Alvin W. Gouldner
MARXISM AND MAO
This is the project: to begin a Marxist critique of Marx–
ism itself. There can be little question that, among the requirements
of such an auto-critique, we must include an historically situated ana–
lysis of the internal contradictions of Marxism. The core of a Marx–
ist critique of Marxism would, then, recognize that Marxism has its
own internal contradictions; that it, too, and not only bourgeois
ideology, has such contradictions; that these contradictions are not
simply outmoded vestiges of Marxism's bourgeois heritage or Vic–
torian prejudices, but remain a living part and an essential key to
Marxism's ongoing present and its future prospect. TIllS concern with
the contradictions of Marxism will be taken as the expression of a
threatening animus by vulgar Marxists, but it will be regarded as
only normal from the standpoint of Mao's Marxism, wlllch under–
stands contradiction as the universal mechanism of all social develop–
ment, including its own.
In the space available, I can only briefly allude to the existence
of two different paradigms of Marxism, Critical Marxism and Scien–
tific Marxism. These are differentiated as modes of intellectual ana–
lysis, in their epistemologies and ontologies, in their diagnoses of capi–
talism and in their conception of socialism, as well as in their revolu–
tionary strategies. A fuller analysis of these differences will be discussed
in
my forthcoming book,
For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in
Sociology Today;
here I will deal briefly only with their differences
as analytic systems.
As
systems of analysis, Critical and Scientific Marx–
ism are partly complementary and partly divergent. They are diver–
gent paradigms because (as Marx acknowledged) the object of sci-
