Against underdog metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory

Abstract

A major target of the Marxist critique of “post-theory”—a broad term encompassing post-structuralism, post-Marxism, and postcolonial theory—has been its notorious deconstruction of the subject. The affirmation of marginal, excluded, and deviant subject positions within the same corpus has been noted less frequently. To recalibrate the Marxist critique of post-theory to also encompass its affirmative moment, we consult Alvin Gouldner and his overlooked concept of “underdog metaphysics.” Far from representing a mere mistake or theoretical incoherence, we maintain that the endorsement of the underdog position adds critical, political, and ethical relevance to post-theory, which would be absent from a purely deconstructivist stance. We use Gouldner to connect the reservations that Marxists have long expressed about the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat with the Marxist critique of post-theory. We argue that underdog metaphysics is just as incompatible with a Marxist program of class-based collective action and mobilization of a mass movement as a full deconstruction of the subject. Ultimately, we claim that post-theory combines deconstruction (of the subject) with affirmation (of the underdog) in a two-pronged assault on the Marxist assertion that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. It is therefore unfortunate that most Marxist critics of post-theory have focused on attacking the notion of a decentered subject while overlooking the affirmation of the underdog position.

Marxist critique and post-theory beyond deconstruction

Since the late 1970s, a cadre of Marxist theorists has intervened against a differentiated but cohesive and exceptionally influential corpus in social theory, which has been denoted with the intentionally rough category “post-theory” (Chibber, 2013: 3). ¹ A prevalent motif in the Marxist critique is its opposition to the deconstruction of the subject, which it identifies as a significant element in various strands of post-theory, including deconstructionism, post-structuralism, new materialism, post-Marxism, post-modernism, and the subaltern school of postcolonial theory.

A less common but no less significant objection among both Marxist and non-Marxist critics of post-theory focuses on the logical inconsistency that arises when many of its proponents not only engage in the deconstruction of the subject but also endorse marginal, excluded, and deviant social groups or subject positions (see e.g. Dews, 1987: 191, 232; Larraín, 1994: 91; Mann, 2013: 60, 64, 67; Wolin, 2006: 80). While we agree that the moments of deconstruction and affirmation in post-theory appear as an “unhappy marriage” between two incompatible conceptions (Mann, 2013), we do not understand the relationship between them as the result of mere mistakes, embarrassing oversights, or simple conceptual incoherence. On the contrary, we suggest that the oscillation between deconstruction and affirmation plays a constitutive role in the project of post-theory, providing it with a critical, political, and ethical relevance that would be lacking if it had consistently clung to deconstruction. In other words, while the moments of deconstruction and affirmation mutually exclude one another on a logical plane, we maintain that they are nevertheless complementary within a practical-political register. Consequently, a Marxist rebuttal of post-theory is incomplete if it solely criticizes deconstruction while letting affirmation off the hook—or worse, if it commends the affirmative stance as preferable to, yet inconsistent with, the deconstructive stance.

To provide a recalibrated Marxist critique of post-theory, we propose a renewed engagement with Alvin Gouldner's all-but-forgotten concept of “underdog metaphysics.” Gouldner is better known for his comparative study of two rival traditions within Marxism (1980), one “critical” and the other “scientific,” and for his prediction of a coming crisis of academic sociology (1970). Prior to these studies, in 1968, he coined the term underdog metaphysics (Gouldner, 1968). He used the concept to expose an ascending form of “establishment sociology,” which was about to replace structural functionalism as the predominant school of thought in North American sociology. The new establishment sociology challenged the ideals of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality precisely through an approbation of marginality, deviance, difference, and exclusion. The moral exhortation doubled as a theory of knowledge by assigning priority to the perspective of marginal groups. Hence, he dubbed it a “metaphysics.” Gouldner did not engage directly with post-theory, which was still in its infancy at the time of his initial interest in underdog metaphysics. Nevertheless, by calling attention to the aporias of underdog metaphysics, he helps us to re-balance a Marxist critique that simultaneously covers the moments of deconstruction and affirmation in post-theory.

Before arriving at our reinterpretation and reactivation of Gouldner's intervention, our argument presupposes some groundwork. These preparations involve engaging with the Marxist critique of post-theory, which, with few exceptions, has been preoccupied with attacking the deconstruction of the subject. ² Gouldner highlights the necessity of systematically engaging with the implicit theory of knowledge behind the affirmation of the underdog perspective, in addition to helping us reposition the critical orientation to address affirmation as well as deconstruction. Moreover, we present a panorama of the affirmation of the underdog position across various incarnations of post-theory. Our intention is not, of course, to cover all significant variations or the full scope of the affirmation of marginalized subject positions, but merely to demonstrate its existence and illustrate some of its iterations. Equally importantly, we also engage with the uneven but long-standing skepticism within the Marxist history of ideas toward romanticized accounts of the underdog position—often, but not always, connected to reservations about the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat. Until now, this tradition has not been related to the corpus of post-theory. We contend that the concept of underdog metaphysics can serve as a junction where the persistent Marxist doubts about the revolutionary capacity of the underdog position and the lumpenproletariat, on the one hand, and objections to post-theory's enamorment with deconstruction, on the other, can be connected to build a more effective critique.

Even if our argument is theoretical and abstract, its practical implications are unmistakable. The persistent appeal and influence of post-theory cannot be fully understood without acknowledging its claim to champion the world's underdogs. Even if this fight-the-power rhetoric can, at times, sound deceptively similar to a Marxian class analysis, the affirmation of particularistic group identities and the glorification of the underdog position are no less problematic for most versions of Marxism than an outright deconstruction of the subject. In both cases, a fundamental condition for a Marxist program of mass action is eliminated: namely, the strategy of politically unifying and mobilizing a societal majority defined by its lack of access to the means of production—a majority that, unlike marginalized identity groups, is central to the production and reproduction of capitalism. Ultimately, therefore, the deconstruction of the subject and the affirmation of the underdog position converge in post-theory as a dual assault on the Marxist proposition that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself (for a similar argument, see Hansen, 2023: 15).

The Marxist critique of post-theory—actuality and limits

It should be an uncontroversial observation that the greater part of the Marxist critique of post-theory has been preoccupied with attacking the deconstruction of the subject, to the neglect of post-theory's affirmation of the underdog position. Nonetheless, just as the concept of post-theory is intended as a catch-all term, emphasizing commonalities at the expense of specificities, the same disclaimer applies to its Marxist opponent. Hence, we need to unpack the various strands of this critique and demonstrate that, despite their diversity, none of the critics has satisfactorily addressed the problems inherent in the affirmative stance.

Alongside the Marxist critique of the de-centering of the subject, other common targets include post-theory's levelling and pluralization of history, structure, power, and knowledge, as well as its attack on grand narratives, class, essentialism, binary oppositions, universalism, reason, emancipation, revolution, and objectivity (see e.g. Callinicos, 1989; Dews, 1987; Eagleton, 2003, 2016; Fraser, 1991; Rose, 1984). Moreover, the Marxist critique has been concentrated on different thought collectives within the post-theoretical landscape. For instance, a number of Marxists have polemicized against the school of thought variously referred to as deconstructionism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, represented by authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Richard Rorty, and so forth (again, see Callinicos, 1989; Dews, 1987; Eagleton, 2003, 2016; Fraser, 1991; Rose, 1984). Others have devoted specific attention to post-Marxists such as Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Paul Hirst, Sam Bowles, Herbert Gintis, Gavin Kitching, and Gareth Stedman Jones, together with their Eurocommunist context and their Althusserian forerunners, most notably Nicos Poulantzas (Anderson, 1983; Boucher, 2008; Geras, 1990; Wood, 1986). Yet others have embarked on a critical engagement with actor-network theory, post-humanism, constructionism, hybridism, and new materialism, as found in authors such as Bruno Latour, Noel Castree, Neil Smith, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway (see e.g. Eagleton, 2016; Malm, 2017), or, not to be forgotten, with the cultural turn and post-Marxism more broadly conceived (Chibber, 2013; Therborn, 2008), and the school of subaltern studies in postcolonial theory (see e.g. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015, 2017; Bartolovich and Lazarus, 2002; Chibber, 2013).

Differences notwithstanding, granted that we bracket issues of art, literature, and architecture (see e.g. Anderson, 1998), a rough distinction can be made between two kinds of Marxist interventions against post-theory. One strand attempts to situate, explain, and criticize social theory in relation to a specific phase or logic of capitalism (see e.g. Granberg and Hammer, 2025, forthcoming; Harvey, 1990; Jameson, 1991; Rekret, 2018; for a critique of Jameson, see Callinicos, 1989: 128–144). Another strand takes aim at delineated epistemological and strategic problems. Since we aim to contribute to a Marxist critique of the tensions and complementarity between deconstruction and affirmation in post-theory, the second strand is more relevant for our purposes in general, and particularly with respect to the ways in which it has focused its critique on the deconstruction of the subject.

In this setting, a handful of instances from the mainstream of the Marxist critique will suffice to offer a flavor of its nature and variations. To begin with, Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued that post-Marxism assumes that politics and ideology are autonomous from societal conditions in general, and from those of class in particular (Wood, 1986: 52, 53, 61, 75, 84, 129; see also Andersson, 1983). Concurrently, post-Marxist theory randomizes history and structure, allowing nothing but contingency. In the case of Laclau and Mouffe, Wood (1986: 61–62) demonstrates how they arrive at their argument that “there are no ‘fixed’ social interests or identities, that all social identities are discursively constructed …” by offering a simplistic choice between “… revolutionary chiliasm and a total denial of any organic connection between working-class interests and socialism …,” which leads them to a binary logic built on the assumption that “where there is no simple, absolute, mechanical, unilinear, and non-contradictory determination, there is no determinacy, no relationships, no causality at all.”

Correspondingly, but with another target in mind, Peter Dews (1987: xi, xv, 228) claims that, similarly to Adorno's critical theory, the post-structuralism of Derrida and Foucault “is directed against the constraints of the paradigm of Subjektsphilosophie ….” However, Dews (1987: 229) continues, “post-structuralist thought can be seen as more closely tied to the philosophy of consciousness than is the thought of Adorno, since it lacks any sense of the interdependence of identity and non-identity” and of interdependence and intersubjectivity more generally. The basic logic probably appears most clearly in the work of Derrida, where “the attempt to move beyond the enclosure of transcendental consciousness through the thought of différance simply reproduces the cancellation of differences” and therefore, in the words of Richard Kearney, “ends up, not with ‘difference’, but with indifference, where nothing is anything, and everything is everything else …” (Dews, 1987: 229).

In contrast to Dews assessment, Alex Callinicos (1989: 80–83) offers a narrative of continuity between Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Derridean rejections of knowledge and reason in contemporary thought. But Callinicos (1989: 62–65, 68–73, 74–75, 87–91) also identifies the centrality—both in the “textualism” of Derrida and his North American followers, and in the “worldly” wing of post-structuralism represented by Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Donzelot, and others—of the subversion of the subject as a “self-certain foundation of modernity.” Here, we are left with a “plural nature of the self [that] is merely one instance of the inherently multiple and heterogeneous character of reality itself,” a subject that is “subordinated to the endless play of difference [which] takes us not into, but beyond, history.”

Jumping forward in time, proponents of “post-humanism” and “new materialism” claim to have replaced the fallacies of deconstructionism and post-structuralism. Despite their earlier efforts to challenge Cartesian notions of the subject, post-structuralism and deconstructionism are now criticized for being built precisely on Cartesian binary oppositions. However, Andreas Malm (2017; see also Eagleton, 2016) compellingly argues that new materialism is not as novel as its advocates claim and is better understood as a post-structuralist wolf in sheep's clothing. While new materialists propose a monistic theory of immanence, rejecting the dualistic conceptualization of the difference between nature and society, or between subject and object, their solution ultimately relies on the very dualist tradition it seeks to overcome. This tradition positions nature and society, as well as subject and object, as entirely separate spheres. Without this initial separation—rooted in the notion that difference equals independence—the assertion that these categories are inseparable and intertwined does not, in itself, justify collapsing them into identity. Without the notion that difference equals independence, one could simply hold that these categories are different and inseparable (Malm, 2017: 48–51; see also Eagleton, 2016: 11; Johansson Wilén and Wilén, 2018).

Although deconstruction has been a primary target for Marxist critics of post-theory, there are a few exceptions that we will discuss below—particularly those related to Gouldner's work and the general Marxist skepticism toward romanticized accounts of the underdog position prior to the advent of post-theory. Yet, it should also be noted in the present context that there are two contemporary exceptions to the one-sided focus on deconstruction that might seem important, found in the works of Terry Eagleton and Wendy Brown—neither of whom explicitly links their critiques to earlier Marxist misgivings about the transformative potential of the underdog.

Beginning with Eagleton, he clearly stands out among Marxists by providing a commentary on the affirmation of divergent, excluded, and marginalized subjects in post-theory, alongside a critique of deconstructivism. To many advocates of post-theory, Eagleton (2003: 13; see also Chibber, 2013: 19) charges, consensus is oppressive, and solidarity represents little more than uniformity. In this regard, the post-theoretical impulse mirrors the liberal's fear of the tyranny of the majority, for which the individual is the antidote. Post-theorists, “some of whom doubt the very reality of the individual, counter it instead with margins and minorities. It is what stands askew to society as a whole—the marginal, mad, deviant, perverse, transgressive—which is most politically fertile” (Eagleton, 2003: 13). Nonetheless, if you oppose norms, authority, and majorities altogether, you are clearly committed to abstract universalism, even though this opposition often comes hand in hand with an attack on abstract universalism as well (Eagleton, 2003: 15). In the end, Eagleton rehearses the familiar indictment against post-theory's “performative contradiction,” paraphrasing Jürgen Habermas’s (1987: 118, 122–127) wording. That is, in cancelling the distinction between validity on the one hand and power or the underdog position on the other, post-theory attacks the presuppositions of its own validity. The objection has merit, but it is not about the underdog position per se. While Eagleton's observations on the matter take us some steps closer to a full Marxist critique that encompasses affirmation no less than deconstruction, they are not developed into a systematic critique of underdog metaphysics.

Turning to Brown, it is necessary to acknowledge that her critique of political activism based on victimized identities represents a quite different case. Her critique of ressentiment is systematically developed and insightful, but she lacks the ambition to analyze the connection between the politicization of victimhood and the post-theoretical current of thought. Indeed, the theoretical backbone of her critique is drawn from Nietzsche's musings on slave morality—that is to say, from the very same source that informs more than a few accounts of post-theory (see e.g. Brown, 1993, 1995). For this reason, we are hesitant to count Brown among the fold of Marxist critics. Nietzsche, the “aristocratic rebel,” attacked slave morality with the intent of propping up dynastic elites (for a Marxist critique of Nietzsche and Nietzschean theory, see e.g. Losurdo, 2021). As we will argue below, Gouldner's critique of underdog metaphysics is a better starting point for a program for progressive social change built on mass movements.

From the lumpenproletariat to the underdog position

The absence of a systematically developed Marxist critique of the relation between post-theory's deconstruction of the subject and its affirmation of the underdog position is surprising, given the historical precedents. The endorsement of the lumpenproletariat as an agent of revolutionary change—more radical even than the working class—was already a bone of contention in Marx and Engels's polemic against Max Stirner and Michael Bakunin. In the assessment of the anarchists, the impoverished existence on the margins of capitalist society prepared the “dangerous class” for heroic acts of resistance (on the original debate about the lumpenproletariat, see Barrow, 2020; Bussard, 1987). Marx and Engels (2017 [1848]: 66) retorted that the impoverished existence of the lumpenproletariat, its “conditions of life … prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

Marx and Engels's negative assessment of the lumpenproletariat was echoed by leading figures of the Second and Third Internationals, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong (here and in the following paragraphs, we are indebted to Barrow, 2020). They grappled with the challenge of how to prevent this group from becoming susceptible to manipulation as tools of reactionary interests. Karl Kautsky (1946: 126) took the sternest stance on this matter, ultimately concluding that the lumpenproletariat would need to be managed through the coercive power of the proletarian-controlled state. Rosa Luxemburg (1961 [1922]: 74, 75) regarded such an approach as counterproductive and advocated for transforming the lumpenproletariat by implementing an expansive and rapid expansion of social welfare programs aimed at pacifying their discontent. That is, the lumpenproletariat could be transformed from being a bribed tool of reaction to being a bribed tool of socialist revolution. Lenin (1965 [1906]: 216) and Zedong (1965 [1939]: 325–326) both entertained the idea of recruiting lumpenproletarians into the revolutionary forces and subjecting them to strict military discipline. However, their practical experiences led them to exercise caution, as they observed that the lumpenproletariat consistently posed a disruptive force. Consequently, both emphasized that this segment of society could never be fully trusted within the socialist movement due to its inherent anarchistic and criminal tendencies (see Barrow, 2020: 3–4, 80–85).

Conjoint with the waning influence of Marxism in the post-1968 conjuncture, the negative assessment of the lumpenproletariat's role in social struggles was reversed into a positive one (Ingram, 2018). A contributing factor was disappointment over the failure of the student uprisings to trigger a mass revolt by the working class that could lead to structural change. This lent credence to the “embourgeoisement thesis,” which stipulated that rising material standards and notions of “respectability” had transformed the working class into a bribed tool of the bourgeoisie. Front figures in the New Left, notably Stuart Hall (1958; see also Marcuse, 2002 [1964]), latched onto this idea from very early on. It provided a justification for searching for a revolutionary subject and revolutionary ideology among the excluded—the “underprivileged,” the “nonconformist young intelligentsia,” the “labouring classes in backward capitalist countries,” the “ghetto population,” to borrow the terms of Herbert Marcuse (1969: 51–58)—as opposed to among the exploited. The lumpenproletariat was now cast as a revolutionary avant-garde, leading a popular alliance “across the ranks of … various marginalised groups: prisoners, mental patients, claimants, clients, students …” (Young, 1979: 16). Spearheading this intellectual reorientation were disillusioned former Maoists, such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others connected to the French journal Tel Quel. It was a short step for the ex-Maoists to replace the object of their populist longings—from “the people” to “the marginalised” (Andersson, 1983: 57; see also Boucher, 2008: 19; Wolin, 2006). Ten years later in the UK, the journal Marxism Today became a major point of gravitation for those who sought to undermine Marxist concepts or Marxism tout court, echoing the shift toward marginality among the French pioneers (Wood, 1986: 2).

Variations of this endorsement of marginality proliferated as it was adopted by and for different groups with a claim to represent the underdogs of society. As regards the feminist movement, Bat-Ami Bar On clarifies how the elevated status of marginality in second- and third-wave feminism came to depart from the Marxist tradition. While “Marx's proletariat occupies two places in capitalist society,” Bar On (1993: 85–86) explains, it

… is socially marginal in relation to the capitalist class, which occupies centre stage by virtue of an economic power that enables it to have enormous political and cultural influence and even control, while at the same time, it is the proletariat that is at the centre stage of capitalist production because it is the living creative force of production that is appropriated by the capitalist class and transformed into the capital that gives the capitalists their power.

In contrast to the Marxists, Bar On (1993: 85–86) continues, important sections of second- and third-wave feminism, as well as the New Left more generally, did not claim that the social marginality of women—or of any other marginalized or subordinated social group—is a function of their centrality in a systemically and socially organized relation with men. In sum, according to Bar On, the Marxist analysis departs from most other attempts to theorize society from below, since social marginality is here understood as a consequence of socio-economic centrality.

Other candidates for underdog status were sought in the global periphery. Thus, the New Left could redeem the lumpenproletariat “as a potentially fruitful concept for understanding Third World anticolonial movements, the US Black Power movement, the global youth and student movements, and even the new social movements of the 1980s … as the vanguard of a global revolutionary movement against capitalism” (Barrow, 2020: 1–2, 4). In this context, a mix of Maoist arguments and anarchist thought figures came together in theorists like Frantz Fanon and his concept of the “wretched of the earth,” resulting in a horizontal image of a center and a periphery, including the notion of the workers in the core capitalist societies as embourgeoized (Barrow, 2020: 5; see also Stallybrass, 1990). Soon, Fanon's theorization of the lumpenproletariat as a new vanguard of anti-capitalist revolution was introduced in the United States by several founders of the Black Panther Party. Taking the argument a step further along the trajectory laid out by Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, argued that the concept of the lumpenproletariat not only included the Black lumpenproletariat, but also an increasing number of white proletarians who were rapidly becoming excluded from their class due to automation in the post-industrial phase of capitalism, along with “Chicanos, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ groups as part of a potentially broad anticapitalist and communist coalition” (Barrow, 2020: 6).

As Vivek Chibber (2013: 7, 19) has demonstrated, this argumentative strategy prepared the ground for the convergence between post-Marxist and post-structuralist thinking and the subaltern version of postcolonial theory in the 1980s. In both schools of thought, one finds incessant attacks on structured notions of the subject, along with attacks on reason, universalism, and essentialism, combined with affirmation of what Subalternist scholars designate as the fragment: “… those elements of social life,” as Chibber (2013: 7, 19) maintains, “that cannot easily be assimilated into dominant discourses or structures—minority cultures, dissident tracts, oppositional gestures.”

It can be argued that Michel Foucault is an exception among the authors of post-theory in that he did not romanticize the underdog. This is suggested by his iconic conception of power as diffused and ubiquitous. If there is no “outside” of power, then this rules out a “margins” from which one can confront a center of power. There are many passages in Foucault's writings to support such a reading (see e.g. Foucault, 1980: 141; see also Laclau and Mouffe, 2014 [1985]: 166). At other times, however, he calls for a “reactivation of local knowledge—of minor knowledges as Deleuze might call them—in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power” (Foucault, 1980: 85). In a series of interviews and public speeches connected to his campaigns for prison reform, Foucault salutes the “non-proletarised pleb” as an antidote to power: “This measure of plebs is not so much what stands outside relations of power as their limit, their underside, their counter-stroke, that which responds to every advance of power by a movement of disengagement” (Foucault, 1980: 138). He insists that “plebs” designates an attitude rather than a sociological category, possibly since the latter would imply a traditional subject position. Shortly after, he contradicts himself by suggesting that the attitude of the pleb is particularly forthcoming among juvenile delinquents. This claim is made on more than one reprise: “And yet, surprisingly, it is the marginalised and violent segment of the plebeian population that is becoming politically conscious. For example, juvenile gangs in the suburbs, in certain quarters of Paris, for whom their delinquent lifestyle and marginal existence has taken on a political significance” (Foucault, 1994: 304).

Foucault's contradictory statements make more sense once we understand what motivates him to side with the underdog in the first place:

“All of these movements emerge from the intellectuals, students, prisoners, among what is called the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Not because I assign any absolute value to these movements, but I believe it possible, both on a cognitive and political level, to claim back some of that which has been monopolized by Marxism and Marxist parties […] Differently put, here one finds the resource that makes it possible to transcend Marxism as a state philosophy.” (Foucault, 1978: 603)

In other words, Foucault does not, unlike many of his followers, ascribe an “absolute” value to the plebs. He endorses the plebeian attitude as a spanner in the works of Marxist state philosophy. ³ Foucault weaponized the appeal to the underdog, just as the anarchists had channeled their opposition to Marx into a vindication of the lumpenproletariat. The gesture is restated by later-day scholars aligned with post-theory. The lumpenproletariat, Jeffrey Mehlman (1977) asserted, resists the totalizing and teleological pretensions of the dialectic. In the same vein, Ernesto Laclau (2002: 381; for a sympathetic assessment, see Thomassen, 2005), from the 1980s onwards a card-carrying post-Marxist, celebrated the lumpenproletariat as a representative of a heterogeneous excess that escapes categorization and “conceptual mastery.” Vice versa, he denounced the “violently dismissive way in which both Marx and Engels referred to the lumpenproletariat.”

The negative assessment of the lumpenproletariat by Marx and Engels is seized upon by post-Marxist scholars eager to portray themselves as more radical than the tradition they seek to supplant. Post-Marxists commonly indict Marx and Engels for having given air to Victorian prejudices against the underclass, which they, along with the “respectable” part of the working class, had inherited from the bourgeoisie (see e.g. LaCapra, 1983: 281, 284; Stallybrass, 1990: 82; Weeks, 2023: 338). Paired with this claim is a questioning of the experiential and factual basis for the animosity between the laboring class and the dangerous class. The split between the two classes, it is argued, owed exclusively to a moral panic that the bourgeoisie had induced into the working poor. Mark Cowling (2002), criminologist and self-designated post-Marxist, pushes this argument the furthest. He equates Marx's considerations about the underclass with Charles Murray's thinly veiled excuse for racism in The Bell Curve. It begs the question why Cowling wants to be seen as if he belongs to the Marxist tradition at all, given that he would probably refrain from calling himself a “post-racist.”

The above quip highlights a dilemma for post-Marxist writers. They cannot lay claim to the Marxian tradition without downplaying the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Marx's theoretical system. Telling is the subtitle of Cowling's (2002) intervention: the lumpenproletariat is a “concept best abandoned.” Like many before him, he observes that Marx and Engels only mention the lumpenproletariat in passing and in journalistic and political texts or works on more peripheral topics. The irrelevance of the concept is further suggested by the fact that Marx and Engels never cared to give it a proper definition, beyond providing a long list of occupations and nicknames. We concede that this claim has gained credence also because later-day Marxists, with a few exceptions (e.g. Bourdin, 2013; Draper, 1972), have neglected the topic.

Another strategy is to acknowledge the authority of Marx and Engels while contending that their remarks on the lumpenproletariat are no longer applicable. In Policing the Crisis, for example, Stuart Hall and his co-authors seek to exempt modern-day delinquents from the nineteenth-century European conception of the lumpenproletariat by arguing that the immigrant backgrounds of these individuals connect them to the rebellious peasant masses of the global South (Hall et al., 1978: 381f, 392f). More recently, Kathy Weeks has argued that the distinction between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat has become obsolete, given that precarious labor conditions now affect virtually everyone. Yet, in close proximity to an anarchist register, Weeks (2023: 335; for a critique of contemporary anarchism and identity politics, see Legér, 2024: 130–140) celebrates the inherent opposition to norms and authority in the historical lumpenproletariat, by virtue of what she takes to be its heterogeneity, unpredictability, and unrespectability (Weeks, 2023: 331–332).

It is in this setting that the strategic importance of Clyde W. Barrow's contribution to the debate about the lumpenproletariat becomes fully apparent. He compellingly demonstrates an innate relation between, on the one hand, the skeptical remarks about the lumpenproletariat in Marx's and Engels's journalistic and political writings, and, on the other hand, Marx's mature theorization in Capital and Grundrisse. He contends that “Marx and Engels did anchor this concept in their analysis of the historical origins of capitalism and in their economic analysis of its extended reproduction as a mode of production” (Barrow, 2020: 14). Moreover, “in reassessing Marx's and Engels's theory of capitalist development in light of this concept,” Barrow also suggests that “there is an overlooked dystopian logic in Capital (also in Grundrisse) that points to a scenario where the proletariat is actually destined to decay into an ever-burgeoning lumpenproletariat and surplus population” (Barrow, 2020: 14). Consequently, the assessment of the lumpenproletariat by Marx and Engels must be understood as an integral part of their analysis of capitalism.

Barrow's accomplishment notwithstanding, he adheres to the conventional interpretation that Marx's and Engels's negative assessment of the lumpenproletariat, which rests on an instrumental rationale—namely, the strategic question of who is best positioned to dismantle the system. Jean-Claude Bourdin (2013) advances this interpretation by drawing attention to the moral or spiritual dimension of the lumpenproletariat as a category. This perspective allows Marx to outline the contours of a theory of revolutionary subjectivity. For Marx, the proletariat's embeddedness in production is crucial, as the discipline of labor fosters sociability, comportment, and intellectual maturity conducive to revolutionary activity. Conversely, these qualities are precisely what are lacking in the criminal and opportunistic lifestyle of the non-productive segment of the working class (and, one might add, of the bourgeoisie). Bourdin is also astute in tracing the Hegelian influence behind this analysis. Hegel's emphasis on Bildung and rootedness in institutional structures is echoed in Marx's negative view of the uprooted and declassed lumpenproletariat. Regrettably, however, Bourdin presents his findings as further evidence of Hegel's supposed conservatism—an implication that, due to their shared disdain for the rabble, now extends to Marx as well. Drawing on Foucault, Bourdin downplays the divide between the laboring class and the dangerous class as a moral panic orchestrated by the bourgeoisie (Bourdin, 2013: 2; Foucault, 1980: 16). Nevertheless, we value Bourdin's emphasis on subjectivity in the debate over the lumpenproletariat. It highlights the role that affirmation of the underdog position plays in Foucault's effort to abolish the political subject. The desire to transcend “Marxist state philosophy” is precisely where deconstruction and affirmation converge in post-theory. At precisely this juncture, we arrive at Alvin Gouldner's work on underdog metaphysics, which help us explore the epistemological stakes of siding with the underdog in a way that aligns with Marx's and early Marxists’ views on the lumpenproletariat.

Gouldner's critique of underdog metaphysics

The notion of underdog metaphysics is introduced by Gouldner in the article “The Sociologist as Partisan,” published in the symbolically charged month of May 1968. It is not for his critique of underdog metaphysics that he is remembered today (on other aspects of Gouldner's oeuvre, see Chriss, 2000; McGowan, 2016; Pedraza, 2002). Insofar as the concept of underdog metaphysics is discussed at all, its present-day reception is confined to writings on sociological method and retrospectives on key works in critical criminology (Calhoun, 2022; Hollands and Stanley, 2009; Lumsden, 2012; Matthiews, 2014). Gouldner provides the most extensive treatment of the topic of any source that we have reviewed. Yet, the concept is still not fully elaborated in either his 1968 article or the reprinted version in the 1973 book For Sociology.

For Gouldner, underdog metaphysics designates a particularist and unconditional endorsement of identity groups with a recognized status as underdogs. Crucially, this value-based standpoint serves as a theory of knowledge as well—hence the conjoint term, “metaphysics.” The categorization of the underdog furnishes the activist-scholar with a reference point for arbitrating between conflicting perspectives in a pluralistic society. In other words, it is an ersatz for a universal standard of reasoned argument on which judgements are normally based. It is this second-order reflection on the implicit knowledge claims behind the appeal to the underdog that constitutes Gouldner's distinctive contribution. It adds another dimension to the Marxist debates about the lumpenproletariat and provides us with a link to the critique of the deconstructivist moment in post-theory.

The target of Gouldner's polemic was not post-theory, however, but the Chicago sociologist Howard Becker. The latter is renowned for his case studies of marginal groups—addicts, pimps, hobos, and so forth. Guiding those empirical investigations was the proto-constructivist idea that rule-breaking has no substantial reality in itself. Acts are deviant only by virtue of the labels assigned to them by the surrounding, conformist society. This summarizes the main tenets of Becker's labelling theory (Becker, 1963: 177ff). In a presidential speech at a sociology congress in 1967, Becker (2009 [1967]) confronted his colleagues with the question: “Whose side are we on?” Although he shied away from answering the question himself, the audience could not fail to catch the underlying message: they ought to side with the groups labelled as “marginal,” “deviant,” “criminal,” and so forth.

The rallying cry was uttered amidst a fermenting student movement which, among other things, had delegitimized structural functionalism within post-war American sociology. Talcott Parsons's functionalist synthesis, oriented toward consensus and equilibrium, was out of touch with the sentiments of a younger generation of students and scholars. The challengers, represented by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, renounced the aspiration for a theoretical understanding of society in its totality. They prescribed microstudies of interpersonal communication and everyday practices. With the plea to side with outsiders and underdogs, Becker put an ethical-political spin on the microsociological revolt against structural functionalism.

Gouldner, himself a former student of the sociologist Robert Merton and thus positioned directly in Parsons's lineage, was well placed to discern the theoretical and epistemological ramifications of Becker's moral exhortation. Consequently, his polemic against underdog metaphysics can be understood as an element of his general diagnosis of the coming crisis of sociology (see Gouldner, 1970). The partial and partisan view extolled by Becker and his generational fellows was yet another testimony to society's growing ineptitude to—mediated through sociology and sociologists—render its own foundations transparent to itself. Hence, underwriting the moral investment in the underdog was a full-blown theory of knowledge written in the skeptical vein, albeit with epistemological tenets that remained implicit.

The starting point of the new metaphysics was the conviction that, in Becker's words: “There is no position from which sociological research can be done that is not biased in one or another way … We must always look at the matter from someone's point of view” (Becker, 2009: 131). No single perspective took precedence over any other by virtue of an alleged scientific method, inherent truth content, or external referent—especially not the sociologist's von-oben perspective on the actions and beliefs of the practitioners.

However, as Gouldner correctly noted, one must still refer to something when passing judgements on conflicting perspectives and truth claims. Consequently, the void left by skepticism is filled with a ranking order supposedly based exclusively on value commitments. Becker's proposal—although he avoids stating it explicitly—is to invert the “hierarchy of credibility.” The social scientist should adopt the point of view of those who have been labelled as “deviant,” that is those deprived of credibility.

Gouldner's concept directs our attention to the metaphysical underpinnings of what initially appears to be a rather straightforward moral prompt. On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”

Based on our portrait of Gouldner thus far, one might be led to think that he was a positivist stalwart. In fact, he pioneered the revolt against the Weberian injunction to separate facts from values, which underwrites the notion of the social scientist as a value-neutral observer of society (see e.g. Gouldner, 1962). A one-time member of the American Communist Party and an interlocutor with the émigrés from Frankfurt, Gouldner stood far to the left of Becker. Furthermore, his critique was echoed by Marxists at the time who protested against the conservative implications of the rejection of sociology's explanatory ambition. This explanatory ambition was a common target for the microsociological schools of thought most closely associated with labelling theory—namely, social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism (see also McNall and Johnson, 1975).

Upon hearing Becker's speech, Gouldner qualified his earlier critique of positivism. It was the ease with which the new generation confessed their partial and biased views that aroused Gouldner's suspicion. He sensed the same conformism and opportunism in this willingness to confess as had previously been concealed behind the sociologist's pretence of studying society from an elevated, value-neutral observation point. Hence his claim that underdog metaphysics was poised to supplant structural functionalism as the new establishment sociology (Gouldner, 1968).

Becker and his compatriots were not just on the side of the marginalized, Gouldner charged—they were, first and foremost, on their own side. From this comment followed a perceptive description of the changed material conditions for making a living as an intellectual in 1960s America. The analysis foreshadows Gouldner's later works on intellectuals as a flawed, universal class (Gouldner, 1979). In the foreword to a book on criminology, however, Gouldner conceded that the students of deviance had an advantage over the social reformers of the New Deal era. Liberated from the assumption that there are living conditions unworthy of human beings—along with the auxiliary proposition that those ills can be mitigated through social reform programs and revolutionary movements—Becker and his peers could study exclusion and deviance in a more “unprejudiced” way than their predecessors had done, and crucially, without commitments to reform or revolution (Gouldner, 1973a).

The gist of this backhanded admission was the observation that tolerance of differences verges on complacency in the face of injustice and misery. The new generation of Chicago sociologists assailed the powers-that-be without any aspiration for their critique to contribute to a fundamental transformation of society. This observation, we believe, applies with equal force to their contemporaries on the European continent, who were laying down the intellectual foundations of post-theory at the same time. The endorsement of the underdog is well suited to infusing a theoretical position with political and ethical significance—to the point where the “old left” can be outflanked in terms of radicality, without constraining the scholar to commit to a vision and practice of a better future for humanity. That is, after every positive order and consensual viewpoint has been exposed as a sham, nothing remains for the seasoned academic but either to sigh at the omnipresence of self-interest and the eternal circulation of elites, or to accommodate it and reap the private rewards of acquiescence. It was such complicity with the status quo that Gouldner sensed lurking behind an indiscriminate critique of power combined with an easy-going confession of one's own biased view on things. In a different context, Gouldner (1976: 284) exemplified the dangers of criticism run amok with Max Stirner's praise for corrosive egoism. This is of particular interest in the context of our argument, since it was Stirner's endorsement of the lumpenproletariat that triggered Marx and Engels's polemic—and since Nietzsche plagiarized extensively from The Ego and Its Own (see Zeitlin, 1994: 120).

After Gouldner: objective partisanship, perspectivism or value-neutrality

Martyn Hammersley's reflections on the Becker–Gouldner debate are among the few scholarly works in recent times that engage at length with the concept of underdog metaphysics. He revisits the old debate as a way of examining different ideas about the connection between objectivity and partisanship in the social sciences. The author subscribes to a Weberian ideal of detached scholarship—the same ideal that Gouldner attacked in “Anti-Minotaur” (Gouldner, 1962). Hammersley (2000, 2001) correctly identifies the aloofness lurking behind Becker's rallying cry and finds himself more in agreement with this stance than with Gouldner's aspiration for sociology to contribute to large-scale societal change. Although an adverse observer, Hammersley is right on the mark in identifying as pivotal Gouldner's conviction that objectivity and partisanship can—and should—go together. In Gouldner's own words:

It should again be clear, then, that I do not regard partisanship as incompatible with objectivity. The physician, after all, is not necessarily less objective because he has made a partisan commitment to his patient and against the germ (1968: 58).

Another example, closer to the social sciences, is found in the Greek classics. Here, objectivity manifests itself in the willingness of the Greek poets to account for the “… nobility of their Persian enemies, even the dignity of their ‘barbarian’ slaves …” (Gouldner, 1968: 53).

At its core, “objective partisanship” is about hearing out the different sides and finding a balanced whole of contradicting perspectives, with reference to values and standards of reason that are not reducible to any single group's or culture's perspective. This qualified Enlightenment ideal was passed down to Gouldner from two separate sources: the Saint-Simonian and Comtean—or positivist—roots of academic sociology, and the Marxist idea of unifying theory and practice. Common to both intellectual traditions is the presupposition that knowledge production is inscribed in a future-oriented transformation of society (Gouldner, 1976: 35ff; Hammersley, 2000: 110ff).

In contrast, the kind of partisanship prescribed by what Hammersley (2000: 30) denominates as “post-Enlightenment” is tied to particularistic group identities and interests. This outlook accords with the notion of underdog metaphysics, and with what we in this article describe as the affirmative moment of post-theory. Hammersley exemplifies this with authors associated with post-theory, such as Foucault. Partisanship in the post-Enlightenment vein is incompatible with scientific objectivity, irrespective of how the latter is construed. This is because the researcher yields unconditionally to the underdog's perspective on things. The only way to combine this partial view with a claim to the authority of science, Hammersley (2000: 30) rightly notes, is by stealth and subterfuge. Scholar-activists subscribing to post-Enlightenment ideas adopt the scientific discourse strategically, as a platform for advancing the agenda of marginalized groups.

In the crosshairs of this partisan approach are not only superior groups, but more importantly, the rational discourse by which such groups are said to conceal their interests and bully subordinate groups into compliance. Hence, underdog metaphysics deprives the researcher of any general value or standard of reason by which the testimonies of the underdog could otherwise have been tested against contradicting narratives and truth claims. It dismantles the discursive procedures by which consent is produced in pluralistic societies through rational (non-violent) and communicative means (Gouldner, 1973b: 66ff; see also Gouldner, 1979).

Adherents of underdog metaphysics can sidestep the need for such discursive procedures for as long as they study disputes involving at least one member of a group designated as “privileged” (white, male, Western, cis, etc.). A swift judgement can then be passed on whatever contentious issue is being debated by drawing on Becker's reversed hierarchy of credibility. This approach, however, grinds to a halt as soon as both (or all) sides in a dispute lay claim to underdog status. Post-theory lacks the intellectual resources to resolve such conflicts, since it forbids the analyst from overruling the claimant's experience-based utterances with reference to facts, statistics, reasoned argument, and the like. Furthermore, the problem escalates with every new group that is recognized as entitled to underdog status.

The difficulty is identified by Bar On (1993: 89), who asks, in relation to standpoint epistemology, whether any of the minority groups are “… more epistemically privileged than the others, and if that is not so—if they are all equally epistemically privileged—does epistemic privilege matter?” This dilemma has translated into attempts to establish a ranking order of marginalization—and, subsequently, of epistemological privilege. Presumably, the more distant one is from the center, the more advantageous one's point of view becomes (Bar On, 1993: 89). The question of how a marginalized group compels other, supposedly more powerful groups to acknowledge its political and epistemological claims—starting with its status as an underdog—is impossible to answer after the “force of the better argument” has been declared void or exposed as mere trickery by the powerful. Unless this status is publicly sanctioned, the assertion of epistemic privilege will be confined to already-won supporters and members of the same marginalized group (Bar On, 1993: 92–96). Underdog metaphysics, therefore, is bound to rely on the moralist register of emotional identification, appeal, threat, conformity, stigmatization, force, and accusation.

The lack of commensurability between groups and their perspectives follows from the prohibition that post-theory imposes on any kind of universal standards. This is congruent with post-theory's esteem for the “marginal, mad, deviant, perverse and transgressive,” as noted by Eagleton (2003: 13). Similar admonitions have been voiced by representatives of the school of left realist criminology, which emerged directly from Gouldner's critique of underdog metaphysics. Its proponents took issue with a trend in critical criminology that condemned all societal institutions—law, order, education, policing, and so forth—as repressive, while inversely glorifying crime as an unorganized means of liberating property and redistributing income. Left realists protested against theory that failed to “distinguish the factory from the prison, education from brainwashing, the anti-social from the social, fascism from democracy” (Young, 1979: 16; see also Fine, 1979; Lea, 2014; Taylor et al., 1973).

Ultimately, as the left realist criminologist Jock Young (1979: 46) observed, it was in the French reception of Nietzsche that the “philosophy of marginalisation” was popularized. It provided a philosophical backbone to the empirical and microsociological branch of underdog metaphysics. Becker's proto-constructivist labelling theory and his prompt to turn the “hierarchy of credibility” upside down are congruent with Nietzschean perspectivism in so far as the ostensive target of the original analysis was universal knowledge claims—both those of natural science and those of Marxism (see Descombes, 1997). It matters little that social scientists working in the post-Enlightenment tradition speak on behalf of marginalized groups, and not, as was the case with Nietzsche, in defence of dynastic elites. Whatever the case, the researcher sides with perspectivism against universalism (for a more detailed discussion, see McGowan, 2020). Thus, underdog metaphysics implies a reinterpretation from below of the weathered pessimism of nineteenth-century reactionary thinkers concerning the promise that the human condition can potentially improve through the progress of knowledge, self-reflection, and social critique—the same promise that supports Gouldner's conviction that scientific objectivity can be reconciled with partisanship.

Conclusion: against underdog metaphysics

Intentionally or not, the affirmation of marginalized identities and the decentering of subjects in post-theory coalesce around a common target: the idea, common in many versions of Marxism, that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself (see also Hansen, 2023: 15). Firstly, on a theoretical level, the concept of the working class as a universal class is incompatible both with partisanship for a particularistic group identity and with a generalized deconstruction of all possible identity positions. Secondly, on a practical-political level, mass mobilization based on class solidarity is undermined by post-theory's endorsement of marginality and deviance.

In this context, it is worth reiterating a simple yet fundamental observation by Eagleton (2003: 15): in historical instances such as the resistance against imperial power in India or the overthrow of apartheid, it was the actions of majorities—not minorities—that proved decisive. For Marxist theory and debates about mobilization and social change to refocus and once again concentrate on the class defined by its lack of access to the means of production—that is, the societal majority—the dominance of post-theory must first be challenged. Importantly, alongside opposing the abstract universalism inherent in the deconstruction of the subject, the Marxist critique of post-theory must also confront the abstract universalism inherent in underdog metaphysics. For these purposes, we conclude, Alvin Gouldner offers a particularly rich resource.

Finally, in addition to encouraging greater focus by Marxist critics on the affirmative elements of post-theory, we also hope that our article can stimulate analysis and critique of the varying degrees of underdog metaphysics across present-day incarnations of post-theory (for a good starting point in this regard, see Legér, 2024: 19–84). For instance, we suggest that the concept of underdog metaphysics could be relevant in relation to concepts and theoretical schools such as situated knowledge (Donna Haraway); the subaltern, who allegedly is not allowed to speak (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); the affirmation of the decolonial subject as a counter-culture against Modernity, colonialism, Christianity, capitalism, and so forth (Walter Mignolo); epistemologies of the South (Boaventura de Sousa Santos); family abolition and critique of waged labor (Kathy Weeks); epistemological injustice (Miranda Fricker); and various incarnations of standpoint epistemology (Sandra Harding). However, as with our previous panorama of the appeal to a marginalized, excluded, and deviant underdog in various schools of post-theory, it goes without saying that the precise character and variations of the affirmation of underdog metaphysics in connection with these concepts and theories vary and remain to be investigated in detail.