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Gouldner, A. (1980).

The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and anomalies in


the development of theory. London: The MacMillan Press.
Marxism and theorists of the Marxist community have been divided, it has long
been noted, into roughly two tendencies: one conceiving Marxism as critique
and the other conceiving it to be some kind of social science. Marxism has been
divided then between Critical Marxists and Scientific Marxists []. (32)
[there is not a real and a fake Marxism:] both are in fact structural
differentiations of a single originally undifferentiated Marxism. (34)
[he cites young Horkheimer as an example of Critical Marxist voluntarism]
In distinguishing Critical and Scientific Marxism, there is, however, no intention of
suggesting that the voluntarism/determinism differentiation is the deepest
essence or truest meaning of that larger distinction. It is but one marker in a
larger set of elements constituting the two syndromes. (36)
[that of voluntarism/determinism, agency/structure is a wider issue and
differentiation in sociological thought]
As different, elaborated paradigms of Marxism, Critical and Scientific Marxism
emerge under different sociohistorical conditions and among different persons
and in differentiated social networks and groups.
[CMs are: Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School both in the first and second
generation]
[SMs are: Della Volpe, Althusser, Poulantzas] (38)
The difference between [CM and SM] reflects a conflict between those viewing
Marx as the culmination of German idealism and those emphasising Marxs
superiority to that tradition. [also, an appeal to the young or rather the mature
writings of Marx]
[CMs] conceive of Marxism as critique rather than science; they stress the
continuity of Marx with Hegel, the importance of the young Marx, [alienation and
historicism]. The [SMs] have (at times) stressed that Marx made a coupure
epistemologique [epistemological break] with Hegel after 1845. Marxism for
them is science, not critique, entailing a structuralist methodology whose
paradigm is the mature political economy of Capital rather than the
ideologised anthropology of the 1844 Manuscripts. (39)
[CMs] stress an historicism that emphasises social fluidity and change, a kind of
organicism calling for the contextual interpretation of events; [SMs] search out
firm social structures that recur and which are presumably intelligible in
decontextualized ways.
[SMs emphasise the base/superstructure dichotomy; CMs the totality] (40)

[he precises that CM and SM are ideal types only; individual thinkers cannot
simply be reduced to them] (60)

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