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",^[1] and was characterized, in the words of David Miller, by "clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog."^[2] 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. Marxism refers to the philosophy and social theory based on Karl Marxs work on one hand, and to the political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand (namely, parts of the First International during Marxs time, communist parties and later states). ... The September Group (also known as the No-Bullshit Marxism Group) is a small circle of scholars interested in Analytical Marxism. ... David Miller is a prominent political theorist in the United Kingdom. ... Gerald Allen Cohen, (born 1941) is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. ... John Roemer is an American economist. ... Jon Elster (born 1940) is a Norwegian social and political theorist who has authored works in the philosophy of social science and rational choice theory. ... Profesor of Political Sciences. ... Erik Olin Wright (b. ... Philippe Van Parijs (born 1951) is a Belgian philosopher and political economist, mainly known as secretary of the Basic Income European Network. ...

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. Image File history File links Karl_Marxs_Theory_of_History_(Cohen). ... Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, MA, Ph. ... Harry Burrows Acton (1908 – 1974) was a British academic in the field of political philosophy, known for books defending the morality of capitalism, and attacking Marxism-Leninism. ... John Petrov Plamenatz (1912–1975) was a Yugoslav political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. ... Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries. ...

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. Historical materialism is the methodological approach to the study of society, economics and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818-1883), although Marx himself never used the term. ... Technological determinism is a reductionist doctrine that a societys technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history. ... Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhaltnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. ... Productive forces or forces of production [in German, Produktivkrafte] is a central concept in Marxism and historical materialism. ... In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning the way of producing) is a specific combination of: productive forces: these include human labor-power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land social and technical relations...

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]. The term exploitation may carry two distinct meanings: The act of utilizing something for any purpose. ... Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. ... Rational choice theory is a way of looking at deliberations between a number of potential courses of action, in which rationality of one form or another is used either to decide which course of action would be the best to take, or to predict which course of action actually will... Game theory is most often described as a branch of applied mathematics and economics that studies situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. ... The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ...

Rational Choice Marxism

By the mid-1980s, "analytical Marxism" was being recognised as a "paradigm".^[3] 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. Image File history File links Making_Sense_of_Marx_(Elster). ... Methodological individualism is a philosophical orientation toward explaining broad society-wide developments as the accumulation of decisions by individuals. ... Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc. ... Functionalism is a term with several senses: For functionalism in sociology, see Functionalism (sociology). ...

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). Anthony Downs is a noted scholar in public policy, and since 1977 is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.. Downs has served as a consultant to many of the nations largest corporations, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House. ... Professor Mancur Olson (1932 - February 19, 1998) was a leading social scientist who, at the time of his death, worked at the University of Maryland, College Park. ...

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.^[4] 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). Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownershipmovement]]. Early forms of human social organization have been described as primitive communism by Marxists. ... Social democracy is a political ideology emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from supporters of Marxism who believed that the transition to a socialist society could be achieved through democratic evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. ... John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ... A Theory of Justice is a book of political and moral philosophy by John Rawls. ... Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the science (study) of morality. In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is good or right. ... Egalitarianism can refer to moral as well as factual theories. ...

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. This box:      Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are mostly privately [1] owned and operated for profit and in which distribution, production and pricing of goods and services are determined in a largely free market. ... Marxs theory of alienation (Entfremdung in German), as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. ... Plato and Aristotle (right), by Raphael (Stanza della Segnatura, Rome). ... For other uses, see Human nature (disambiguation). ... A priori is originally a Latin phrase meaning from the former or from what comes before. However, several different uses of the term have developed in English: A priori (law) - adj. ... Logic, from Classical Greek λόγος logos (the word), is the study of patterns found in reasoning. ...

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. The term exploitation may carry two distinct meanings: The act of utilizing something for any purpose. ... Socialism is a social and economic system (or the political philosophy advocating such a system) in which the economic means of production are owned and controlled collectively by the people. ... Means of production (abbreviated MoP; German: Produktionsmittel), also called means of labour are the materials, tools and other instruments used by workers to make products. ... Self-ownership (aka the soveriegnty of the individual or individual sovereignty) is the condition where an individual has the exclusive moral right to control his or her own body and life. ... The production of surplus value, from Karl Marxs Capital in Lithographs, by Hugo Gellert, 1934 Surplus value is a concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, where its ultimate source is claimed to be unpaid surplus labour performed by the worker for the capitalist, serving...

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"^[5], 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"^[6], i.e. to be appropriated as private property. In politics, right-wing, the political right, or simply the right, are terms which refer, with no particular precision, to the segment of the political spectrum in opposition to left-wing politics. ... In English-speaking countries, libertarianism usually refers to a political philosophy maintaining that every person is the absolute owner of their own life and should be free to do whatever they wish with their person or property, as long as they respect the liberty of others. ... Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. ...

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. Image File history File links Analytical_Marxism_(Roberts). ... As a word, praxis can mean: Praxis is a Latinate English noun, referring to the process of putting theoretical knowledge into practice. ...

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.^[7]

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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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. Marxism refers to the philosophy and social theory based on Karl Marxs work on one hand, and to the political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand (namely, parts of the First International during Marxs time, communist parties and later states). ...

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

Notes

Bibliography

• Carver, T. and Thomas, P. (eds.) (1995) Rational Choice Marxism. London: MacMillan. ISBN 0-271-01463-6
• Cohen, G. A. (1978) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-691-02008-6
• Cohen, G. A. (1988) History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824816-4
• Cohen, G. A. (1995) Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47751-4
• Cohen, G. A. (2000a) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Expanded Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924206-2
• Cohen, G. A. (2000b) If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00218-0
• Elster, J. (1985) Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29705-2
• Elster, J. (1986) An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33831-X
• Gordon, D. (1991) Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-390-4
• Hirst, P. (1985) 'G. A. Cohen's Theory of History', in Marxism and Historical Writing. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7100-9925-8
• Levine, A. and Wright, E. O. (1980) 'Rationality and Class Struggle', New Left Review 123.
• Mayer, T. F. (1994) Analytical Marxism. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. ISBN 0-8039-4681-3
• Miller, D. (1996) London Review of Books, October 31, 1996.
• Parijs, P. (1993) Marxism Recycled. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 2-7351-0536-9
• Przeworski, A. (1985) Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-26742-0
• Roberts, M. (1996) Analytical Marxism: A Critique. London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-855-9
• Roemer, J. (1982) A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-674-34440-5
• Roemer, J. (ed.) (1986) Analytical Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-31731-2
• Wood, A. (2004) Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-31698-7
• Wright, E. O. (2003) 'Autobiographical Essay', in Stephen Turner and Alan Sica (eds.), A Disobedient Generation. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. ISBN 0-7619-4275-0