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ALVIN W. GOULDNER
ence is to discover laws independent of human will and determinative
of it, while a "critique" aims at establishing the manner in which hu–
man history is an outcome of the hidden potency of men. The basic
conclusion of the Left Hegelian critique of
religion
was to show that
God's being was entirely a postulation of
man
and an expression of
man's
own alienated being. A critique, then, aims at making men's
potency more fully manifest so that men might then make their own
history consciously rather than blindly. A natural science, in con–
trast, will, by ascertaining the laws that presumably determine hu–
man will, allow those having technical knowledge of these laws to
apply their knowledge in a technological way and to formulate the
problem of social change as a
technical
problem.
In a "scientific" socialism, the technical conferences of bu–
reaucratized "vanguards" tend to be substituted for the political dis–
cussion and education of masses. A critique, however, aims to trans–
form the political process by deepening the mass consciousness and
liberating it from its false consciousness. Here the political process
and outcome are seen as profoundly affected by the nature of
~en's
consciousness. The politics and praxis of a socialism conceived as a
critique will thus differ substantially from that conceived as science.
There are, then, two tendencies in Marxism, both authentic to it;
one toward critique, which I call "Critical Marxism," and another
toward science, which has called itself "Scientific Marxism."
Transformations in the everyday life of Western capitalism un–
derlie the decline of Scientific Marxism and the rise of Critical Marx–
ism: successful revolutions in industrially backward countries; the
accommodation of the proletariat in industrially advanced countries;
the militancy of nonimpoverished groups, etc. The emergence of
Maoism, however, as a special case of a Critical Marxism distinct, in
part, from that of Cuban socialism, illustrates the way in which a
theory is changed by diffusion to a society which has an everyday
life that is (and always was) different from the everyday life of the
society in which it first originated.
Maoism seems distinguished by the emphasis it places upon the
universality of contradiction. To that extent Maoism represents a
new and distinct stage in the world development of Marxism because
it has achieved a reflexivity superior to that of Western Marxisms;
it can and has faced the "bad news" about its own internal contra-
