Gouldner, A. (1980). The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and anomalies in the development of theory. London: The MacMillan Press.

Marxism and theorists of the Marxist community have been divided, it has long been noted, into roughly two tendencies: one conceiving Marxism as ‘critique’ and the other conceiving it to be some kind of social ‘science’. Marxism has been divided then between Critical Marxists and Scientific Marxists […]. (32)

[there is not a ‘real’ and a ‘fake’ Marxism:] both are in fact structural differentiations of a single originally undifferentiated Marxism. (34)

[he cites young Horkheimer as an example of Critical Marxist voluntarism]

In distinguishing Critical and Scientific Marxism, there is, however, no intention of suggesting that the voluntarism/determinism differentiation is the deepest ‘essence’ or truest meaning of that larger distinction. It is but one marker in a larger set of elements constituting the two syndromes. (36)

[that of voluntarism/determinism, agency/structure is a wider issue and differentiation in sociological thought]

As different, elaborated paradigms of Marxism, Critical and Scientific Marxism emerge under different sociohistorical conditions and among different persons and in differentiated social networks and groups.

[CMs are: Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School both in the first and second generation]

[SMs are: Della Volpe, Althusser, Poulantzas] (38)

The difference between [CM and SM] reflects a conflict between those viewing Marx as the culmination of German idealism and those emphasising Marx’s superiority to that tradition. [also, an appeal to the ‘young’ or rather the ‘mature’ writings of Marx]

[CMs] conceive of Marxism as critique rather than science; they stress the continuity of Marx with Hegel, the importance of the young Marx, [alienation and historicism]. The [SMs] have (at times) stressed that Marx made a coupure epistemologique [epistemological break] with Hegel after 1845. Marxism for them is science, not critique, entailing a ‘structuralist’ methodology whose paradigm is the ‘mature’ political economy of Capital rather than the ‘ideologised’ anthropology of the 1844 Manuscripts. (39)

[CMs] stress an historicism that emphasises social fluidity and change, a kind of organicism calling for the contextual interpretation of events; [SMs] search out firm social structures that recur and which are presumably intelligible in decontextualized ways.

[SMs emphasise the base/superstructure dichotomy; CMs the totality] (40)

[he precises that CM and SM are ‘ideal types’ only; individual thinkers cannot simply be reduced to them] (60)