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Analytical Marxism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophy

   Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was
   prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists
   during the 1980s. It was mainly associated with the September Group of
   academics, so called because they have biennial meetings in varying
   locations every other September to discuss common interests. The group
   also dubbed itself "Non-Bullshit Marxism",^ and was characterized, in
   the words of David Miller, by "clear and rigorous thinking about
   questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog."^ The most
   prominent members of the group were G. A. Cohen, John Roemer, Jon
   Elster, Adam Przeworski, Erik Olin Wright, Philippe van Parijs, and
   Robert van der Veen.

Beginnings

   Analytical Marxism is usually understood to have taken off with the
   publication of G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence
   (1978). More broadly conceived, it might be seen as having originated
   in the post-war period in the work of political philosophers such as
   Karl Popper, H. B. Acton, and John Plamenatz, who employed the
   techniques of analytical philosophy in order to test the coherence and
   scientificity of Marxism as a theory of history and society.

   Those thinkers were all hostile to Marxism. Cohen's book was, from the
   outset, intended as a defence of historical materialism. Cohen
   painstakingly reconstructed historical materialism through a close
   reading of Marx's texts, with the aim of providing the most logically
   coherent and parsimonious account. For Cohen, Marx's historical
   materialism is technologically deterministic theory, in which the
   economic relations of production are functionally explained by the
   material forces of production, and in which the political and legal
   institutions (the "superstructure") are functionally explained by the
   relations of production (the "base"). The transition from one mode of
   production to another is driven by the tendency of the productive
   forces to develop. Cohen accounts for this tendency by reference to the
   rational character of the human species: where there is the opportunity
   to adopt a more productive technology and thus reduce the burden of
   labour, human beings will tend to take it. Thus, human history can be
   understood as the gradual development of human productive power.

Exploitation

   At the same time as Cohen was working on Karl Marx's Theory of History,
   American economist John Roemer was employing neoclassical economics in
   order to try to defend the Marxist concepts of exploitation and class.
   In his General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), Roemer employed
   rational choice and game theory in order to demonstrate how
   exploitation and class relations may arise in the development of a
   market for labour. Roemer would go on to reject the idea that the
   labour theory of value was necessary for explaining exploitation and
   class. Value was in principle capable of being explained in terms of
   any class of commodity inputs, such as oil, wheat, etc., rather than
   being exclusively explained by embodied labour power. Roemer was led to
   the conclusion that exploitation and class were thus generated not in
   the sphere of production but of market exchange. Significantly, as a
   purely technical category, exploitation did not always imply a moral
   wrong [see §4 ["Justice"] below].

Rational Choice Marxism

   By the mid-1980s, "analytical Marxism" was being recognised as a
   "paradigm".^ The September group had been meeting for several years,
   and a succession of texts by its members were published. Several of
   these appeared under the imprint of Cambridge University Press's series
   "Studies in Marxism and Social Theory". Included in this series were
   Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx (1985) and Adam Przeworski's
   Capitalism and Social Democracy (1986). Elster's account was an
   exhaustive trawl through Marx's texts in order to ascertain what could
   be salvaged out of Marxism employing the tools of rational choice
   theory and methodological individualism (which Elster defended as the
   only form of explanation appropriate to the social sciences). His
   conclusion was that – contra Cohen – no general theory of history as
   the development of the productive forces could be saved. Like Roemer,
   he also rejected the labour theory of value and, going further,
   virtually all of Marx's economics. The "dialectical" method is savaged
   as a form of Hegelian obscurantism. The theory of ideology and
   revolution continued to be useful to a certain degree, but only once
   they had been purged of their tendencies to holism and functionalism
   and established on the basis of an individualist methodology and a
   causal or intentional explanation.

   Przeworski's book uses rational choice and game theory in order to
   demonstrate that the revolutionary strategies adopted by socialists in
   the twentieth century were likely to fail, since it was in the rational
   interests of workers to strive for the reform of capitalism through the
   achievement of union recognition, improved wages and living conditions,
   rather than adopting the risky strategy of revolution. Przeworski's
   book is clearly influenced by economic explanations of political
   behaviour advanced by thinkers such as Anthony Downs (An Economic
   Theory of Democracy, 1957) and Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective
   Action, 1971).

Justice

   The analytical (and rational choice) Marxists held a variety of leftist
   political sympathies, ranging from communism to reformist social
   democracy. Through the 1980s, most of them began to recognise that
   Marxism as a theory capable of explaining revolution in terms of the
   economic dynamics of capitalism and the class interests of the
   proletariat had been seriously compromised. They were largely in
   agreement that the transformation of capitalism was an ethical project.
   During the 1980s, a debate had developed within Anglophone academic
   Marxism on whether Marxism could accommodate a theory of justice. This
   debate was clearly linked to the revival of normative political
   philosophy after the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice
   (1971). While analytic moral philosophy holds that one is free in all
   situations to make a moral judgement that is in the interests of all
   equally, some commentators remained hostile to the idea of a Marxist
   theory of justice, arguing that Marx saw "justice" as little more than
   a bourgeois ideological construct designed to justify exploitation by
   reference to reciprocity in the wage contract.^ The analytical
   Marxists, however, largely rejected this point of view. Led by G. A.
   Cohen (a moral philosopher by training), they argued that a Marxist
   theory of justice had to focus on egalitarianism. For Cohen, this meant
   an engagement with moral and political philosophy in order to
   demonstrate the injustice of market exchange, and the construction of
   an appropriate egalitarian metric. This argument is pursued in Cohen's
   most recent books, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (1995) and If
   You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich? (2000b).

   In contrast to traditional Marxism, Cohen rejects the argument that
   capitalism is unjust because under it workers experience alienation, or
   a lack of self-fulfilment as workers. For Cohen, this thesis is based
   on an untenable metaphysical account of human nature: the claim that
   all persons have one purpose and aim toward one end, productive labour.
   Because such a claim cannot be inferred from a priori truths of logic
   or from experience, it is not justifiable by the restricted means
   available to analytic philosophy.

   Cohen further departs from previous Marxists by arguing that capitalism
   is a system characterised by unjust exploitation not because the labour
   of workers is "stolen" by employers, but because it is a system wherein
   " autonomy" is infringed and which results in a distribution of
   benefits and burdens that is "unfair". In the traditional account,
   exploitation and injustice occur because non-workers appropriate the
   value produced by the labour of workers, something that would be
   overcome in a socialist society wherein no class would own the means of
   production and be in a position to appropriate the value produced by
   labourers. Cohen argues that underpinning this account is the
   assumption that workers have "rights of self-ownership" over themselves
   and thus, should "own" what is produced by their labour. Because the
   worker is paid a wage less than the value he or she creates through
   work, the capitalist is said to extract a surplus-value from the
   worker's labour, and thus to steal part of what the worker produces,
   the time of the worker and the worker's powers.

   Cohen argues that the concept of self-ownership is favourable to
   Rawls's difference principle as it acknowledges "each person's rights
   over his being and powers"^ , but also highlights that its centrality
   provides for an area of common ground between the Marxist account of
   justice and the right-wing libertarianism of Robert Nozick. However,
   much as Cohen criticises Rawls for treating people's personal powers as
   just another external resource for which no individual can claim merit,
   so does he charge Nozick with moving beyond the concept of
   self-ownership to his own right-wing "thesis" of self-ownership. In
   Cohen's view, Nozick's mistake is to endow people's claims to
   legitimately acquire external resources with the same moral quality
   that belongs to people's ownership of themselves. In other words,
   libertarianism allows inequalities to arise from differences in talent
   and differences in external resources, but it does so because it
   assumes that the world is "up for grabs"^ , i.e. to be appropriated as
   private property.

Criticisms

   Analytical Marxism came under fire from a number of different quarters,
   both Marxist and non-Marxist.

Method

   A number of critics argued that analytical Marxism proceeded from the
   wrong methodological and epistemological premises. While the analytical
   Marxists dismissed dialectically oriented Marxism as "bullshit", many
   Marxists would maintain that the distinctive character of Marxist
   philosophy is lost if it is understood non-dialectically. The crucial
   feature of Marxist philosophy is that it is not a reflection in thought
   of the world, a crude materialism, but rather an intervention in the
   world concerned with human praxis. According to this view, analytical
   Marxism wrongly characterises intellectual activity as occurring in
   isolation from the struggles constitutive of its social and political
   conjuncture, and at the same time does little to intervene in that
   conjuncture. For dialectical Marxists, analytical Marxism eviscerated
   Marxism, turning it from a systematic doctrine of revolutionary
   transformation into a set of discrete theses that stand or fall on the
   basis of their logical consistency and empirical validity.

   Analytical Marxism's non-Marxist critics also objected to its
   methodological weaknesses. Against Elster and the rational choice
   Marxists, it was argued that methodological individualism was not the
   only form of valid explanation in the social sciences, that
   functionalism in the absence of micro-foundations could remain a
   convincing and fruitful mode of inquiry, and that rational choice and
   game theory were far from being universally accepted as sound or useful
   ways of modelling social institutions and processes.^

History

   Cohen's defence of a technological determinist interpretation of
   historical materialism was, in turn, quite widely criticised, even by
   analytical Marxists. Together with Andrew Levine, Wright argued that in
   attributing primacy to the productive forces (the development thesis),
   Cohen overlooked the role played by class actors in the transition
   between modes of production. For the authors, it was forms of class
   relations (the relations of production) that had primacy in terms of
   how the productive forces were employed and the extent to which they
   developed. It was not evident, they claimed, that the relations of
   production become "fetters" once the productive forces are capable of
   sustaining a different set of production relations.^ Other non-Marxist
   critics argued that Cohen, in line with the Marxist tradition,
   underestimated the role played by the legal and political
   superstructure in shaping the character of the economic base. Finally,
   Cohen's anthropology was judged dubious: whether human beings adopt new
   and more productive technology is not a function of an ahistorical
   rationality, but depends on the extent to which these forms of
   technology are compatible with pre-existing beliefs and social
   practices.^ Cohen recognised and accepted some, though not all, of
   these criticisms in his History, Labour, and Freedom (1988).

Justice and Power

   Many Marxists would argue that Marxism cannot be understood as a theory
   of justice in the rather narrow sense intended by the analytical
   Marxists. The question of justice cannot be seen in isolation from
   questions of power, or from the balance of class forces in any specific
   conjuncture. Non-Marxists may employ a similar criticism in their
   critique of liberal theories of justice in the Rawlsian tradition. Most
   of these theories fail to address problems about the configuration of
   power relations in the contemporary world, and by so doing appear as
   little more than exercises in logic. "Justice", on this view, is
   whatever is produced by the assumptions of the theory. It has little to
   do with the actual distribution of power and resources in the world.

Denouement

   As a project, analytical Marxism had largely disappeared by the end of
   the 1990s. Most of its practitioners agreed that the Marxism that in
   the beginning they had set out to interrogate and, to an extent,
   defend, was not theoretically or politically defensible. They concluded
   that as a theory for a the explanation of human action, Marxism was a
   failure on both theoretical and practical grounds.

   The leading lights of analytical marxism now focus their energies in
   other areas – moral and political philosophy (Cohen, van Parijs),
   democratic theory employing economic models (Roemer, Elster).
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