No. 022 MARXIST
SCHOLARSHIP IN AMERICA: T. R. Young RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
|
of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of the RED FEATHER INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY |
MARXIST
SCHOLARSHIP IN AMERICA:
Theories of Deviancy and Difference
Philosophers
have only studied the world
in various ways; the point is to change it.
....Marx
INTRODUCTION
Marxism is a growth industry in the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia, and in Latin
America. Given the remarkable accomplishments of capitalism as a system of production one
may well wonder how to understand the appeal of marxism to thousands in the U.S., to
hundreds of thousands in Europe and to the millions in Africa, Asia and in Latin America.
Even in the small, conservative college town in the rich conservative mountain state in
which I live and work, there are fragments of four marxist-oriented groups to be found.
I stress the term "marxist-oriented." The various members of
the four groups are oriented to many interests and to many theorists on the one side while
few of them are actively engaged in revolutionary work. 1 The
interest in marxism is an interest grounded on humanism, a quest for community, a critique
of capitalism, an interest in self-realization and the competent human being such implies,
some firm belief in democracy and participation and assessment. Many non-marxists share
many of the same interests. What orients groups in this area to marxism is the conviction
that capitalism as a system is hostile to these interests.
No one in DSOC (The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee), in NAM (The New American
Movement), in the loose coalition of Marxist scholars of which I am a part would see a
bureaucratic state socialism as a happy replacement for the bureaucratic state capitalism
growing in America. The Y.S.A. (Young Socialist Alliance), also found in this university
town, is oriented to many tendencies which augment, modify and make marxism a suitable
point of departure in these circumstances.
The Reach of Marxist Theory Marxism,
during its span of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal
political forces than all the preceding generations together. Marxism, gathering its
millions together in one huge camp is everywhere threatening the assembled armies of
capitalism. The mighty NATO forces are in disarray; the forces of SEATO are scattered, the
fortress of European capitalism is under siege, the greatest army in history, the U.S.
army, is an ineffectual Caliban. Capitalist governments worry that Italy will vote to
throw out capitalism. They worry that Nicaragua will be lost to the multinational
corporation. They worry that the unaligned nations will compare India to China. They worry
that the youth will read Marx; not to study the enemy but to find the friend to their
aspirations for peace and community. 2
The capitalist states rejoice in the grim and dreary reports from the U.S.S.R.
They rejoice in the stories of slaughter and vengeance in Cambodia. They delight in
drought, disease or famine in China or Cuba. The capitalism camp relishes the ineptitude
of centralized planning in Poland. It eagerly snatches at every instance of minority
oppression an d gloats over the repression of religion in East Europe. And still marxism
thrives. Given the remarkable accomplishments of capitalism, an American lawyer, real
estate agent, business person, or police officer might well wonder at the interest in
marxism.
In the quest for profits, major publishers turn out marxist tracts in the thousands, in
the U.S., Beacon Press, Vintage Press, Prentice Hall, Penguin, Harper, Bantam Books and
dozens of other publishers publish every decent work they find to satisfy the market. New
journals oriented to a critical appraisal of capitalist economics, cultures, politics, and
social relations are thriving. The Monthly Review, The Insurgent Sociologist,
The New Left Review, Socialist Review, Radical America, In These Times, Review of Radical
Political Economics, Telos, and many more left oriented journals thrive.
Even the conservative, traditional journals are infected with this madness. Marxist
articles in sociology, long neglected, find a 1)lace. The American Journal of Sociology,
in Sociological Inquiry, in The Sociological Quarterly, in Qualitative Sociology , in The
American Sociologist, and in Social Forces. Even the.American Sociological Review will
publish an article oriented to marxist critique. In a forthcoming issue, Appelbaum's
article on a dialectical approach to social change is scheduled. The last bastion of
bourgeois scholarship succumbs.
The Positivities of
Capitalism The data of American capitalism
are impressive. From 1865 to 1975, economic output increased fifty times over; ten times
over on a per capita scale. The American state now employs one-fifth of the workforce.
Federal spending has grown from $70 billion in 1950 to $432 billion in 1973. Median family
income in 1976 was $14,000. There is wealth in abundance: Over 1 trillion dollars in
outstanding stock alone. Televisions, radios, cars, telephones, food, clothing, drugs,
houses, and baseballs pour out of the capitalist productive apparatus in waves, in floods,
in oceans.
Who could complain about this system? What madness, what folly inspires a critique of
capitalism. Things are getting better. The concentration of wealth has declined from 1922
to 1969. The too one percentage had 32 percentage of a smaller pie in 1922 and in 1969,
the top one percentage holds only 25 percentage of the wealth of America. For the poor,
state and local governments paid out $21 billion in fiscal year 1976 while the federal
government paid out $31 billion for food, health, housing and other amenities of life. And
there is also social security, medicare and various educational programs to help the poor.
If the poor remain poor, it is, in this land of opportunity, their own failings.
Indeed, capitalism has many virtues which commend it to the human estate. It is the most
productive system in human history. It is the most flexible, the most inventive and the
most dynamic economic system so far invented. Primitive communism, feudalism, slavery and
colonialism were, compared to capitalism, stagnant and repressive. Capitalism fails the
most active knowledge process in human history overturning the most ancient forms of
knowledge and dismissing them as superstitious myth. There are more people studying more
things in Europe and the Americans than ever in human history. There are more scientists
alive today than died in all of human history. Capitalism has greatly improved
transportation, agriculture, communications and housing. Capitalism has sustained a health
care system that has lengthened human life and reduced morbidity rates among those
societies which enjoy its fruits. There are more doctors in Beverley Hills than in El
Salvador or Guatemala.
Is not this the best of all possible worlds. Peace, prosperity, security from foreign
enemies, ample opportunity for the best and the brightest: who is to gainsay all this?
Unending improvement in soaps, cars, beers, drugs, sports, clothes, houses, office
machines, televisions, telephones and, perchance with genetic engineering, the human being
itself. Vacations, holidays, weekends to refresh the spirit. Freedom to explore the world.
Quiet summer evenings and instant access to cinema, theatre, and music in myriad forms.
Jazz, country and western, swing, blues, classical, and religious music to soothe,
delight, and to comfort. One must search to know how so many American scholars seek to
spoil this picture. In the face of the data, why does marxist scholarship survive and
proliferate.
Theories of Deviancy and Difference How is one to
understand the resurgence of marxism in the heartland of capitalism? Given the remarkable
accomplishments of capitalism, how is it vulnerable? How is it possible for so many
thousands of American scholars to betray their mentors, abandon their conservative
education, subvert their own disciplines, oppose their colleagues, bring anguish to their
friends and family and desert their own interest in career and recognition? What theory,
what sensible reasons lay behind so much difference between some five percentage of
American sociologists and their more sober, more compatible colleagues.
There are many ways to try to understand the madness and folly of marxism in the U.S.
There are several approaches one could use to explain and explore the explosive interest
in marxist theory. One could seek biological explanations. Perhaps marxists share some
hereditary disease; perhaps a faulty gene or a missing molecule. Theories of deviance
could be adduced to explain the behavior of marxist scholars--certainly they are deviants
in several senses. Does differential association explain their abnormalities? Does
labeling theory help us to know and to cure their troubles? Perhaps body type provides the
key to this delinquency. An honest theorist must consider the possibility that marxists
live in a culture of intellectual poverty which yields generation after generation of
deprivation and with deprivation, apathy. Or maybe marxists are deprived relative to
non-marxists.
Most likely, Merton could explain this mischief as a dysjuncture between goals and means.
Maybe marxists are rebels because they reject the goals of American culture and lack the
institutional means to achieve their own goals. But then one has to inquire why the goals
are rejected and why the institutional means won't satisfy these marxists. That is always
the problem with Merton's categories...they don't explain why the means are missing or the
goals of the majority instituted.
One is forced back to a psychological analysis. Surely marxists as a group have failed to
accept cultural goals because of some early childhood trauma arresting normal psychosexual
development; resolution of the Oedipal complex; integration of the superego and formation
of an adequate ego. Maybe one needs both Merton and Freud to deal with marxists.
Deviancy Detailed That marxist scholarship in America
is deviancy is beyond question: Marxists reject the canons of scientific inquiry which
inform all normal scholars. Marxist scholars are not value free; they link research and
theory to a criticism of all things existent and to a transformation of all existing
relations. The notion of academic freedom in marxist circles offends their ideas of
freedom. Marxists want freedom to act as well as to think. Cultural marxists scorn
objectivity; they have thinly veiled contempt for quantification and statistical
inference. Marxist scholars seek not after grants to do market research. They do not stand
in line for funds for disaster research nor do they study workers' movements in South
America with C.I.A. or Pentagon funds. Marxists are not content to publish: they
continually talk of praxis--the unification of theory and action. A final heresy is the
insistence on the part of marxist scholars that every research act be interpreted in the
context of a historical and societal totality. Studies limited to two variables from a
sample is, to marxist scholarship, an exercise in idiocy. The canon of cumulative
knowledge is reviled.
Marx on Marxism Failing a
satisfactory theoretical accounting of marxist scholarship in the U.S. using conventional
theories of deviancy, one could turn marxist theory back on marxism itself and look to
concrete changes in the recent history of capitalism to understand the rise of marxist
scholarship. One could tie the interest in marxism to the problems of capitalism. This
approach suggests that, perhaps, marxists are quite normal and act on the basis of
knowledge rather than on psychopathic compulsion. One might wonder whether unemployment,
crime, political maneuver, inflation, foreign policy, fiscal policy, the rise of monopoly
capitalism and other internal problems of capitalism might not account for the flood of
interest in marxism. Perhaps some internal in the marxist camp centering around humanism
and a critique of domination in all society offers an explanation of the explosive
interest in marxism. All this means that maybe there is a material rather than a genetic,
biological, psychological, or socio-pathic basis for marxist scholarship. 3
We can examine the thesis that marxian sociologists simply read the data better
than do their conservation, value-free colleagues and, possibly, come to some conclusion
about how knowledge and society are linked using marxist scholarship as a case in point.
In the section which follows, some of the central problems of capitalism identified by
marxist scholarship are set forth. As one goes through this interpretation of deviant
scholarship, it will take a good deal of subsequent reading on the part of the interested
reader to come to a final judgment. It may take years before a given reader is satisfied
that all the evidence is in. Certainly the answer is not found in this investigation. All
I mean to do here is to explore the question of why marxist knowledge abounds in
capitalist society.
If the points of critique of marxists are, on balance, valid, then the source of socialist
knowledge and scholarship is not to be found in genes, faulty socialization, physiological
imbalances or differential association. Still less is it to be found in labeling theory,
control theory, body shape, the culture of poverty or any other currently valid theory of
deviancy.
Problems of Capitalism: A Marxist View
The Future of Marxism. Marxism will be a valuable intellectual and political
tool as long as capitalism remains the primary mode of production in the world. Marxism
speaks to the oppressed and the exploited in ways that conventional theory and
conventional politics cannot and will not. The same holds for socialism. It offers a
structural solution to a structural problem. It generalizes its solution to the workers of
world and argues that all should be workers, at least for the central part of their lives.
It excuses no one from the work process and excludes no one from access to the essentials
for the production of human culture.
Some form of state socialism will be put forward since socialism is the only governmental
answer to the problems of private capitalism. There are, of course, non-governmental
answers to the problems above of capitalism.
Religious socialism has and has had a great appeal to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists
and others around the world and across history. However, religious sensibility as it
appears today is privatized. It defines those who believe and act in ways congenial to
other religions and other gods as outsiders thus not to be included in any peaceable
kingdom. Should a religious sensibility arise that is truly universal and accommodating to
the vast array of cultural differences which mark the human estate, it might well displace
state socialism as a solution to the many problems of capitalism.
Banditry, street crime and white collar are much more personalized and much less
theoretically informed answers to the problems of poverty, unemployment, anger and
despair. More personal solutions are seen as well; alcohol and drug abuse, self blame and
suicide, child and spousal abuse as well as other forms in which one sees the use of
alienated power.
CONCLUSION. These assertions and more of marxists
relative to the successes and failings of capitalism are, for the most part, testable. But
a fair test requires that one look beyond one's own situation to that of all persons in a
capitalist economy. A fair test requires that one look beyond one's own country to other
countries in a globalized capitalist formation. A fair test requires one look at trends
across time and around the world. A fair test requires that one examine the negative
consequences of capitalism as well as its many successes.
That normal science fails to test these effects of capitalism may well come from the fact
that most scholars and academics dwell in a privileged sector of the economy. It may come
from the fact that this generation of scholars and academics came to age during the golden
years of American capitalism; 1943 to 1973. It may come from the fact that USA has
occupied the top of the profit chain in recent times. The reader might want to refer to
the marxist journals mentioned and look at the data which transcends such limited views
and visions. The Capitalist System by Edwards, et al. or the American Political
System by Greenberg offer hard data on these theses. The various NACLA
publications give hard data on the theses pertaining to foreign policy and to American
corporate activities in poor countries as a means to examine the effects of U.S.
capitalism overseas.
After looking at the data, one is in a better position to judge as between the various
theoretical perspectives one might use to account for the deviant ideas of marxists about
capitalism and about science. Some of the questions to be answered include: Are marxist
scholars deviant or simply different from most American scholars? Are ordinary theories of
deviancy adequate to handle the rise of marxist scholarship or are marxist scholars quite
ordinary people whose analysis is the product of informed, insightful human beings? Are
the theories of deviancy used in contemporary sociology value-free and universal analytic
tools or are they an ideological form of knowledge suitable for the needs of social
control in a capitalist society. And finally, is the sociology of knowledge itself
adequately understood in American sociology or is the self-knowledge of sociology lacking
such that the majority of American sociologists are largely ignorant of their own society
and its place in the wider sweep of history. Until these kinds of questions are answered,
it is difficult to know how to understand marxist scholarship in America: as case material
and history for deviancy theory, or as praxis. It is difficult to know whether the
response of traditional sociology to marxist scholarship is political or value-free. Until
such time, the appeal of marxist analysis will continue to be inexplicable to millions of
Americans.
REFERENCES
Appelbaum, Richard.
"Marxist Method." The American Sociologist, V. 13:1, Feb.,pp. 73-81.
Baritz, L., (ed.). 1971 The American Left. New York: Basic Books.
Buraway, Michael. 1978 "Contemporary Currents in Marxist Theory." The American
Sociologist, V. 13:1, Feb., pp. 50-64.
Edwards, R., Reich, M., and T. Weisskopf. 1978 The Capitalist System. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall.
Greenberg, Edward S. The American Political System. Cambridge: Winthrop Press. 1977
O'Connor, James. 1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martins Press.
Sewart, John. 1978 "Critical Theory and the Critique of Conservative Method."
The American Sociologist, V.13:1, Feb., op. 15-21.
Seifert, Walter. 1978 "An Encouraging Word." The Reader's Digest, p. 75, March.
Footnotes
