Analytical Marxism...Free to Lose by John Roemer

[RadioRaheem84]

I am reading John Roemer's Free to Lose which seemed like a good buy, but just reading the introduction, I am a little skeptical now.

He says the labor of theory of value is wrong along with the falling rate of profit. Instead he claims he can prove Marx right by using neo-classical theory instead?

I guess I should read the book to find out just how he is going to prove this, but could anyone give me a reason to continue.

It seems like this revised Marxism of the analytical school is nothing short of Marxism without the labor theory. Is that even possible?

[MarxSchmarx]

I think it would help if you took a step back and examined the whole purpose of Roemer's exercise.

The (somewhat unstated) goal was often to show that Marxism was consistent with neoclassical economics. This was seen as valuable because the authors like Roemer recognized that Marx's ideas deeply resonated with many people, but were seen in some academic courners as having been built on a very shaky foundation that neo-classical economics had largely rejected. Thus a big part of the goal was to recast Marx's ideas using the neoclassical language so that they did not rise or fall with the validity of the LTV.

It was also an attempt, quite unsuccessful, to introduce a degree of rigor into discussions about Marxism and create a common dialect among scholars and activists of Marx to systematically pursue some ideas to their conclusions which Marx didn't explicitly formulate.

[Jose Gracchus]

I am reading John Roemer's Free to Lose which seemed like a good buy, but just reading the introduction, I am a little skeptical now.

He says the labor of theory of value is wrong along with the falling rate of profit. Instead he claims he can prove Marx right by using neo-classical theory instead?

I guess I should read the book to find out just how he is going to prove this, but could anyone give me a reason to continue.

It seems like this revised Marxism of the analytical school is nothing short of Marxism without the labor theory. Is that even possible?

At the height of the neoliberal-Hayek resurgence in the ideological and intellectual quarters of the West in the late-70s to 90s, you had a lot of heavy revisionism in the Western Left, in my opinion due to retreats in working class struggle after the failure of the 68-73 revolutionary wave to produce any substantial breakouts, and the obvious moribund nature of Brezhnevite 'socialism' on one hand, and Deng's moves for the opportunist right and market reforms on the other hand. Basically a group calling themselves "analytic" or "positivist" Marxists tried to rehabilitate a corpse of Marxism while removing almost all of the analytical core Marx built his program around. Basically they capitulated to all the doctrine around the true 'scientific' merits of methodological individualism and marginalism, a bunch of them became basically market socialists, presaging a lot of the failed attempts at rehabilitating Eastern-Soviet 'socialism' at the 11th hour, and you can still find hints of this intellectual trend in David Schweickart's "Economic Democracy" (what Louis Proyect called, I think correctly, "shopkeepers' socialism").

I think it is very revisionist toward Marx and Engels, and ultimately bullshit concessions to bourgeois apologetics. Human beings are not atomized idealized individuals; methodological individualism is itself ideological in content.

[RadioRaheem84]

But did the analytical Marxists at least achieve to dismantle neoclassical economics using their own language against them while still retaining Marxism?

In other words they're like the Anachist FAQ section on capitalism?

[Zanthorus]

I think MarxSchmarx is closer to the mark than TIC. I'm not really sure how useful it is to talk about Analytical Marxism as a product of the failure of the struggles of the late 60's/early 70's (Especially since people were still struggling well into the late 70's when AM really became a distinctive current of thought. See for example the Winter of Discontent in Britain, or the mass strikes which presaged the formation of Solidarity in Poland). In their own words AM was basically a current that rejected the idea that Marxism had any distinctive methodology as it's own, and interpreted the label 'scientific socialism' to mean the use of all the latest social scientific tools at their disposal to prove Marx right. For justification they would usually point to what they percieved as Marx's utilisation of the intellectual vanguard of his own time viz classical German philosophy, English (More accurately Scottish) political economy and French socialist politics. Basically an attempt to co-opt Marxism back into the mainstream social sciences.

What this ignores is the quite obvious fact that Marx never took up German philosophy, British political economy or French socialism uncritically, in fact he subjected all three trends to a critique. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the subject knows that Marx didn't simply take up Hegelian philosophy but subjected it to rigorous critique throughout his early intellectual development. Similarly, the subtitle of Marx's Capital is a contribution to the critique of political economy. And Marx's starting point throughout this critique is the distinctively un-Smithian and un-Ricardian one of alienation, the objectification and mediation through things of human social relationships.

Without going too much through the details I think it is fairly clear that Marx did have a distinctive methodology that was 'holistic' and 'dialectical' as opposed to 'individualist' and 'analytical'. He never examined anything as an isolated particular but analysed it as a constituent part of a whole system of social relations and practices. This is why he avoided the discussion of finance and merchant capital until the third volume, even though those categories come before industrial capital, because with the rise of industrial capitalism and their situation in a whole new system of social relations and practices they take on new determinations which cannot be understood simply by being analysed in isolation. A fifteenth century money lender cannot form the basis of an analysis of the modern stock market.

AM did have something of an upside I suppose, in that it was a very consistent manifestation of certain trends in post-Marx Marxism dating back to Kautsky where Marxism is seen as an essentially positivist science with an all-encompassing 'theory of history' which is merely the logical continuation of the traditions of the enlightenment including their schemas of 'universal history'. By showing how utterly incompatible any of that is with the maintanence of the critical and revolutionary side of Marx's work they unwittingly provided an excellent demonstration of why such an interpretation is untenable. A good lesson to anyone why dialectics is not some add-on to Marxism which can be accepted or rejected at will but it's core. On this point I reccomend Derek Sayer's 'The Violence of Abstractions: Analytical Foundations of Historical Materialism' which takes G. A. Cohen's defence of what he percieves to be Marx's 'theory of history' with it's strong technological determinism and uses it as a foil to demonstrate among other things why any interpretation of Marx which ignores dialectics and places historical materialism in the same line of thought as the universal history of the enlightenment is untenable.


But did the analytical Marxists at least achieve to dismantle neoclassical economics using their own language against them while still retaining Marxism?

Not in the slightest. Most of the AM crowd became market socialist types. The only exception IIRC was G. A. Cohen who eventually moved from trying to justify Marxism in terms of social theory to justifying Marxism via ethical philosophy, the problems with which should be manifest. I'm not even sure what the point of trying to demolish neo-classicalism on it's own terms would be tbh.

[Jose Gracchus]

A lot of them were critical philosophers who tried to engage 'distributive justice' a la Rawls from the further left, if I remember correctly.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

I read some interesting stuff about them on the question of why a worker would participate in a strike or revolutionary activity. Using methodological individualism it would seem difficult to explain why any one worker goes on strike; the strike doesn't succeed or fail according to their personal participation, so they might as well scab and then if the strike wins they still get the benefits. The analytical Marxists came up with answers like being on strike is exhilarating, scabbing is humiliating, workers feel a sense of moral duty etc - basically they tried to find peripheral reasons a worker would fight back, since it doesn't fit very comfortably with the rational-choice/individualist method. Much more persuasive is the classical answer that workers hold, to varying extents, social identities as a class of people rather than simply individual utility-maximising ones.

[RadioRaheem84]

So in other words, Analytical Marxism tries to justify Marxism through the same individualist philosophy as the neo-classicals?

How would that even begin to work? Neo-classical economists presuppose a bunch of junk, why would anyone want to defend Marxism through their prism of reasoning?

[AllThatIsSolid]

I guess because they wanted to show to their bourgeois colleges that marxism could be defended even when using methodological individualism and neoclassical general equilibrium theory. And not only this, but they thought that such a methodology where superior to all other analytical frameworks. For them, marxism where not based on clear and rigorous argumentation. Analytical marxism, then, would ameliorate the "flaws" of Marx. Also, they wanted to distinguish between capitalism as an objective economic organization, and normative claims of social justice that they claim Marx did not do.

Erik Ohlin Wright and Michael Burawoy are still advocating these types of arguments, but I think that they have thrown away the label in favor of "public sociology". Daniel Little has a blog, “Understanding Society”, that captures this line of argument on Marx, seeing him as a critic of exploitation, domination and alienation but dismissing his economic theory as “unconvincing”.

[RadioRaheem84]

What is this Little guy talking about?

Neo Classical thought is based on the material interests of the boss/owning class much like Marxism is in the interests of workers. How do these analytical Marxists reconcile the two?

I figured that as a Marxist you would already know that. How could someone argue in favor of a presumed position (Marxism) by using the reasoning of another presumed position (neo-classical)?

[AllThatIsSolid]

What is this Little guy talking about?

Neo Classical thought is based on the material interests of the boss/owning class much like Marxism is in the interests of workers. How do these analytical Marxists reconcile the two?

I figured that as a Marxist you would already know that. How could someone argue in favor of a presumed position (Marxism) by using the reasoning of another presumed position (neo-classical)?


My understanding of what people such as Little are saying is that it is more about methodology than substantive arguments about the empirical world. So Little for example, agrees with the substantive argument of Marx that Capitalism is in certain cases "wrong" (capitalism presupposes exploitation, domination and alienation). But he does so within the framework of what he and other proponents call "Analytical Sociology". This "school" is based on methodological individualism – that all analysis of the social world should begin with the individual – scientific realism – that the object of scientific explanation is to find causal mechanism between cause and effect and not just correlation - and the idea that individuals are always socially situated into society.

So, the important part for them is to use a methodology that is "clear and simple" because it has "stable microfoundations" (is based on MI) and that is "convincing" (because it tries to find the mechanisms between cause A and effect B through mechanism X and Y etc). Little gives an example of this:


Here is how I described Marx's assumptions about the actors within capitalism in TSM:

Marx's accounts depend on an examination of the circumstances of choice of rational individuals. Marx identifies a set of motivational factors and constraints on action for a hypothetical capitalist and then tries to determine the most rational strategies available to the capitalist in these circumstances of choice.... A second part of this model of explanation involves an attempt to determine the consequences for the system as a whole of the forms of activity attributed to the typical capitalist at the preceding stage of analysis. (141-42)

But Marx has a nuanced and socially specific conception of the actor:

Against both these positions -- the nonsocial individualism of political economy and the uncritical holism of speculative philosophy -- Marx puts forward an alternative position. On this account the socialized individual is the ultimate unit of analysis in social explanation. "Individuals producing in society -- hence socially determined production -- is of course the point of departure" (Grundrisse 83).... On this account society is not a freestanding entity, and social relations exist only through the individuals who stand within them. At the same time, however, individuals exist only within particular sets of historically given social relations. Consequently, social explanations must begin with a concrete conception of the individual within specific social relations." (150)

These assumptions about social actors conform fairly well to the assumptions incorporated into analytical sociology.
Now, I'm not sure why it is so necessary to focus on MI when all individuals in any historic moment are situated into a world of social relations. For me this would be the more interesting part than this knee-jerking ahistorical account that sets up all individuals as utility-maximizing "rational" actors.

In any case, I think this is also politically motivated because these guys want to sound convincing for otherwise hostile colleges that would question their method. But I don't think they have done a good job because still, as you said, they rely on neo classical theory that presupposes equilibrium and "free" markets.

[RadioRaheem84]

Their philosophy may not be good but what about their economics?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think it would help if you took a step back and examined the whole purpose of Roemer's exercise.

The (somewhat unstated) goal was often to show that Marxism was consistent with neoclassical economics. This was seen as valuable because the authors like Roemer recognized that Marx's ideas deeply resonated with many people, but were seen in some academic courners as having been built on a very shaky foundation that neo-classical economics had largely rejected. Thus a big part of the goal was to recast Marx's ideas using the neoclassical language so that they did not rise or fall with the validity of the LTV.

It was also an attempt, quite unsuccessful, to introduce a degree of rigor into discussions about Marxism and create a common dialect among scholars and activists of Marx to systematically pursue some ideas to their conclusions which Marx didn't explicitly formulate.

One of Cockshott's German comrades who tried to recast Marx's ideas within a neoclassical framework did a much better job. Why? Because he validated LTV within the neoclassical framework. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, though.

[Kotze]

^
Klaus Hagendorf

[AllThatIsSolid]

Their philosophy may not be good but what about their economics?

Imo, a way to think about the economics of AM and the like (without being any authority on the subject) is that they separate between the economy - which is based on a marginalist theory of value and not on the LTV - and exploitation, domination, alienation etc, that may or may not be present in any "moment" in capitalist society.

So exploitation for instance is a matter of empirical investigation and not necessarily inherent in the relation between capital and labor like it would be using the LTV. Here are two examples of how exploitation is defined which is then used to investigate if the real world "matches" this definition:




“Workers are exploited if they work longer hours than the number of labor hours employed in the goods they consume.” (Elster 1986, 121)




“[A] group is exploited if it has some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off.” (Roemer 1986, 136)

So they do not believe in the LTV, but they believe that capitalist societies is often or for the most part exploitative.