in academia are not always as astute as their promotion committees, deans and presidents in evaluating academic Marxism from a Merxist perspective. Academic Marxists are forever debating the real. meaning of Marxism and the relation between intellectuals and the working class, as if words made a social movement. But Marxism is not a set of texts and dogmas, but a highly organized and successful method for the production of knowledge and social change. Intellectuals are Marxists to the degree that they are part of that organized method for the economic, political and intellectual practice ‘of class struggle. Wherever they work in the capitalist division of labor, they become Marxists to the degree that they are linked to the working class struggle by a proletarian worldview and by ties to a proletarian party with the fighting capacity to produce change. Only academic Marxism can be produced over cocktails at the Hilton and in ‘opulent conference rooms where professors compete and pontificate in exchange for applause and promotion. Academic Marxism practiced in isolation from the working class movement is a fraud. As the workers! movement grows more militant in response to the increased attack on labor in the U.S., intellectuals will be increasingly judged by ordinary class-conscious working people. They will simply ask: In all your prattling about the essence of Marxism and the onerous task of giving knowledge to the workers, did you in fact serve the working class, or did you serve only your careers and fight to maintain your privileged position over workers? By now every academic Marxist has heard about Gramsci's distinction between traditional intellectuals in the service of the ruling institutions and organic intellectuals of the working class. They know that an important problem in the transition to socialism is simultaneously producing working class intellectuals and transforming traditional intellectuals of the petty bourgeois class into intellectuals serving the working Class. Much less clear is precisely what is practically involved in the latter process, or indeed what it is about the traditional intellectual which must be changed. This essay addresses one thing that has to be changed, the traditional intellectuals' petty bourgecis class perspective. Everyone knows that the petty bourgeois is, SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 80CLASS CRITIQUE the fundamental subjectivity of the petty bourgeois perspective, we can analyze the ideological and political results of its “left” and "right" distortions of class. The starting point for the Marxist analysis of class is “individuals producing in a society, and hence the socially determined production of individuals." (I) The theoretical and practical object of a dialectical analysis is not the world as perceived by individuals, but the totality of the ways in which individuals are organized to produce and reproduce their material and social world, including their experience of individuality. The starting point in Marxist analysis is the whole system, be it the world system or 2 whole social system. Thus Marx understood society not subjectively, but dialectically as the result of the totality of the ways we are organized to produce and reproduce society. Such Marxist concepts as party, class, mode of production and relations of production attest to the profoundly non-subjective and non- individualistic method of dialectical materialism. To be sure Marxism is the practice of individual and human liberation, But the task means using dialectical materialism to identity the class forms of slavery and building the party organization capable of transforming them. The starting point for the petty bourgeois analysis of society and class is the isolated individual, not the organization of social relationships, not our social methods for producing the quality of individual life and experience. The Marxist method looks at the totality of individuals' social relationships. The petty bourgeois method begins with the individual and moves from there to build concepts of class and social organization. The latter approach is methodological macness and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual production of society. We are not first of all individuals, then later on social beings; we are first social beings, and expressions of the totality of our social relationships. Our experience of individuality is the socialized effect of these relationships. The source of a petty bourgeois method is, of course, the petty bourgeoisie. Their "science" does not for one minute transcend their everyday class experience. Both are subjective and individualistic. In everyday capitalist life, the petty bourgeois professors in the big universities actually imagine that they are the center of their fate and that they managed the hustle to the top by virtue of their ‘extraordinary education and talent. By comparison, the less privileged students and teachers often feel powerless, but they also aspire to be self-determining professionals, and are SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 82OF ACADEMIC MARXISM generally blind to their overall class position below the bourgeoisie and above the proletariat. Subjectively and uncritically, they project this experience into their scientific understanding of society. Now we can begin to understand what happens when the petty bourgeois model is used to explain social development, The model is that of the isolated individual in a world of objects which may either advance or threaten career and self-interest. Projected into an analysis, this experience develops either into an idealism (ideas or individual motivations are the motors of history and class) or into objectivism (individuals and classes are determined by objective forces). The "left" being on the side of self- determination gives causal weight to the notion of society as ‘the production of ideas; the "right" sees the individual buffeted by external forces, and in the mechanical Marxist version, most often by economic forces. These definitions reduced to their simplest class terms here are clearly reflected in the meanings which Lenin and Mao attributed to "right" and "left" deviations within the communist movement. Within the Chinese Communist Party, Mao identified empiricism and dogmatism as the different poles of the same subjectivist, subject-centered petty bourgeois worldview: ‘There used to be a number of comrades in our Party who were dogmatists and who for a long period rejected the experience of the Chinese revolution, denying the truth that "Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action" and overawing people with words and phrases from Marxist works, torn out of context. There were also a number of comrades who were empiricists and who for a long period restricted ‘themselves to their own fragmentary experience and id not understand the importance of theory for revolutionary practice or see the revolution as a whole, but worked blindly though industriously. The erroneous ideas of these two types of comrades, and particularly of the dogmatists, caused enormous Josses to the Chinese revolution during 1931-34, and yet the dogmatists, cloaking themselves as Marxists, confused a great many comrades. "On Practice" was written in order to expose the subjectivist errors of dogmatism and empiricism in the Party, and especially the error of dogmatism, from the SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 83CLASS CRITIQUE standpoint of the Marxist theory of knowledge. It was entitled "On Practice” because its stress was on exposing the dogmatist kind of subjectivism, which belittles practice. (2) Lenin's models for "right-wing" thought were the major theorists of the International, for example, Kautsky and Bernstein. In politics, the “right” was revisionist and opportunist. Lenin summed up the relationship between the class basis and politics of the revisionist: Qpportunism _and_s shauyinism _have_the_same political content, namely, class collaboration, repudiation of the dictatorship of the prole repudiation of revolutionary action, unconditional acceptance of bourgeois legality, confidence in the bourgeoisie and lack of confidence in the proletariat. (3) Lenin's historical model for “left” deviations in politics were the "Council Communists," the "Workers! Opposition Movement" and the many varieties of anarcho-syndicalism. The "left" signaled the infusion of petty bourgeois subjectivism, individualism and adventurism into the communist movement. The rigid idealism of "left" politics expressed itself as principled opposition to compromise, unilateral rejection of legal and reformist struggles and suspicion of organization and the Bolshevik Party. (4) "Left" thought in theory appeared within the communist movement in the romantic revolutionary conceptions of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukacs. (5) They interpreted dialectical materialism not as the actual social organization of class practices, but in a Hegelian fashion as the revolutionary mentality of the proletariat, a socially given ability to think dialectically about society. Lukacs and Korsch were Philosophers of praxis because they saw revolution as a problem of correct philosophy rather than 2 practical method of class struggle. The appeal of the "left" has always been its opposition to the dominant "right" (empiricist and economist) deviations within the communist movement. Thus, "left" thought arose in opposition to the mechanical Marxism of the Second International, then decades later, to the same tendencies in the Third International. Unfortunately, the "left" reacts to the "right" from the idealist side of the same subjective petty bourgeois worldview that engendered Second and Third SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 EYOF ACADEMIC MARXISM International economism and empiricism. The criticism of the "right" has to be made from a proletarian and dialectical materialist standpoint. This was the task of Lenin and those who have followed him. In the next section, we will show how the same "left" and "right" tendencies identified by Mao and Lenin in the communist movement can be found among academic Marxists. But in the petty bourgeois practice of social science, they are the dominant tendencies fully in accord with the academic production of knowledge, that is, a productive process which functions for the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Reproduced within academic organizations and through subjective models of knowledge, Marxism is turned into just another theory divorced from practice and exchangeable in the academic marketplace for personal advancement within the petty bourgeoisie rather than for social advancement of the working class. Without a practical methodology and organization for overcoming a subjective worldview (the self-centered experience of the petty bourgeoisie), Marxism as the unity of theory and practice is broken in the academic production process into one of its components (science, Philosophy, or practice narrowly defined as politics). The dialectical theory of social and intellectual production is reduced to one of the poles of bourgeois subjectivity (idealism/objectivism). The "Left" Liquidation of Class Into Consciousness Ina class society, no thought escapes the stamp of a class. "Left" thought is merely the idealist side of petty bourgeois individualism and subjectivism, a reaction to economism and determinism, but within the same overall class standpoint. ‘The consequences of. an idealist methodology for class analysis can be seen in the way "left" theorists identify problems and solutions to problems within capitalist society. For the various cultural critics of the “left” (from Lukacs and Korsch, through the Frankfurt School, Marcuse and Piccone), the problem is identified at the level of superstructure in ideological blocks to critical reason. Ideology has so engulfed perception in late capitalism, that ‘even oppression and alienation appear as natural states of being. The solution is to find some revolutionary subject with the negative mentality that can overcome alienation and break through the fetishized appearance of social SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 85CLASS CRITIQUE relations to the essence of society. This is, of course, very Hegelian. Not surprisingly, our cultural "leftists" prefer Hegel and the philosophical Marx of alienation to the Marx of Capital; they also tend to prefer anarchism and incividualism to Lenin and democratic centralism;, they preter any analysis which focuses on cultural and ideological control. The model for the "left" thought is practice as self- realization, not practice as the actual social organization of mental and material production. Our "leftists" are ilosophers of revolution. The faulty class analysis of the academic "left" comes out clearly in their search for a revolutionary agent of change. Professorial "left" theorists like Lukacs and Korsch, who were actually in the communist movement, assumed the necessity of class analysis and the revolutionary role of the proletariat. Their futile project was to place the proletariat within an idealist framework, Thus, Lukacs and Korsch argued against the "right-wing" empiricists and revisionists of the Second International that the superiority of the proletariat as a class lay in their method, dialectical materialism. Unfortunately, unlike Lenin, they did not understand the dialectic materialistically as the actual historical unfolding of class struggle, the specific social organization of class practices. Instead, in a subjective and Hegelian fashion, they interpreted the dialectic idealisti- cally as synonymous with spontaneous consciousness of the working class. Korsch, along with Lukacs, and following Hegel, treats dialectical materialism as a philosophy, and philosophy as "its epoch comprehended in thought." (6) From the "left" communist perspective the proletariat are the revolutionary agents of history not because of the practice of class struggle, but because they are in the correct social position to acquire a revolutionary philosophical consciousness which allows them to transcend the reified appearance of social relations and grasp society as a philosophical totality. In fairness to Lukacs, he was a Leninist in the sense that he accepted the role of the party. But his "left" project, as Coletti has pointed out, reduced the class struggle to a battle in the sociology of knowledge between bourgeois empiricists and proletarian dialecticians. The division which capital introduces between the laborer and the objective conditions of labor is replaced by the distinction which the "intellectual" introduced between subject and object, with consequences, as Lukacs himself has since observed, SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 86OF ACADEMIC MARXISM that a socio-historical problem is thus transformed into an ontological problem. (7) The New Left follows the idealist project of the communist "left" in their class analysis, except that they have abandoned altogether the vanguard role of the proletariat and heightened the vanguard role of the new petty bourgeoisie by calling them a "new working class." Lukaes and Korsch infected the proletarian movernent from within by assimilating the proletariat to the model of the intellectual. The New Leftists do away altogether with the proletariat on the grounds of their disappearance, irrelevance and, most especially, their ideological co- optation. They look for the revolutionary agent of change in groups which are immune to the dominant forms of ideological control because of their marginality or their special sense of alienation and oppression. The theory of marginals as revolutionaries owes much to Marcuse's analysis of unidimensionality, the total and non- contradictory infusion of capitalist ideology over all classes.(8) The real rebels are not workers, who are the most integrated into the system and most subject to its brainwashing, but the intellectuals and the outsiders: freaks, minorities, criminals, homosexuals, the oppressed people of the Third World, etc. What these theorists fail to understand is the class location of these social groupings. They erroneously define intellectuals, homosexuals, etc. as gutside of social classes. Thus, the newest “left™ theorists focus on categories of oppression and neglect the class contradictions which produce the class struggle of which the marginals are a part. In short, there is no class analysis. For example, it is not understood that some of the marginal social groups, such as racial minorities, are clearly among the most exploited and most militant members of _the working class, But other marginal categories based on sex, Somali and country cut across class and hide ‘class distinctions The major "new working class" theorists in Europe and the United States (for example, Serge Mallet, Andre Gorz, Alain Touraine and James O'Connor) do not write in the obscure language of cultural criticism so characteristic of the traditional intellectuals. "New working class" theorists speak more for the new technocratic intellectuals, and their methods overlap with those of empiricists. Nevertheless, like the cultural critics, they conceive of practice according to a model of individual perception and motivation, and select the vanguard class according to their socially situated SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 87CLASS CRITIQUE mental tendencies, especially their sensitivity to the new forms of alienation and bureaucratic control. For example, James O'Connor, although an economist presumably concerned with the labor process, sees the major contradictions of monopoly capitalism at the level of the state (9) and thereby arrives at "new working class" theory on distinctly "left" grounds. Alain Neaigus has made the connection between O'Connor's methods and results and Marcuse’s humanist/idealist method: In many ways, O'Connor's views are similar to those of Marcuse. He no longer regards organized workers in the "monopoly sector" as a potential revolutionary force, because they have become integrated into the system and their conflict with capital is now institutionalized. The motive force for social change is located among social groups outside the direct sphere of capital-labor relationships, from state workers alienated from their function. . to the most oppressed and exploited groups, the "wretched of the earth" in the advanced capitalist centers....As with Marcuse, the vanguard group of O'Connor's alliance devolves to the alienated intelligentsia, this time in the form of state service workers. It is this group which embodies the perspective which looks at society as a whole, and who are imbued with an ethic of service. (10) Intellectuals as the Classless Vanguard There is still another variety of petty bourgeois “leftism," and it is the most blatant defense of petty bourgeois class privilege. Some "leftists" who claim to be more radical than Marx and the workers’ movement cherish the petty bourgeois myth that they are classless, and believe that with a little help from "left" philosophy they can learn to levitate above the uncritical masses. In the U.S. the journal Telos has established itself as the defender of classless “leftism." When the fellow editors of Telos were questioned by an outsider about "the political aloofness and obscurity" of their journal, the chief, Paul Piccone, made a clear defense of the ivory tower: The call for the unity of theory and practice, or for the immediate political relevance of theoretical discourse, presupposes a whole series of social SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 88OF ACADEMIC MARXISM conditions which no longer exist....In the administered societies of late capitalism, particularly in North America, individuality is so well managed by the state that it can respond only to pre-packaged slogans and concepts elaborated within the system's logic of reification. In such a situation, it becomes meaningless to address theoretical discourse to a nonexistent public sphere. Restricted to academic ghettos, theoretical discourse becomes the peculiar dialectic of a specific group of intellectuals whose personal histories or other idiosyncracies have made them (at least partly) immune to the epidemic of consumerism, bureaucratization, and mass cretinization rampant in everyday life. (11) The new priests of reason are in no mood to give an apology for their aloofness to "those sectarian Don Quixotes Still looking for salvation in the struggle to organize masses of Sancho Panzas who refuse to leave the windmills of late bourgeois hegemony for not altogether attractive Marxist promises of earlier forms of the same ideology." (12) Yet, according to Piccone, the new priests of reason were originally attracted to Marxism because of its “emancipatory project." But after years of rational dialogue with various Marxist traditions, they have found them all bankrupt. At best, Marxism is a sophisticated expression of an earlier bourgeois society where exploitation, classes and parties still had some meaning; at worst, Marxism is positivism and bureaucracy in the service of oppression. Apparently, what Telos would preserve is the "left" spirit untainted by mortal ties to any agents of change, save the intellectuals, who have fled in disgust to their "ghettos." But our intellectuals are tied to their class and their careers in the universities where they have arrogantly set themselves up to protect the "spontaneity" and “negativity” of rational discourse while giving Marx and Marxists a “decent burial." Piccone’s presentation of "left" thought is so amusing that we can easily forget that he and most of the writers of Telos work within a tradition that mildly infected Marxism In the past, almost killed it during the New Left period, and today functions in academia to squash the rumblings of revolutionary Marxism. Our super-radical "friends" of human emancipation turn out in practice to be the most vicious enemies of militant Marxists and communists. In an atmosphere where more and more people want to learn SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 39CLASS CRITIQUE about Marxism, they preach a radicalism based on petty bourgeois individualism and scorn for the working class. Unwittingly or wittingly, they aid the most reactionary academics by justifying the purge of communists with shouts about incompetence and sectarianism. These "new" anarchists offer, in exchange for Marxism, a philosophical practice which poses absolutely no threat to business as usual. ‘The Bankruptcy of "Left" Class Analysis Piccone awards vanguard status to intellectuals who keep out of politics and get an "A" in "rational!" discourse. "New working class” theorists argue that the vanguard virtues of intellectuals spring less from their detached reason than from their feelings of alienation, oppression and sensitivity to the fine points of ideological control. The most mindless “left” theorists keep changing their choice of vanguard depending on the current wave of political protest and without any regard to class analysis. Even from our brief examples, the bankruptcy of "left" class analysis must be clear. At the center of the difficulty is an unreconstructed petty bourgeois worldview which takes the individual, the individual's ideals, perceptions and motivation as the motors of scientific and political practice. Where does knowledge come from? Our idealists answer: from the philosophy of praxis. Where do problems in capitalism come from? They are located in the realm of ideology as contradictions between ideals and reality, and increasingly as unidimensionality, or blocked perception of contradictions due to the all-pervasive, repressive capitalist ideology. Who are the agents of change? Groups consisting of persons who are sensitive to these problems of alienation and fragmentation and can spontaneously grasp the total social process. What is wrong with this model? First of all, the method does not derive from a general or universal theory of human motivation, but from a theory deduced from the experience of the petty bourgeoisie as an intermediate class fearing proletarianization above all else. Even if we accepted this subjective concept of practice, the motivational theory does not speak for the working class, The problems of the proletariat have long gone beyond alienation and a sense of fragmentation. The proletariat are exploited and, for the most part, have already lost control over the productive SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 90OF ACADEMIC MARXISM process to the intellectuals and technicians who are so busy projecting their fears of the proletariat into managerial visions of socialism. Certainly, the problems of the proletariat are more concrete than unidimensionality. Only an intellectual could define problems almost totally within the realm of ideas. Secondly, @ motivational theory of practice is simply incorrect, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual socially organized practice of generating knowledge or the practice of class struggle. As dialectical materialists, Marxists do not build their theories of revolution on vague concepts of human nature or on what individuals perceive or imagine. A concrete class analysis addresses how people are actually organized to act in all productive structures, economic and political 2s well as ideological. The problem of knowledge is to move beyond perceptual reality and subjectivism to a rational understanding of contradiction in these productive structures, to produce a rational non- subjective knowledge as @ weapon in the class struggl The Right Road to Class Analysis "Left" theorists, especially the cultural critics and fickle defenders of the alienated and oppressed, are profoundly conscious of method and practice. But their method is merely philosophical. It provides no concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Today as academic Marxism becomes more respectable and moves from "left" opposition to a conservative and researchable topic, the critical and philosophical Marxists are losing ground to "right" Marxists. Acmed with their empiricist’ methods, "right" Marxists promise scientific results for the workers! movement. To see what's wrong with their method and how it functions to hide class privilege, we will have to go more deeply into the empiricist theory of knowledge and societal development. Both are theoretical expressions of a petty bourgeois worldview, only from the "right" side (bjectivism and determinism). Where Does Knowledge Come From? The Empiricist and Technical Conception Of Setentific Practice Empiricism is thet representation of scientific practice which, by pre-supposing the existence of knowledge in the facts, deduces from the facts the SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 aCLASS CRITIQUE objects of scientific research: to verify these facts, to group them together and to synthesize them by a process of abstraction which renders them susceptible to effective handling: that is to say allows for their accumulation and communication. The empiricist model would therefore treat scientific work not as a process of transformation but as a process of purification of the stated fact, since it seeks to eliminate the contingent properties of the fact and thereby arrive at its "essential determination." (13) "Right-wing" Marxists imagine that they will advance the class struggle by being as scientific as their bourgeois colleagues. They turn pale and uneasy with too much talk about theory and dialectical materialism. They say, "Let's get down to the facts." But for all their fanatical concern for the methodology of fact-gathering, our empiricists are profoundly unconscious of method. They know that academic institutions serve the bourgeoisie, but do not apply the lesson to themselves. They want to assure the purity of their Marxism and their science by a contradictory dose of moral concern for the workers, familiarity with sacred texts and strict adherence to ideal rules of fact-gathering. They do not really understand that they are not free-floating technicians, but fact-gatherers with a petty bourgecis class perspective who work in an organization for the production of knowledge useful to the bourgeoisie. How Soclety Develo; The Self-Movement of the Economic Variable Marxist empiricists have always been easy targets for bourgeois empiricists. The lattet are very democratic and pluralistics they see development as the result of multiple variables, cultural as well as economic. Marxist empiricists are vulgar economic determinists; quite indefensibly, they see society as the effect of the primary economic variable. Marx, of course, gave primacy to the mode of production, but he never thought of it in empiricist fashion as being a thing or merely people's relations to things, or only the technical organization of production. The mode of production and class encompass all those social relationships between agents which bear on their control over the labor process. SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 92CLASS CRITIQUE objects of scientific research: to verify these facts, to group them together and to synthesize them by a process of abstraction which renders them susceptible to effective handling: that is to say allows for their accumulation and communication. The empiricist model would therefore treat scientific work not as a process of transformation but as a process of purification of the stated fact, since it seeks to eliminate the contingent properties of the fact and thereby arrive at its "essential determination." (13) "Right-wing" Marxists imagine that they will advance the class struggle by being as scientific as their bourgeois colleagues. They turn pale and uneasy with too much talk about theory and dialectical materialism. They say, "Let's get down to the facts." But for all their fanatical concern for the methodology of fact-gathering, our empiricists are profoundly unconscious of method. They know that academic institutions serve the bourgeoisie, but do not apply the lesson to themselves. They want to assure the purity of their Marxism and their science by a contradictory dose of moral concern for the workers, familiarity with sacred texts and strict adherence to ideal rules of fact-gathering. They do not really understand that they are not free-floating technicians, but fact-gatherers with a petty bourgecis class perspective who work in an organization for the production of knowledge useful to the bourgeoisie. How Soclety Develo; The Self-Movement of the Economic Variable Marxist empiricists have always been easy targets for bourgeois empiricists. The lattet are very democratic and pluralistics they see development as the result of multiple variables, cultural as well as economic. Marxist empiricists are vulgar economic determinists; quite indefensibly, they see society as the effect of the primary economic variable. Marx, of course, gave primacy to the mode of production, but he never thought of it in empiricist fashion as being a thing or merely people's relations to things, or only the technical organization of production. The mode of production and class encompass all those social relationships between agents which bear on their control over the labor process. SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 92CLASS CRITIQUE Y.M. Bodemann captures the current political expression of ‘tright™ thinking Once we become more fully aware of our own interests (jobs, non-interference with our teaching duties, salaries, etc.) and become aware that our interests are really identical with those of other working people, we will, with strong unions, all be able to build a revolutionary party... .Our political starting point, therefore, is and must be the university, and we must seek alliances with other occupational groups and the working class generally from there. (13) Bodemann thus defends political practice against the armchair speculation implied in Al Szymanski's comment that intellectuals should give priority to theory and combat the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. (16) On the contrary, Bodemann replies, we no longer live in academic "ivory towers’ as free-floating intellectuals or privileged petty bourgeois. We are members of the working class and should talk less about Marxism and begin fighting the oppressive relations in our workplace Apparently by pursuing their self-interests in the universities and colleges, intellectuals will automatically serve the interests of the working class as a whole. But this is obviously not always the case. Under threats of proletarianization, intellectuals fight basically for the right to continue commanding their secretaries, managing the priestly skills which capital has taken away from the workers and generally trying to hold on to their intermediate class position over the proletariat. Black workers can recognize this without the aid of study when they see white teachers organizing against their oppressive administrators for their special right not to be "exiled" to the ghettos. Classes define themselves in class struggles, not in the minds and studies of sociologists. By what perverse method have academic Marxists arrived at the knowledge that they are workers? The root of their delusion is clearly petty bourgeois opportunism expressed theoretically in a faulty, undialectical, economist and empiricist methodology. Like the "left" philosophers they deduce knowledge and politics from a subjective, ideological position which ends up supporting their own class interests. Unlike the "left," they think ‘that they are deducing correct knowledge from a scientific analysis of the SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 34OF ACADEMIC MARXISM facts." But their conception of "facts" and their method for gathering them are both idealistic and conservative for they ignore practice as the criterion for the production of truth and social formations. How Marxist Empiricists Reduce Class to the Economic Variable Empiricists equate class, that ensemble of ideological and political as well as economic practices, to an economic variable, an object of class determination. At the most economistic level, class is calculated by level of income and occupation. In his classic defense of reformism, Evolutionary Socialism, Eduard Bernstein, acting just like a modern soctological technician, measured. wages, income distribution and social differentiation to prove according to the facts that the bourgeoisie and proletariat were becoming alike. Now with the help of a little moral education and parliamentary strategy, the two classes could walk hand in hand into the dawn of socialism. Thus Bernstein hid class differences by doing away with classes. His methodological ploy was to interpret class at the level of bourgeois "facts." He examined the technical division of labor and not the social relations of production, that is, the productive ground of Class and the technical division of labor. (17) Rosa Luxemburg was the first to spot Bernstein's empiricism and attack his reformist intent: "To him, ‘capitalism’ is not an economic but a fiscal unit and ‘capital’ for him is not a factor for production but simply a quantity of money." (18) Luxemburg understood "capital" and "economic" as social relations of production. Bernstein merely described society at the level of distribution and exchange. He worked "scientifically" and "politically" within the established order. This is the meaning of empiricism. Bernstein lives today in all those sociological stratification studies which give empirical proof of the non- existence of class. His method lives also among our contemporary social democrats, although they use economic factors to prove not that class has disappeared, but that the working class includes nearly everyone in society. The result, however, is the same: class distinctions, especially those of the petty bourgeoisie, disappear. Thus, not surprisingly, the New American Movement, the modern voice for the peaceful transition to socialism, defines the petty bourgeoisie out of existence with their economist version of the working class: SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 95OF ACADEMIC MARXISM facts." But their conception of "facts" and their method for gathering them are both idealistic and conservative for they ignore practice as the criterion for the production of truth and social formations. How Marxist Empiricists Reduce Class to the Economic Variable Empiricists equate class, that ensemble of ideological and political as well as economic practices, to an economic variable, an object of class determination. At the most economistic level, class is calculated by level of income and occupation. In his classic defense of reformism, Evolutionary Socialism, Eduard Bernstein, acting just like a modern soctological technician, measured. wages, income distribution and social differentiation to prove according to the facts that the bourgeoisie and proletariat were becoming alike. Now with the help of a little moral education and parliamentary strategy, the two classes could walk hand in hand into the dawn of socialism. Thus Bernstein hid class differences by doing away with classes. His methodological ploy was to interpret class at the level of bourgeois "facts." He examined the technical division of labor and not the social relations of production, that is, the productive ground of Class and the technical division of labor. (17) Rosa Luxemburg was the first to spot Bernstein's empiricism and attack his reformist intent: "To him, ‘capitalism’ is not an economic but a fiscal unit and ‘capital’ for him is not a factor for production but simply a quantity of money." (18) Luxemburg understood "capital" and "economic" as social relations of production. Bernstein merely described society at the level of distribution and exchange. He worked "scientifically" and "politically" within the established order. This is the meaning of empiricism. Bernstein lives today in all those sociological stratification studies which give empirical proof of the non- existence of class. His method lives also among our contemporary social democrats, although they use economic factors to prove not that class has disappeared, but that the working class includes nearly everyone in society. The result, however, is the same: class distinctions, especially those of the petty bourgeoisie, disappear. Thus, not surprisingly, the New American Movement, the modern voice for the peaceful transition to socialism, defines the petty bourgeoisie out of existence with their economist version of the working class: SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 95OF ACADEMIC MARXISM the propertyless. For example, the distinctive class interests of the petty bourgeois managers and technicians are defined by their control over other workers and aspects of the labor process, which is a result of their monopoly on skill, ideology and management. Francesca Freedman's work on the class structure of the U.S. is a case in point. Writing in the social democratic journal, Socialist Revolution, she rejects the position put forth by Poulantzas that the technocratic-managerial stratum constitutes a new petty bourgeoisie on the grounds that actual ownership of the means of production is the only determinant of class, and the petty bourgeoisie is propertyless. Classes arise out of an objective material base; they form the human actors of the given relations of a certain mode of production. In this light, it is difficult for me to accept Poulantzas's creation of a new class, since the basic social relation of capitalism has not and cannot be changed, ives, the relationship between the owners of capital and those who own nothing more than their own labor- power. (21) Nevertheless Freedman concedes that other super structural factors such as ideology, politics and consumption patterns can determine membership in factions within a class. Her argument is narrowly economistic in its interpretation of superstructure and in its conception of relations of production. Except in the most mechanistic versions of reformist Marxism, the so-called superstructural factors are much more than epiphenomene or reflections of the economic variable. They have relatively autonomous structures and practices. Thus, from a dialectical view, classes define themselves not only by their social relations within the labor process, but also by those ideological and political practices which affect their control over the labor process. Freedman is also mechanistic and academic in her interpretation of social relations within the labor process. The petty bourgeoisie, most especially the technocratic- managerial stratum, have distinctive social relations within the productive process. They do not merely live within the realm of ideology; there is more than one way for a class to control the labor process, and that control is not achieved by ownership alone. As Braverman points out in Labor_and SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 7CLASS CRITIQUE Monopoly Capital (22), capital's struggle for control over produstion did rot cease with appropriating the means of production. In addition, through the process of Taylorism capital appropriated the knowledge and skill which had given craft workers an important measure of control over production, Thus, the new petty bourgeoisie arose historically to manage for capital the division of labor which capital had created by separating conception from execution of work. Within its own productive process, monopoly capital created a new pattern of control and the potential breeding ground for a new class. The new technocratic-managerial stratum eventually developed a distinctive political interest in maintaining its own position with or without the support of capital. Whether we take Poulantzas's position that the new petty bourgeoisie is now a class or our view that it is a class in formation, one point is clear: Freedman's economistic analysis does not even begin to touch the problem of class determination. The concept of relations of production much more complex than the wage/labor/capital relationship. (23) The Petty Bourgeoisie Killed by Formalism and Exiled to Limbo Erik Olin Wright has recently provided us with one of the more sophisticated and more futile exercises in an empiricist’ and economist elimination of the petty bourgeoisie. More accurately, his method is that of Grand Theory, speculation or formalism. He deduces class not from the "facts" and certainly not from class practices but from an economist reading of Marxist theory. This formalism is really no obstacle to empiricism because it will help statisticians elaborate more and more categories of economic determination. But like empiricism, formalism is an obstacle to class analysis for it is blind to science, to society and to classes as processes of production. Wright's work is a distinct improvement over that of Freedman's in one respect: he grants Poulantzas's and Marx's, important distinction between class as involving relations of production and involving relations of possession. In this way, he definitely broadens the concept of class beyond the wage- labor relation. Defining control over the labor process to include actual ownership of means of production and the capacity to put labor into motion (possession), he arrives at the following tri-part depiction of the major classes according to Marx: SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 98(OF ACADEMIC MARXISM UNAMBIGUOUS LOCATIONS WITHIN CLASS RELATIONS = According to Erik Olin Wright Processes Underlying Class Relations Economic Ownership Possession Control over Control over Control over investments the physical the and the means of Tabor process Zccumulation production of others process + + + + + - + Full Control = No Control So far so good, except that Wright like the other academicians does not use his categories to show that the new petty bourgeoisie of managers and technicians also have some stake in possession by virtue of their control over skill and often the control over the labor of others. Instead, Wright lumps "semi-autonomous employees" (including all professionals and teachers) along with higher managers and small employers into a limbo called "contradictory class locations." Wright defines these locations as classless! positions within capitalist societies which are objectively torn between classes. Such positions do not have a class identity of their own rights their class character is defined strictly by their location between classes. (25) SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 99CLASS CRITIQUE Thus, Wright furnishes us with an altogether new ploy for not considering the class of intellectuals. They, like the whole intermediate stratum, do not constitute a class, but are a jumble of reactive and contradictory relations.” The analysis perfectly fits the petty bourgeois belief in classlessness and free-floating intellectuals. His approach personifies academic Marxism. The aim of his whole exercise is speculation and categorization for the sake of categorization. In positivist fashion, he assumes that somehow the political implications will emerge after theoretical speculation: All of this is in @ sense a prelude to the analysis of the role of intellectuals in the struggle for socialism and the ways in which Marxist intellectuals can serve the working class....Only if the contradictory character of the objective class location of intellectuals is grasped can we begin to understand the contradictory character of their relationship to the class struggle and accordingly adopt appropriate political strategies for linking various categories of intellectuals to socialist movements. (26) But political strategies will never emerge spontaneously from the facts or from speculation. Wright completely misses the sense in which knowledge is a process of production involving theory and practice from its very beginning. Also, he does not really understand class as class practices. His notion of class is merely formal and has absolutely nothing to do with particular classes in historical social formations. He makes the error of deducing classes from a pure model of the capitalist mode of production with no concrete reference to actual social formations. Consequently, he gives us no sense of how classes actually emerge through the concrete practices of class struggle, practices which are ideological and political as well as economic. Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Mao ever thought that class struggle took place only at the level of the production process. Also, although class is principally determined in the production process, ideological and political factors certainly play an important role in determining class. This is most particularly the case with the technocratic-managerial stratum, whose influence in the labor process through control over other workers’ labor and possession of intellectual means of production is a direct result of their ideological/control_ functions within SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 100OF ACADEMIC MARXISM capitalism. Wright even admits his economic bias, but to the pleasure of an academic audience who want to make their ‘own political decisions about their own contradictions, he sticks dogmatically to his charts of pure capitalism. ‘Toward a Practical Solution To the Dilemmas of Intellectuals The review of various schools of academic Marxism shows only that the intellectuals agree to disagree about their class position and politics. Using a subjective approach to class, "left" intellectuals out of arrogance have declared themselves to be among the vanguard: superior by virtue of their philosophical practice or by their "new working class" status and special sensitivity to the subtleties of alienation and ideological control. Faithful to the bourgeois model of a single empiricist science, "right" intellectuals _ have examined the objective facts of their situation (having to work for a wage and being gradually proletarianized) and declared themselves to be a faction of a vast, multi- dimensioned working class. Finally, some intellectuals have found such a formal complexity of determining variables ‘that they have decided that intellectuals really float between classes in an embarrassment of contradictions. The last position really offers the most hope for academic research on class. Now academics can set up research institutes to discover the particular balance of proletarian or bourgeois contradictions for each status. This could even turn into a fine business. Individual intellectuals could submit their profiles to the computer to see if they are more proletariat or bourgeois, and decide on their politics accordingly. Behind the ivy-covered walls there is no possible way of deciding on the "correct" class model beyond fashion, talk, training and other careerist persuasions. Academic’ class analysis depends on religious commitment to one of the existing idealistic models for getting knowledge: empiricism ‘or following the ideal rules of fact-gathering in order to discover the field of economic forces determining an individual's class position, then deducing the probable political reactions; idealism, or the search for the negative and revolutionary subject of history; and formalism, just Plain theorizing and deducing categories from structural models of class. Thus, there is no "practical" solution to the dilemma of academic class analysis, only varieties of speculation which leave unaddressed, unchallenged and SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 101CLASS CRITIQUE unchanged the class practices which produce knowledge about class. Beneath all the complexity and obscurity of academic positions emerges one constant, and it is the key to confusion and the primary obstacle to correct knowledge: an intractable petty bourgeois worldview which never examines reality as practice, the organization of productive processes. Academic obscutities and complexities derive not from the difficulty of the task of class analysis but rather from the bartiers to knowledge built into the intellectual's own class practice. ‘At this period of U.S. history when a militant workers movement is in formation, Marxists working in academia can fight their co-optation and advance the cause of workers by becoming conscious of the profound differences between the proletarian and the petty bourgeois methods for producing knowledge and doing class analysis. A class-conscious and practical grasp of the Marxist method for getting correct knowledge will require absolute clarity about the following: I, Intellectuals are not a sector or a vanguard of the working class; they have distinctive class interests of their own as_members of an intermediate stratum below the bourgeoisie and over the working class. 2. All knowledge is partisan and bears the stamp of a class; the knowledge of traditional intellectuals bears the stamp of the petty bourgeoisie, no matter what varieties of Marxism they profess. 3. All knowledge is practical and all the solutions to the problems of knowledge, including the problems of class analysis, are resolved in the organized practice of class struggle. 4, Historically, the solution to the practice of the working class and the dilemmas of intellectuals allied to the working class have been resolved in the Marxist-Leninist party as the practical embodiment of the method of dialectical materialism in the service of the working class. NOTES 1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econom: (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970) pps ISEBH SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 102OF ACADEMIC MARXISM Mao Tse-tung, "On Practice," Four Essays_on_ Philos: (Peking, Foreign Languages Press, Dp 3. Vile Lenin, “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International," Collected Works, Vol. 22, December 1915-July 1916 (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 112. Vale Lenin, "Lett-Wing! Communism — An Infantile Disorder,” Collected’ Works, Vol. 31, April-December 1920 (Moscow, Brogress Publishers, 1974). 5. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London, Merlin Press, 1971); and Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (London, Reon Lote Beoke 1970 FOP a aja atthe ett! problematic seet John Horton and Fari Filsoufi, "Left-Wi ‘Communism: An Infantile Disorder in Theory and Method,’ Insuegent Sociologist, Vol. 7 No. | (Winter 1977). 6, Rorsehy opr elt pe 1. 7. Lucio Coletti, "From Hegel to Marcuse," From Rousseau to Lenin (London, New Left Books, 1972), p. 134. 8. Herbert Marcise, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Beacon Presy 1364). 9. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1973. 10. Alain. Neaigus, "The Methodology and Ideology of Theories of ‘the Middle Class," unpub. doc. diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1976, pp» 117, 119. 11, Paul Piccone, "Internal Polemics, p. 178 12, Ibid. p- 179. 13, Mane! Castells and Emilio de Ipola, "Epistemological Practice and the Social Sciences," Economy’ and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May 1976), p. 122. 14, Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," Selected Works (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 28. 15, Y.M. Bodemann, "Problems of Marxist Social Science: In Response to. Szymanski," Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer 197), pp. 77-78. 16, Albert Szymanski, "The Practice of Marxist Social Science," Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. 7, No. | (Winter 1977), pp. 53-59. \7. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 2nd ed. (New York, Schocken, 1961). 18, Rosa Luxemburg, "Reform or Revolution," Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Speaks (New York, Merit, 1970), p. 65. 19. New American Movement, The Political Perspective (1972, 1974), p. 4. 20, Karl ‘Kautsky as quoted in Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York, Collier, 1962), p- 212. 21, Francesca Freedman, "The Internal Structure of the American Proletariat," Socialist Revolution, Vol. # (October-December 1973), pe 46. 22, Harry Braverman, Labor_and Monopoly Capital (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978). » No. 31 (Spring 1977), SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 103CLASS CRITIQUE 23. Our view of class is based on the analysis developed by Marlene Dixon in the following articles: *Proletarian versus Petty Bourgeois Socialism," and "In Defense of Leninism: Against Social Democracy," Synthesis, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1976); and "The American Petty Bourgeoisie ‘and Socialism," Synthesis, Vol. [, No. 2 Fall 1976). 24, Erike Olin Wright, "Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies," New Left Review, No. 98 (July-August 1976), p. 32. 25, Erik Olin Wright, "Class Analysis of Intellectuals," unpub. paper presented at the Fifth Annual West Coast Socialist Social Science Conference, (May 1977), pp. 6-7. 26. Ibid., p 13. SYNTHESIS/Summer-Fall 1977 108