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Shopping for Revolution
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11102 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1986 |
1,496 Words |
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Paul Gottfried
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Alvin Gouldner was a thinker obviously proud of his intellectual pedigree. He filled his writings with the statements and ideas of nineteenth-century revolutionaries like Marx and Bakunin and the interwar synthesizers of Marx and Freud associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. In doing a review of The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, I was struck by the speculative and fragmentary nature of Gouldner's work. Anyone who demands that an author treat his subject systematically would do well to look elsewhere. Gouldner's essays are not likely to please those who desire rigorous proofs. Nor will they please those who share his contempt for middle-class civilization but who wish to hear leftist pieties and nothing else. Though Gouldner provides those pieties, he often presents them in the context of discussing complicated social theories in arcane language. Like one of his mentors, Herbert Marcuse, he gives anti-American radicals what they want if they are willing to unravel his syntax.
Gouldner places modern intellectuals, what he calls the "New Class," into a role analogous to Marx's proletariat. Despite their middleclass origin, disgruntled intellectuals are the ones who are most persistently critical of what they see as the misery produced by the capitalist West. Like the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Gouldner interprets oppression as a kind of deprivation that is more psychological than material. He associates this deprivation with the fragmented, and presumably unnatural, form of existence that marks human life in advanced capitalist society. He predicts that the establishment of socialism (which he identifies with self-described socialist regimes but in a highly selective way) will end human misery in America. Humankind will become reintegrated into its environment, without the mediating filters of class and gender.
Gouldner believes that only intellectuals--that is, alienated social theorists and obliging technocrats--can flesh out his vision of wholeness. Though they do constitute a class, with shared material interests, Gouldner's intellectuals, like Marx's idealized proletariat, are seen as capable of making themselves "gents of revolution." Their own quest to escape 'enslavement" will help advance the emotional and material liberation of others. Gouldner urged his fellow intellectuals to stop shopping elsewhere for revolutionary agents. It was Marx who had begun the questionable practice by mocking bourgeois intellectuals like himself and by trying to make the working class into the instrument of social change. Intellectuals should look to themselves to bring about the transformation desired.
Gouldner's posthumously published Against Fragmentation contains no major departures from ideas that he had developed in his earlier writings. His core teachings--about the revolutionary mission of the New Class, the value of critical discourse in generating revolutionary consciousness, and the equation of capitalism with fragmentation--had been laid down by him in the sixties and seventies, and by the socially radical Freudians of the Frankfurt School even before Gouldner had begun to write. All the same, the anthology, particularly chapter 9, does take a bold approach in addressing a problem created by the reinterpretation of the Marxist dialectic in Gouldner's work and, even earlier, among the Frankfurt School. Gouldner's view of the dynamics of revolution is only vaguely related to Marx's materialist understanding of history. Gouldner does not justify quintessentially Marxist concepts like the labor theory of value or Marx's linking of socialist revolution
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