Marxism and Game Theory

[NewSocialist]

In the early eighties, Jon Elster and John Roemer --of the infamous "Analytical Marxist" September Group-- urged incorporating game theory into Marxist analysis. Carrying on in this tradition, Bruce Philp more recently authored Reduction, Rationality and Game Theory in Marxian Economics, also stressing the need for Marxism to embrace game theory.

I was curious if anyone here thinks this is a good idea. Why or why not?

To those unfamiliar with the concept, it would be best to first read Elster's article Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory (http://users.auth.gr/%7Ekehagiat/GameTheory/05PapersAdvanced/PoliticalScience/001full.pdf) and G. A. Cohen's reply (http://www.jstor.org/pss/657102) to it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

We discussed this back in 2008:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/game-theory-t90590/index.html

[NewSocialist]

I see. I'll be sure to look over that thread.

Still, maybe not everyone caught that discussion back then and perhaps there are other users who can offer a fresh perspective on the topic.

[Widerstand]

There are some attempts in recent years to incorporate complexity theory (which includes game theory) into revolutionary leftist theories. For Example Gernot Ernst's Komplexität - Die Linke und Chaos Theorie (Complexity - The left and chaos theory) as well as Alan Woods' and Ted Grant's Reason in Revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science.

More specifically, there is also a rather recent book on cooperative models for game theory: Robert Axelrod's The complexity of cooperation.

[blake 3:17]

I got interested in games in general after playing Connect 4 and Trouble with kids. One child did some really interesting things with Trouble -- which combines elements of chance and strategy -- by introducing new rules. This game everybody gets two turns in a row. This game you can divide the popped die ( 1 - 6) between up to three pieces. This game you can give your roll to a friend. It was fascinating.

A friend whom I play chess with a couple of times a week has told me that our chess playing has helped him in his union work -- a lot of the issues he is dealing with are very byzantine dealing with large institutions and small work places. I'm not sure that his improvements in chess have improved his union work, but who knows? He has said that he understood some odd seemingly generous moves on the part of the employer, and how they are less benevolent and more strategic than they appear on the surface.

While it's not really Game Theory, Hillary Wainwright's Arguments for a New Left is a really fascinating take on how and why social justice types in the former Soviet Bloc were into pretty extreme neo-liberal theory ala Hayek. It's more than worth it's time. You also don't need to read all of it, because it is episodic in nature.

Canada's pre-eminent Games Theorist calls for Julian Assange to be assassinated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtIafdoH_g

[NewSocialist]

Very interesting. Thanks for the book recommendations everyone! It looks like I have some reading to get to.

[Die Neue Zeit]

My application of game theory is in the area of determining appropriate political programs. I don't know where else game theory could be reasonably applicable.

[Widerstand]

My application of game theory is in the area of determining appropriate political programs. I don't know where else game theory could be reasonably applicable.

Economical simulations.

[ckaihatsu]

We discussed this back in 2008:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/game-theory-t90590/index.html


Here are some main points from that thread which are worth revisiting here....





[Game theory's] core deficiency (which may be shared by other optimization approaches) [is] that it has all too limited a domain of application precisely because of the general inapplicability of some of its more commonly applied foundational assumptions.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1255782&postcount=20


This statement could easily and validly be generalized to all of science, scientific investigations, and rational thinking in their entireties. If you can't find proper approximations for the boundaries of the area you're defining then you're already fucked -- to some degree of accuracy (grin) -- because of the assumptions you're using in framing the problem to begin with.





It's funny how you think mathematical theories assume something about human psychology. I wonder, do we also need to assume a "very simplistic human being" when we apply game theory to evolutionary biology or computer science? Do logicians who deal with game semantics also make assumption about human psychology? These people - who all use game theory - certainly don't make assumptions about human beings or value systems, much less simplistic ones.


This is an excellent observation, and I've been on the lookout for something along the lines of what it's saying. To me it's a materialist critique of the field of psychology, since, in our prevailing bourgeois society of property-interested societal factions, many on the ground have raised the psychology-minded kind of thinking into an entire mindset and even a worldview, or religion.

Its shortcoming, however, is that it tends to set the boundaries of the environment it defines at entirely too constricted a scope. We know that psychology is primarily interested in the individual, and this default focus may be decidedly too constrained, especially considering the existence of societal and political factors at play more generally, that are not removed from influencing individuals' lives.

Because of this particularly reductionist approach to the scientific study of the individual, psychology can be of a *political* benefit to those who are interested in shifting attention away from more *general* factors that contribute to how individuals are treated in society -- as by general policies and the status quo.

For those of us who are more large-scale and political in our approach to society and the individuals in it, some materialist framework like that provided by optimization approaches / game theory is actually *helpful*, considering that we all begin by conforming to similar physical limitations and that we live our lives within a world of mostly regular and wholly definable material social interactions.





It's worth emphasizing that [...] there are two ways we can study psychological disorders. One is the case study approach, looking at each case and describing its symptoms and potential cures, kind of like early natural history.

The other is to approach the study of psychology disorders with a coherent and unified theory of how and why psychological disorders arise, which should certainly take into account their rarity. I think such a comprehensive approach is more promising from a predictive and prescriptive standpoint, and ultimately a more fulfilling use of psychologists' time.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1255782&postcount=20





Game theory is not an optimization problem, because you have several competing functions to be maximized. It's conceptually something rather different.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1253041&postcount=12





Game theory is (often) a special case of multi-criteria optimization. The goal is to maximize benefits while minimizing costs or risk, and the only difference with certain forms of (one-dimensional) optimization, is that the objective function is a weight of metrics that frequently imply an inherent trade-off (for example, famously, the iterative versus single prisoner's dilemma). The goal of game theory is to identify the set of strategies where you can't improve in one metric of performance without sacrificing another (so-called Pareto optimal sets). More general multi-dimensional optimization does not have this trade-off between potential metrics, but in any event game theory is a special case of such optimization problems.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1254877&postcount=17





While complexity theory *is* abstract, it's *not* a model, as much as it's an *approach* to the study of natural or social systems, akin, or counterposed to, reductionism or a holistic ("whole-istic") approach to scientific investigations.


Complexity Pages

A non-technical introduction to the new
science of Chaos and Complexity

http://complexity.orconhosting.net.nz/intro.html


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