Marxist Accounts of Power

Roughly speaking, and leaving aside doctrines of Marxism in power associated with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other revolutionary leaders, Marxist contributions to the study of power after Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci tend to fall in one or more of the following categories: Western Marxism, critical theory, and structuralism. It is sometimes asserted that the critique of instrumental reason common to much of Western Marxism and [Page 406]critical theory is an attempt to reconstruct a philosophical debate on consciousness, experience, reason, and knowledge that in fundamental respects goes back to Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, and that as such the great philosophical rigor of Western Marxism and critical theory is achieved at the great expense of a substantial sociological deficit. This deficit is visible in the evident lack of a theory of social action that does not reduce action to class interest; the claim is that Marxists often do not distinguish between interests and values.

Therefore, few Marxists apart from Gramsci can account for both consensus as well as conflict in advanced industrial societies without resorting to the very dubious idea of false consciousness. The attempt to incorporate a theory of communication and discursive consensus into a Marxist framework tends to modify the framework beyond the parameters of Marxism. The case of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) would seem to provide a very good example. Habermas can be regarded along with Alfred Schmidt (b. 1931; author of Marx's Theory of Nature, 1962) as one of the last living members of the first generation of critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, which was founded with the financial backing of Felix Weil in the 1920s, and which was directed for many years by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and then Theodor W. Adorno (1903- 1969). Habermas's doctoral thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), is a fine historical account of the disintegration of a noncommercialized sphere of public information in advanced industrial democracies, and is written from a broadly Marxist perspective. In his subsequent works he abandons this perspective in favor of an analytical and normative approach he refers to as a theory of communicative action. His theory of communicative action has very little in common with Marxism, and indeed, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) and other works he explicitly sets himself the task of correcting the sociological and communicative deficits of Marxism and historical materialism that render the latter obsolete.

The corresponding problem is that what there is of sociology in Marxist theories of power tends to be excessively empirical and restricted to more and less complex models of stratification. In extreme cases this has meant broadening the analysis of the class composition of advanced industrial societies from bourgeoisie and proletariat to as many as 35 different identifiable social classes, measured according to varying levels of skill, education, income, and so forth. Hence, it is widely argued that the sociological deficit in Western Marxism and critical theory is reflected in the fact that power is conceptualized more effectively by thinkers such as Foucault (1926–1984), Bourdieu (1930–2002), and feminist as well as other new social movement theorists. These theorists are credited with having a more nuanced conception of power than one focused on social class and stratification, which usually means they take up questions of identity, group affiliation, social action (in the broadest sense), recognition, and transgression in non-Marxist terms. While Foucault and to an even greater extent Bourdieu would probably concede that they are indebted to Marx in key respects, they would not define themselves as Marxists. Hence, in assessing the legacy of Marxist accounts of power after Marx and Gramsci, the first issue is to ascertain to what extent the critique of instrumental reason is also a critique of power.

...