Troy Southgate

Jan 03, 2025

AS I have noted on previous occasions, the Frankfurt School is not what many people on the Right say it is and whilst it has become fashionable for capitalist apologists to squeal about so-called ‘Cultural Marxism,’ it remains a huge mistake to infer that Marxism as it evolved in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik uprising is the same as that envisaged by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-1800s.

Take Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980), for example, a leading Jewish-American sociologist. Despite the fact that he was never a member of the Frankfurt School, Gouldner was nonetheless a Marxist who applied the same rigorous criticism to the economic theories of Das Kapital and believed that Marxist dialectics should be applied to Marxism itself. Having been exposed to the one-sidedness of academic sociology, Gouldner soon began to question the validity of left-wing beliefs in a technologically changing world and he achieved this by re-examining some of the things Marx and Engels had deliberately chosen to ignore.

Although the patriarchs of this ideology had rejected ‘utopianism’ and insisted on a more ‘scientific’ interpretation of world affairs, they eventually realised that their version of ‘socialism’ was not the cure-for-all-ills they had once believed it to be. The unfolding socio-economic discontent in France, which Marx and Engels had always sought to present as a conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, now appeared to be a battle between the bourgeoisie (town) and the peasantry (country). However, even this seemed to be an insufficient explanation for what was actually going on during the course of their lifetime and after some thought the pair concluded that perhaps the real class struggle involved a conflict between the people and the state. The latter, after all, is an agency of the ruling elite.

Finally, by examining the Asiatic mode of production and realising that rulers in countries such as India did not actually seem to own any land, despite extracting profit from it, they were forced to conclude that the state itself was a more ‘autonomous’ institution than anything being proposed by Marxist theory. Furthermore, that the lack of land ownership within the Asiatic mode of production – through which Marx suddenly became aware of largely autarkic villages beyond the perimeters of the West – undermined the very basis of Marxism’s interpretation of class in relation to the consequences of property-owning economics.

As a result of identifying the anomalies within their system, Marx and Engels insisted that such matters were “less than critical” and, instead, outlined their theories in relation to capitalism solely as it was being practised in England. A century later, Gouldner – just as certain figures in the Frankfurt School had done before him – began to highlight these erroneous details in an attempt to realign Marxism with a new, economic world that had seemingly defied the outdated theories of the past. Gouldner even developed an idea which he described as ‘Nightmare Marxism,’ which included a criticism of the manner in which Marx and Engels had once assumed that overcoming the class conflict would ensure that the state would simply wither away.

By exposing the anomaly that his predecessors had tried to suppress in relation to the Asiatic mode of production, i.e. the fact that the state is something that is altogether above and beyond the class system, Gouldner explained that in the event of a Marxist triumph the state itself could become dangerously totalitarian when placed in the hands of a new ruling elite. This was nothing new, of course, as this development had already come to light in Eastern Europe, but Gouldner wanted to prove that the seeds of this outcome are to be found in the economic inadequacies of Marx and Engels themselves.

This clearly has important ramifications for those who like to claim that Communism as it appeared after 1917 was simply a betrayal of authentic Marxist values. Once we add to this the fact that not all classes are proprietary, Gouldner says, we can see why the founders of this ideology tried so desperately to hide the flaws in their system. Gouldner had revealed that Marxism was not ‘scientific’ after all and thus just as ‘utopian’ as some of the other anti-capitalist brands that Marx and Engels were attacking in the nineteenth century. Both had realised to their horror that proprietary capitalism was almost completely unique to European civilisation and this is why Das Kapital was chiefly aimed at class and power in the British Isles.

Gouldner’s ‘Nightmare Marxism’ essentially justifies the bourgeois claim that private property is crucial to technological development and that eliminating it does not bring an end to poverty and suffering but merely leads to a more industrialised form of the Asiatic mode of production. This leads us to question why Gouldner – an ‘outlaw Marxist’ who always sought to expose the role of deceptive ideologists – was essentially suggesting that Marxism had failed to appreciate that private property itself is the key to bringing about the kind of economic production the Marxists themselves yearned for.

This critique of faulty economic thinking, drawn from the ranks of Marxism itself, can teach us a great deal about the sheer worthlessness of class-based struggle.