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From International Socialism, No.46, February/March 1971, p.22.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The death of Lucien Goldmann last October at the early age of fifty-seven was a serious loss to a revolutionary movement in which serious Marxist theorists are far from plentiful.
Goldmann’s whole life was a struggle in defence of the Marxist method. From 1945 to the sixties he stood up against both the philosophical onslaught on Marxism and the Stalinist distortions of Marxism, whether dogmatic or revisionist. To do so he drew on the early work of Georg Lukacs which he propagated, translated and popularised.
Goldmann made no fundamental advances in Marxist method beyond Lukacs’ positions, but his political independence enabled him to avoid his master’s zigzags, and his concrete applications of the method to the history of literature and philosophy showed all the richness that a dialectical approach is capable of. The Hidden God should be read by anyone who wants to see how intellectual creations can be located in social reality without being reduced to the status of reflections or passive products.
In The Human Sciences and Philosophy he provided a manual which any socialist exposed to the bourgeois social sciences can use to avoid contamination. He shows the dangers of ‘mechanistic biology, behaviouristic psychology, empiricist history, factual and descriptive sociology’; and he identifies
‘... the inadequacies of the new descriptive methods of contemporary sociology and of the separation of theory from concrete research. The common factor running through tendencies which are apparently different and even opposed, is the radical elimination of every historical element from the study of human facts.’
Marxist thought itself is not immune from corruption by bourgeois ideas, and here too Goldmann’s work is of value. In the essay Is there a Marxist Sociology? (IS 34) he studies the various revisions and distortions Marxism has been subjected to. He traces these to the creation of false alternatives which did not exist in Marx’s work. For example, the separation of science and morality, of individual and collective, of means and ends.
For nearly a hundred years varieties of ‘Marxism’ have been used to bolster up party bureaucrats, opportunist politicians and brutal ruling classes. The dead wood left behind will take a lot of clearing, and Goldmann’s work was a pioneering effort.
The tragedy of Goldmann was that this struggle for Marxist method took place in isolation from the working class. Partly this isolation derived from Goldmann’s historical situation, partly from his own choices (e.g. his distrust of Trotskyism, tendencies to reformism in practical politics, etc.) As a result, Goldmann fought for Marxism within the institutions of bourgeois culture. Hence a tendency in his work, not fully elaborated, to defend Marxism in terms of its ‘comprehensiveness’ as a theory in relation to other theories, rather than on the basis of the historical role of the proletariat.
When the revolutionary movement is strong enough to maintain its own culture, the problems will be confronted differently. But the isolated forerunners will not be forgotten.
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