THE THEORETICAL STATUS OF MARXISM

Douglas V. Porpora
Department of Psychology and Sociology
Drexel University
Philadelphia PA 19104
Porporad@DUVM.EDU.OCS


It is time for an exam on contemporary sociological theory.
Answer the following question, and write an essay discussing
your response.  (Together with the essay, this question is worth
100 points.)


Draw a line connecting each sociological perspective listed
below on the left with every empirical phenomenon listed on the
right for which the sociological perspective currently offers a
specific theory that substantially explains the phenomenon in
its own terms.



SOCIOLOGICAL                EMPIRICAL
PERSPECTIVES                PHENOMENA

Interactionism              Roots of Rebellion in El Salvador
Phenomenology               Inadequacy of U.S.Health Care System
Exchange Theory             Urban decay
Phenomenology               Poverty in America
Rational Choice Theory      Crime
Ethnomethodology            U.S. foreign policy
Exchange Theory             Racial Inequality	
Neofunctionalism            Gender Inequality	
Marxism                     Economic Stagnation
Postmodernist Theory*       Issues of discourse and meaning
Structuration Theory        Patterns of Intl. Development
                            The destruction of the enviornment
                            The Transition from feudalism
                               to capitalism
                            The degeneration of news into a form
                                of entertainment
                            The trivialization of U.S. politics

*Postmodernist theory encompasses the following related
perspectives:  structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics and
discourse analysis.

SAMPLE ESSAY

This question has obviously been designed to make Marxism look
good.  Although to be sure in some cases -- the cases of racial
and gender inequality in particular -- what the Marxian
perspective has to say may not be entirely satisfactory, the
Marxian perspective does have something substantial to say about
all of the phenomena listed on the right.  Furthermore, as will
be argued below, for the great majority of the listed phenomena,
Marxism is the only one of the listed sociological perspectives
that does offer an explanation.  In other words, for the
majority of phenomena listed, the Marxian perspective has no
real competitors.  It stands virtually alone as a source of
sociological explanation.

Undoubtedly, we could make ethnomethodology or phenomenology
look equally good by compiling a much different list of
phenomena to be explained.  However, the need for
ethnomethodology or phenomenology is not at issue here.  Let us
concede right off that something like ethnomethodology, symbolic
interactionism or phenomenology is needed to account for certain
types of phenomena.  These perspectives fall in a very different
domain from Marxism.  Thus, to reject them in favor of Marxism
because of what Marxism explains that they do not would be like
rejecting relativity theory in favor of quantum mechanics
because of what quantum mechanics explains that relativity
theory does not.  For different phenomena at different levels,
different theories are frequently needed.

What is at issue in this paper is not the need for
phenomenology, ethnomethodology, or symbolic interactionism but
the need for Marxism.  Thus, the important question is not
whether the exam question's list of phenomena is or is not
biased.  The important question is whether the phenomena on that
list stand in pressing need of explanation.  If they do, and if
for many, the Marxian perspective provides the best or only
source of explanation, then the need for the Marxian perspective
is rather  compelling.

Why, then, is there talk of Marxism's supercession?  In the
terms framed by the exam question, there may be four reasons why
we might conclude that Marxism has been superceded.  They are
(i) that although Marxism provides the best or only explanation
for many of the phenomena listed, the world has changed so that
it is no longer important to address these phenomena; (ii) that
it is still important to explain the phenomena that Marxism
addresses, but, contrary to first appearances, one of the other
listed perspectives actually provides better explanations;
(iii) that while the phenomena are still important and while
Marxism still provides the best source of explanation for them,
Marxism's conceptual apparatus is so problematic that we can no
longer continue to pretend that Marxism is viable; or (iv) that
despite the merits of Marxian theory, Marxism is dead as a
social movement so that it no longer serves as the important
theoretical instrument of politically liberating struggle.

In the remainder of this paper, it will be argued that none of
these reasons holds up.  It will be argued that the questions
that Marxism addresses are still of crucial importance, that
Marxism still provides the best answers to them, and that
although Marxism has conceptual difficulties, they do not
warrant Marxism's abandonment.  Finally, it will be argued that
if Marxism has the merits conceded, then the death of the
Marxist movement says more about us than about the theory; if
Marxism has the merits conceded, then whether  or not Marxism is
currently serving as the theoretical instrument of politically
liberating struggle, it should serve in that capacity and we
ought to work to see that it does.

THE ISSUES MARXISM ADDRESSES AND HOW WELL IT ADDRESSES THEM

It would be pedantic to spend much time demonstrating that the
phenomena on the exam question's list are of crucial importance.
That much is almost self-evident.  The issues they raise are not
just of academic significance.  They are issues of justice,
quality of life, and even of basic human survival.  As much or
even more than the issues addressed by other sociological
perspectives, they are issues that non-sociologists in the
population at large care about.  They are issues that people
struggle and die for.  Thus, to the exent that sociology has
something important to say to those outside its boundries, these
issues assume prominent importance.

This is not to denigrate the issues raised by, say, symbolic
interactionism or ethnomethodolgy.  Conversation analysis, for
example, is both highly interesting and intellectually important
in its own right.  Moreover, judging from the continued
popularity of Debra Tannen's (1990) YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND,
it is also something that a large sector of the American public
cares about and finds useful.    There is no need to ask which
is the more important, the nature of the conversations we have
or the habitability of the globe.  There is no need to choose
among the two.  The point is that no matter how important the
nature of our conversations is, so is the habitability of the
earth and our cities. So is the poverty we see around and beyond
us.  So is an historical sense of how we all got here.  If
conversation analysis does not address these issues, then we
need something else that does.

Given that the phenomena on the exam question's list are
important, how does Marxism fare in addressing them?  This
question must actually be divided into two:  (i) Does the
Marxian perspective offer a theory that substantially
contributes to the explanation of each phenomenon on the list;
and (ii) how does this theoretical explanation fare relative to
the explanatory theories offered by the other sociological
perspectives?

With regard to (i), Marxian theory of course has something
substantial to say about each phenomenon on the list.  Again, it
would be pedantic to spend much time demonstrating this.  In
many cases, the relevant Marxian theory is both evident and
strong.  The roots of rebellion in El Salvador, for example,
certainly have something to do with the class structure there:
historically, in this agricultural country, two percent of the
population owns sixty percent of the land.  Similarly, Marxian
theory has an enormous amount to say about the stagnation of the
U.S. economy (e.g., Blustone and Harrison 1988; Foster and
Szlajifer 1984; Mandel 1975), the inadequacies of the U.S. news
media and the general poverty of American political discourse
(Bennett 1988; Herman and Chomsky 1988), ecological destruction
(e.g., Ekins et al 1988; Sweezy and Magdoff 1989), international
patterns of development (Frank 1969; Wallerstein 1974), urban
form (Gottdiener and Pickvance 1991; Harvey 1989; Tabb and Sawers
1984), health care (Navarro 1976; Waitzkin 1983), crime
(Chambliss and Mankoff 1976 ) and of course historical changes
in modes of production.

Admittedly, there are three phenomena listed where the adequacy
of Marxian theory is currently in doubt:  racial inequality,
gender inequality, and the study of discourse and meaning.
Since these are the areas where the Marxian perspective may be
judged to be weakest, let us return to them after seeing how the
other sociological perspectives fare where the Marxian
perspective is strong.

For all of the other phenomena listed, the Marxian perspective
may be said to have a strong positive heuristic.  The term
"positive heuristic" comes from Lakatos's (1970) "Methodology of
Scientific Research Programmes," a post-Kuhnian effort in the
philosophy of science to establish criteria for the evaluation
of competing paradigms, perspectives, or research programs.  A
research program's positive heuristic in a research area is its
agenda for addressing scientific puzzles in that area, which may
be either strong or weak.

In this sense, a positive heuristic is an element within the
perspective or research program itself (the two terms are being
used interchangeably) that indicates how a scientific puzzle is
to be attacked. It may consist, for example, of straightforward
ways of making an overly simple model more complex.  That was
characteristic of Marx's approach in CAPITAL:  In Volume I, he
excluded the complexities of supply and demand only to
reintroduce them later.  Sometimes it is the very failures of a
prominent theory in a research program that suggest the
direction for futher research.  This has certainly been true in
the case of the failed predictions in Marx's original critique
of capitalism.  For example, an enormous amount of theoretical
research has been devoted to explaining why the American working
class has failed to develop a socialist consciousness.  Yet,
according to Lakatos (1970) and Laudan (1977), it is not the
number of empirical failures that a research program experiences
that determines its vitality but the number of successes, many
of which may be built on prior failures.

If the Marxian perspective has been very successful in
addressing puzzles associated with the phenomena listed in the
exam question, this has been because it has an especially strong
positive heuristic in these areas.  That is so for three
reasons. First, most of the phenomena listed have to be
explained historically and Marxism is an historically-oriented
perspective.  Second, these kinds of phenomena need in large
part to be explained systemically in terms of social structural
arrangements, and systemic, social structural arrangements are
pivotal to the Marxian perspective.

Third, the Marxian perspective does not just promote an
historical and structural metatheory; it offers a highly
substantive model of a specific social arrangement -- capitalism
-- in terms of which many of the listed phenomena are explained.
For example, the competitive social structural arrangement in
which capitalists are embedded goes a long way toward explaining
the behavior of capitalists and the movement of capital. To
illustrate, it explains the capitalist tendency to externalize
costs to the environment; the movement of capital and jobs out
of the inner cities with consequent patterns of poverty and
urban decay; patterns of international development; and the
structural transition from competitive to monopoly or late
capitalism.

Similarly, the Marxian insight that news has become a
commodified product in a competitive arena explains the
degeneration of news into entertainment.  And the Marxian thesis
that economic power gets translated into political power
substantially accounts for the general disempowerment of the
American people and the limitations of American political
discourse.  Ironically, it is what is often regarded as a
conceptual problem for the Marxian perspective -- the
explanatory primacy it assigns the economy -- that is in many
ways its strength, the source of its very powerful positive
heuristic.

To cite the strengths of the Marxian perspective is at the same
time to cite the limitations of many of the other listed
perspectives when it comes to addressing the exam question's
list of phenomena. Phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic
interactionism, -- none of them incorporates a developed account
of large-scale systems.  None of them has a developed account of
macrosocial structural relations.  None of them incorporates a
causal mechanism on the order of capitalist competition that can
account for the phenomena in question (Prendergast and
Knottnerus 1988).

As a result, the positive heuristics of these three perspectives
are very weak when it comes to addressing most of the phenomena
on the list, specifically those phenomena where Marxism is
strong.  Clearly, each can contribute much to the analysis of
discourse and meaning.  Each can contribute something to racial
and gender inequality and to crime, although it goes too far to
say that any can on its own provide the whole explanation for
these phenomena.  An account of poverty, for example, that
relied exclusively on these perspectives would turn into the
culture of poverty theory -- an account to be sure, but not one
that many sociologists today would care to endorse.

When it comes to the other phenomena on the list, it is not so
much that these perspectives are refuted by any of the data as
that they have little to say about them.  Yet, a perspective's
inability to address puzzles that another has solved can be just
as damaging as actual refutation -- and is more common (Laudan
1977).  What would be the ethnomethodological or
phenomenological or symbolic interactionist account of urban
decay or of U.S. economic stagnation or revolution in El
Salvador?

Certainly, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and
ethnomethodology can play a role in any Marxian account of any
of the phenomena that Marxism addresses.  Fantasia (1988), for
example, relies on much symbolic interactionism in his
essentially Marxian account of labor solidarity.  Whenever there
are people interacting, these sociological perspectives will
always have a role.   But for the phenomena we are considering,
that role will always be an adjunct one, subsidiary to the
dominant role played by Marxism.

It could not be otherwise for the core of the problem
encompassed by each phenomenon is structural or relational or
economic rather than cognitive or symbolic.  Harrison (1992),
for example, although not a sociologist, provides what could
loosely be considered an historical phenomenology of human
environmental thought.  As insightful and rich as that account
is, it would be hard to argue -- and Harrison does not -- that
culture rather than the dynamics of our historical modes of
production lies at the basis of ecological destruction
throughout history.   Thus, as Sartre eventually concluded about
existentialism, at least for the phenomena we are discussing,
phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism
will always be handmaidens to Marxism. For similar reasons, the
same is true of exchange theory, rational choice theory, and the
various postmodernist perspectives.  While many of the phenomena
on the exam question's list may incorporate dimensions of
exchange and while all may involve rational actors, neither
exchange theory nor rational choice theory specifies on its own
the social arrangement, the structural mechanism that
essentially accounts for any of the phenomena.  These, again,
are perspectives that could be brought in as adjuncts if need be
once the structural mechanisms at the heart of the listed
phenomena are identified.  Neither perspective presents any
strong positive heuristic for identifying the relevant
structural arrangements on its own.  Again, what is exchange
theory's account of ecological destruction, of the inadequacy of
the U.S. health care system or of the poverty of American
political debate?  Once Marxism first establishes the structural
relationships and social positions, rational choice theory might
tell us why rational capitalists or rational health care
providers or rational politicians behave in the collectively
irrational ways they do.  But once again, the structure and the
perspective that identifies it must come first.  It is
undoubtedly for this reason in part that rational choice
Marxists have continued to retain some semblance of Marxism.

Much the same could be said for
structuralism/post-structuralism, semiotics, and discourse
analysis.  These are very powerful analytical tools for
analyzing and deconstructing meaning, whether that meaning is
embodied by words, clothes, or the built environment.  Today,
the study of meaning is very much on the agenda, and so these
allied perspectives command central attention.  Given the
Marxian concern with ideology, which obviously has to do with
meaning, some very prominent Marxian analyses have themselves
incorporated structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics (
Gottdiener 1985; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1984).  In fact, many of
the seminal structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers come
out of the Marxian tradition.

Still, it needs to be reiterated that while all human processes
are meaningful results of meaningful human agency, the central
problem associated with most of the phenomena listed in the exam
question is not a matter of meaning.  It is a problem of human
relationships:  power, competition, physical force, positional
interests, etc.  While the postmodernist perspectives are
perspectives that, like Marxism, emphasize systems and
structural relations, the systems and structural relations they
attend to are systems of and structural relations among signs
rather than people.

Although the postmodernist perspectives have tended to reduce
human structural relationships to symbolic relationships among
signs (e.g., Hindess and Hirst 1977), this is not a reduction
that will go through.  The competitive nature of the
relationship among capitalists, for example, is not a matter of
discourse.  It is not simply a matter of "subject-positions"
discursively adopted.  It will not be changed by a change in the
discourse.  The relationships between capitalist and capitalist,
between worker and worker, and between capitalist and worker,
which are all at the heart of the capitalist system all have
an existence apart from the way we talk about them (Porpora
1989).

Moreover, in an explanatory sense, the existence of those
structures is prior to the way we talk about them and to some
extent at least determinative of the way we talk about them.  To
deny this, to reduce all human relationships to relationships
among signs becomes a form of objective idealism, what Harland
(1986) calls "superstructuralism," that is, the tendency to
reduce to what Marx called the superstructure the entire
economic infrastructure.  Although such idealism is fashionable
today, idealist reductionism has turned out to be every bit as
perverse and  anti-humanistic as materialist reductionism.

In the end, similar questions can be asked of the various
postmodernist perspectives as we asked of the other sociological
perspectives we have considered so far:  If, for example, we
divorce post-structuralism from Marxism in those cases where the
two are wedded, what is the post-structuralist theory of
economic stagnation, urban decay, revolution, or, indeed, of
many of the other phenomena listed in the exam question?  The
answer is the same as before:  For the phenomena we are
discussing, there is no such theory that can stand alone; in
each case, post-structuralism is an adjunct to a more
fundamental Marxian analysis.

This leaves us, finally, with structuration theory and
neofunctionalism, which alone among the perspectives listed in
the exam question may be considered contenders for the same
space occupied by Marxism.  If postmodernism so often becomes
the Hegelian "night in which all cows are black," structuration
theory is the black hole into which all theorists fall:  Marx,
Bourdieu, Foucault, Habermas, etc. are all engulfed by
structuration theory, where they there appear as if something
new.   Because the resulting theory of structuration is so
sprawling and Parsonian in its level of abstraction, it is
difficult to assess in a short space.  Yet, we can say
something.

Structuration theory decenters the subject and, accordingly,
makes little reference to actors' intentions or interests.  It
peripheralizes social structure as that concept is traditionally
understood, particularly by the Marxian tradition (Callinicos
1985; Porpora 1989). It accordingly treats systems as
epiphenomena of rulelike behavior (Porpora 1989). It argues
that no general theories are possible, but only episodic,
conjunctural accounts (Cohen 1990).

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that structuration
theory offers little empirical explanation for any of the
phenomena we have been considering.  It renounces all of the
conceptual tools that could provide such an explanation and,
indeed, it explicitly repudiates the very enterprise of general
explanation.  Thus, there is no structurationist theory of
poverty or of economic stagnation or of any of the other
phenomena on the exam question's list.  Such explanation is not
the point of structuration theory, which aspires instead to be a
general social ontology.

This much is admitted by Cohen (1990), who has sympathetically
attempted to systematize Giddens's work.  Cohen (1989: 291-294)
concedes that structuration theory has yet to demonstrate its
relevance for empirical researchers.  Although Cohen calls for
an empirical "demonstration project" that would accomplish that
end, he, nevertheless, admits that "in all likelihood,
structuration theory will not serve as the basis for a research
programme" (Cohen 1989: 281) and that "in principle,
structuration theory does not easily lend itself to the
cumulative development of social scientific knowledge" (Cohen
1989: 281).

Thus, it is on ontological rather than explanatory grounds that
structuration theory stakes its claim.  In other words, it
claims only to offer a superior social ontology not a superior
source of explanation.   Fair enough, but if so, then
structuration theory is not an explanatory competitor of
Marxism.  It is at most an alternative ontology to which we may
turn if the ontology underlying Marxism has truly proven
untenable. Whether that is the case  is a question to which we
will turn in the next section. For now, let us finally consider
neofunctionalism as an explanatory competitor of Marxism.

In the introduction to his recent anthology of neofunctionalist
work, Colomy (1990: xxx) argues that in the time since Alexander
officially coined the term "neofunctionalism," the perspective
has become "more than a promise; it has become a field of
intense theoretical discourse and growing empirical
investigation."  That may be.  It may also be that in abandoning
traditional functionalism's "illicit teleology" (Turner and
Maryanski 1979) while retaining its multidimensional focus and
concerns with action, order, and system integration,
neofunctionalism has some interesting things to say.  There is
no space here for a detailed examination of the merits of
neofunctionalist work in relation to the tasks it has set
itself.  Fortunately, such an examination is unnecessary for our
purposes.  The only question we have to answer is whether
neofunctionalism addresses the phenomena on our exam question's
list.  If it does not or if it does not do so well, then
neofunctionalism cannot replace Marxism either.

If we examine the neofunctionalist anthologies edited by
Alexander (1985) and Colomy (1990a), we can see that while
neofunctionalism has definitely moved into broader areas of
concern than traditional functionalism, its attention to the
phenomena that here concern us is spotty or tangential at best.
Alexander's collection contains nine papers while Colomy's
contains eighteen.  The first three papers in Alexander's
collection and the first eight in Colomy's are largely
metatheoretical in nature.  They outline conceptual frames and
"presuppositions" for various fields of inquiry but do not do
much empirical explanation.

The next three papers in Colomy's collection are addressed to
the sociology of religion and science.  We may regard them as an
effort to address the phenomena labeled "the analysis of
discourse and meaning" on the exam question's list, phenomena
that, as we have seen, many other sociological perspectives also
address.  While the Marxian perspective addresses these
phenomena as well, they are not among the phenomena on the exam
question's list on which we said the distinctive claims for
Marxism rest.

The remaining papers in the neofunctionalist collections seem at
first glance to contend more centrally with a Marxian analysis.
They are papers concerned with  social change, inequality,
political sociology, and gender.  However, if we were expecting
somethng in the same terrain as Marxism, then these papers
disappoint.  Aside from being, like structuration theory, overly
concept-heavy for their empirical yield, the papers all fail to
centrally address the phenomena to which Marxism is directed.

Colomy's (1990b) piece on social change is illustrative.  It is
titled "Recent Developments in the Functionalist Approach to
Change."  Colomy does do a nice job of demonstrating that
contrary to all the criticism, neofunctionalist analysis can say
something interesting about change.  The problem is that in this
piece, change is equated with differentiation.  Similarly, two
of the four papers on social change in Alexander's collection
likewise focus on differentiation, while one (Eisenstadt 1985)
discusses societal boundaries and the other (Lechner 1985) is
another metatheoretical  essay, this time on Parsons and
modernity.

The neofunctionalists have certainly produced a more nuanced and
concrete account of differentiation as a "master trend" in
history. However, as important as this phenomenon may be in
itself, it is not one of the phenomena on our exam question's
list, and, moreover, it does not strongly relate to those
phenomena. If this is what we can expect from neofunctionalism
in relation to change, then, neofunctionalism does not contest
Marxism on its own terrain.

So far, the same may be said of inequality and political
sociology.  The two papers on inequality in Colomy's collection
deal with the professions (Barber (1990a) and occupational
prestige (Barber 1990b), respectively.  About macrosocial
poverty and the concentration of wealth, there is silence.
Colomy's only paper on political sociology (Lehman 1990) is,
again, largely metatheoretical rather than explanatory, while
one of the two political sociology pieces in Alexander's
collection (Prager 1985)  makes a  largely taxonomic distinction
between totalitarianism and democracy.  The other paper (Barber
1985) is once again on the professions.

We may conclude that for the phenomena on the list where the
Marxian perspective is strong, i.e., the great majority, its
explanations are virtually uncontested by theories from the
rival perspectives.  If that conclusion is correct, this is a
striking finding indeed.  It means that despite all the talk of
sociology being a multiparadigm discipline , for a large class
of important phenomena, sociology is a single paradigm
discipline.  If most sociologists choose not to embrace that
paradigm, they evidently also choose not to consider the
phenomena to which that paradigm is addressed.  Calling
sociology a multiparadigm discipline in such case is as fatuous
as calling physics a biparadigm discipline because different
phenomena are addressed by quantum mechanics and the theory of
relativity.

Before considering Marxism's conceptual challenges, we must
finally return to the three phenomena where the power of
Marxism's positive heuristic is most in doubt: Racial and gender
inequality and the analysis of discourse and meaning. Even here,
it is not as if Marxism has nothing to say, as if the
perspective were of no value whatsoever.  The real debate is
whether what Marxism has to say is sufficient on its own.
Certainly, with Marxism's strong emphasis on the manufacture of
ideology, it has a lot to say about symbolic representations.
Lukes's (1974) three dimensions of power and particularly his
third dimension of "manufactured consent" is particularly
important not just to the analysis of discourse but to the study
of the ideological supports of racism and sexism as well.  And
Berger's (1972) Marxian treatment of art certainly speaks to
culture in general and to gender inequality in particular.
There are similarly solid Marxian contributions to the study of
race ( Feagin and Feagin 1986; Marable 1983).

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that when it comes to racial
and gender inequality and to discourse analysis, the positive
heuristics of the postmodernist perspectives have appeared to be
more prolific than Marxism's.  That is, more exciting lines of
exploration have emerged from these perspectives than have
recently been associated with Marxism.  This does not
necessarily mean that the explanations these perspectives
provide are necessarily more cogent or fundamental than those
provided by Marxism but only that in these areas, postmodernist
theorists have had a clearer research agenda to follow.  Whether
the pursuit of that agenda will in the long-run pay off with
superior puzzle-solving, only time will tell.

While Laudan (1977) argues that in the long-run the ability to
solve puzzles is what determines the success of a research
program, in the short and medium terms, what may be more
determinative of theoretical dominance in our discipline is the
strength of a perspective's positive heuristic in directions
that are of contemporary saliance.  If a perspective offers a
strong positive heuristic or agenda for research in a highly
topical area, it will command attention and proponents, whether
or not in the long run that agenda actually pays dividends in
solutions to puzzles and whether or not the perspective has much
to say in other research areas.  In the short and medium terms,
the important thing is whether researchers have exciting lines
to follow, and even if those lines ultimately lead to dead ends,
until those ends are reached and the exciting lines of inquiry
exhausted, the perspective will remain popular.

Colomy (1990a) makes such an observation in reference to the
displacement of traditional functionalism.  Although the fatal
flaw in tradtional functionalism was the "illicit teleology" at
its heart, its displacement probably owed more to the perceived
weaknesses of its positive heuristics in the direction of social
change and conflict, which were historically salient in the
sixties and early seventies.

The Marxian perspective is perhaps suffering a similar fate
today.  Its positive heuristics are weakest in the directions of
racial and gender inequality and discourse analysis, which are
currently playing a socially salient role in the so-called
"politics of identity."  The perspectives that have particularly
strong positive heuristics in these directions -- structuralism,
poststructuralism, semiotics, and discourse analysis -- are the
ones that are, therefore, prominent today.

While the politics of identity and the theoretical perspectives
that can strongly speak to it are currently salient, the
problems that Marxism addresses remain, and they remain
important, important even for their bearing on race and gender.
Sooner or later these problems will once again take hold of our
attention.  Since these problems are left unaddressed by the
perspectives now found so promising for race and gender,
disciplinary sensibilies will presumably change once again.
When they do, the star of postmodernism will begin to fade, and
renewed interest may be devoted to Marxism.  Over the long-term,
what matters is not the strength of a perspective's positive
heuristic in a single direction that happens to enjoy momentary
salience, but the strengths and widths of its positive
heuristics across an entire band of problems of disciplinary
interest.

THE CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES TO MARXISM

Conceptual difficulties are usually more damaging to a research
program than empirical refutations (Laudan 1977).  Empirical
refutations can often be addressed by relatively minor
theoretical revisions that do not threaten the research
program's ontological hard core.  We have already observed, for
example, that the absence of revolution in the developed
capitalist countries constitutes a refutation only for a
specific theory within the Marxian perspective and not for the
Marxian perspective tout court.

It is otherwise with conceptual difficulties, for they
frequently do challenge the very theoretical foundations of a
research program.  It is one thing for Marxism to have made a
prediction that failed for incidental reasons.  It would be
another matter altogether if, for example, it turned out that
the labor theory of value could not be sustained.  The labor
theory of value underlies the moral charge of exploitation that
Marxism levels against capitalism and underlies as well much of
Marxism's explanatory apparatus.   Clearly, if the labor theory
of value can not be sustained, then Marxian theory will have to
be fundamentally rethought to such an extent that the product
might justifiably be labeled "post-Marxist."

As we have seen, Marxism is not really contested by perspectives
offering superior explanations for the phenomena to which
Marxism is principally addressed.  Instead, the important
challenges to Marxism are conceptual criticisms.  To list a
sample, Marxism is today accused of functionalism (Elster 1985;
Giddens 1983), of historicism (Giddens 1983), of essentialism
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985), of economic reductionism (Alexander
1985), and of logo and phallo centrism (Denzin 1986; Lyotard
1979; Seidman 1992).  Thus, the most effective banners currently
raised against Marxism are banners decrying Marxism's conceptual
flaws.

What compounds the problem is that, among others, the banners
are raised in the name of postmodernist perspectives --
structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics and discourse
analysis -- that are currently enjoying success in socially
salient areas where Marxism is weak, the areas of race, gender,
and meaning in particular.  Such successes in these areas tend
simultaneously to vindicate the postmodernist ontology and to
cast doubt on the modernist ontology of Marxism.  If, for
example, it takes a non-logocentric, non-essentialist ontology
to come to terms with the new politics of identity and if
Marxism is both logocentric and essentialist, then it is easy to
conclude that something is radically wrong with Marxism,
something that must be changed at its roots.

Ultimately, what is in question is fundamental ontology, and
that is a metatheoretical or philosophical issue.   For the most
part, Marxian sociologists in America exhibit little patience
for metatheoretical debate.  Unlike Lukacs, Korsch, or even
Lenin, American Marxists within sociology tend not to regard
metaphysics as part of the struggle.   Perhaps it is not part of
the struggle on the street, but it is definitely a large part of
the struggle in the academy.  And unless that struggle is
engaged, American academics will continue to abandon Marxism.

There is certainly no space in this paper to definitively
counter all the charges leveled against the modernist, Marxian
ontology.  Yet, a few important points can be made.  First,
while the successes of the postmodernist perspectives in the
areas of race and gender may well count in favor of a
postmodernist ontology and against the modernist ontology of
Marxism, Marxism can draw on its own empirical cards.  As we saw
in the previous section, Marxism is distinctly successful in
addressing a wide range of important phenomena that more or less
fall under the category of political economy.  Marxism's
successes in these areas tend to vindicate its modernist
ontology, thereby casting doubt in turn on the postmodernist
ontology.

On purely conceptual grounds, moreover, it is not at all clear
that the postmodernist ontology can be sustained.  At its
extreme, postmodernism rejects any concept of truth, any concept
of objective reality, and any concept of a coherent human
subject.  Thus, at the extreme, postmodernism becomes an
idealist reductionism that borders on nihilism.  It is opposed
after all not just to Marxism but, more broadly, to modernist
humanism itself.

Like Marxism, postmodernism considers itself a liberationist
perspective, a perspective that is supposed to be instrumental
in liberating us from oppression, especially those oppressions
deriving from racial and gender distinctions.  Yet, at the same
time, postmodernism tells us that there are no essential selves,
no coherent subjects.  We are all instead as personally
fragmented as the characters in Twin Peaks.  Instead of coherent
selves, there are only subject positions discursively adopted
(Butler 1990; Flax 1990).   Who or what, then, does
postmodernism seek to liberate?  Subject positions?  While we
can understand the oppression of women or racial minorities
conceptualized as coherent selves, what does it mean to oppress
or liberate fragmented subject positions?  The postmodernist
ontology itself is not clearly coherent.

Equally suspect is postmodernism's embrace of relativism, its
tendency to deny the concepts of truth and objective reality
that modernist perspectives such as Marxism uphold.
Postmodernists decry the concept of truth as "logocentric" and
even as "phallocentric" (Denzin 1986).  They tell us of the
death of the "metanarrative" or of grand theories such as
Marxism (Lyotard 1977).  Finally, they tell us that "concealed
in the will to truth is a will to power" (Seidman 1992: 135).

Seidman (1992), accordingly, recommends that we replace the
discourse of truth with a discourse of pragmatics.  However, his
position just illustrates the political inadequacy of
postmodernism's relativist stance.  Specifically, Seidman (1992:
135)  maintains that theory choice should be determined not by
criteria bearing on truth  but by "the intellectual, social,
moral, and political consequences of choosing one conceptual
strategy or another."

What Seidman refuses to understand even after it is pointed out
to him (Alexander 1992; Antonio 1992) is that such
consequentialist assessments themselves depend on truth claims.
It is a truth claim that this or that theory has good or bad
social, moral or political consequences.  Unless consequences
are just going to be declared by fiat, there will have to be
debate about their truth.

For any liberationist perspective, the concept of truth, however
modernist it may be, is indispensable.   After all, social
critics cannot maintain that the exploitative or oppressive
character of a social system is just one way to look at it, a
way that in their contrariness they happen to prefer.  If they
expect to persuade others to change the system, then they must
be saying that their critical view is at least closer to the
truth than the ideology that legitimates the system.  In the
end, for it to stick, any charge of injustice or social harm
must be grounded in a claim to truth.  If the concept of truth
disappears, then social criticism disintegrates along with it as
well as any possibility for a liberationist perspective.
Foucault at least understood that.

To turn, finally, to the other conceptual charges raised against
Marxism, it is highly debatable whether Marxism is inherently
functionalist, historicist, reductionist, or "totalizing."  One
does not have to go as far as rational choice theory to repair
elements of functionalist logic within Marxism.  With regard to
reductionism, there are few Marxists today who would maintain
that all important social phenomena can be explained by a
Marxian framework or that non-economic processes do not matter.
As for alleged totalizing tendencies, only Marxist dogmatists
would consider the Marxian perspective to be a static framework
immune to further growth or revision.  Certainly, any statement
of position, whether it be a theory, a book or an article,
"totalizes" in excluding certain considerations while making
claims for others.  That seems ineluctable but innocuous as long
as all statements of position are regarded as provisional,
subject to correction.  Most contemporary Marxists would regard
Marxism in that light as a theoretical position in progress.

In short, while Marxism faces conceptual challenges, it is not
at all clear that those challenges cannot be met.  In some
cases, Marxism is conceptually challenged by rival ontologies
that are currently on the ascent.  Yet, those rival ontologies
are themselves beset by conceptual problems.   The debate has
hardly concluded, and traditional Marxists in particular have
hardly begun to enter it.  While much metatheoretical work
remains to be done, work to which Marxists ought to devote more
attention, no warrant has yet accumulated to conclude that the
ontological hard core of Marxism has been superceded.

CONCLUSION

It was argued that there is a broad range of important problems
that Marxism seems uniquely capable of addressing.  It was not
argued that these are the only important problems for
sociologists to address or that Marxism can always entirely
explain the problems it addresses on its own.  Thus, it was not
argued that Marxism is the only theoretical perspective that
should command sociologists' adherence.  The actual argument is
more modest:  That just as physics needs both quantum mechanics
and relativity theory for different sorts of phenomena,
sociology still needs Marxism to make sense of many important
problems that concern us.  The argument is also that while
Marxism is challenged by an array of conceptual criticisms, not
all of those criticisms stick and that it is far from clear that
those that do stick call for such a fundamental revision of
Marxism that we should already be talking of Marxism's
supercession.  In short, we still need Marxism and not some kind
of post-Marxism.

It may be countered, finally, that Marxism is dead as a
political movement, that it no longer speaks to the current
struggles underway.  Yet, if Marxian theory is correct, then
current struggles are affected by and part of still other issues
that go unnoticed.  It is our job as intellectuals to analyze
those issues the best way we can.  If that means a Marxian
analysis, then it is our job as well to get Marxism noticed once
more, to make sure that it again informs those movements
struggling for a better world.

***********************
This concludes the sample essay. Now consider your own response
to the exam question.


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