Is there anything salvageable about Rational Choice Marxism?

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Heya,

So I'm not really interested in the "corrections" made to Marxist theory by the likes of Roemer and Elster, but I am interested in the prospect that game theory could be applied to Marxism. I am aware that an author named Bruce Philp wrote a book about trying to strip away the individualist assumptions of the rational choice Marxists while maintaining a game model, but I don't know how far he goes.

Leaving out Roemer's attempt to provide a game-theoretic alternative account of exploitatio (to replace the "broken" Law of Value), I've heard there is a massive logical flaw in Roemer's "Analytic Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory" where he confuses sufficient and necessary causes on something basic.

Anyway, I'm wondering how anyone else who has looked into this sees it.

Thanks!

[Clarion]

Yes, there is.


There's no need to strip away the individualist assumptions of rational choice, methodological individualism must be the foundation for any scientific study of society.


Self-interest is the only rational basis for socialism. Any socialism that isn't rooted self-interest will be dependent on ideological conformity and some involuntary force above society keeping it in place, it is inherently unstable. Scientific socialism isn't based on Christian charity or altruism. Socialism will replace capitalism precisely because it is in the individual interest of the vast majority.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Thanks for reminding everyone why no one likes Rational Choice Marxism.

I'm not against methodological individualism as a mode of analysis, but to assert some kind of metaphysical primacy to individualist analysis is exactly one of the dogmas that prevented Rational Choice Marxism from becoming a sustainable approach to Marxism; I don't think it is a coincidence that virtually none of its practitioners are still Marxists. That may be because Marxism is fundamentally flawed and should be rejected, but it could also point to flaws in their assumptions, which is the premise with which I am working.

Anyone else?

[cantwealljustgetalong]

For anyone interested (no one), I've located the sufficient-necessary flaw in Roemer via an article by Andrew Kliman (http://libcom.org/library/Simultaneous-valuation-exploitation-theory-marxist-humanism).



Roemer (1981: 19) first states that reproduction requires that no stock be run down to zero. He notes correctly that one way of 'assuring' this-i.e., one sufficient condition for reproducibility-is to postulate that all physical surpluses are non-- negative in every period. Yet immediately thereafter, he pronounces this postulate a 'requirement' for reproducibility -i.e., a necessary condition. It is easy to show that this is incorrect.

[Skyhilist]

Sorry for the ignorance, but could someone please explain Rational Choice Marxism to me in layman's terms?

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Rational Choice Marxism was a subset of Analytical Marxism, an acamedic attempt in the 1980s to replace the literary, dialectical method of Marxism with the methods of contemporary "bourgeois" philosophy and social science, while still implementing Marxist ideas and concepts.

Rational Choice Marxists were especially fervent in embracing the economic orthodoxy at the time: they embraced the central assumption of neoclassical theory, that all action is reducible to individual actors and can only be explained by accounting for individual decisions. The advantages of accepting the above assumptions (known as "methodological individualism") is that they opened up the mathematically complex models of neoclassical behavior to be employed in Marxist analysis, especially the fields of Game and Social Choice Theory.

Claiming methodological individualism as the only legitimate mode of analysis is a more extreme position than many bourgeois economists (and social scientists) hold; for instance, Keynesians tend to focus on aggregate economic forces ("macroeconomics") rather than the actions of individual actors ("microeconomics"). In embracing neoclassical assumptions, the Rational Choice Marxists gutted the central assumptions of Marxist theory, so it shouldn't be surprising that the conclusions and tools of Marxist theory were next.

They rejected the law of value (also known as the labor theory of value) outright, and tried to replace it with the Fundamental Marxian Theorem (which claims to make exploitation the exclusive source of profit, but does not) and theories of exploitation based on rational choice models. Their methodological assumptions also resulted in rejecting the law of the falling rate of profit, the central component of Marxian theory that makes capitalism eternally prone to crisis. They made no attempt to reconstruct this law and skipped right to imagining market socialist Utopias, where capitalism was at last tamed.

I think the promise of Rational Choice Marxism is obvious, but their draw was their failure: zealous acceptance of mainstream methodology. On the whole, Analytical Marxists were better at critically engaging with methodological questions than the Rational Choice Marxists, but many fell into similar traps and ceased to be Marxists by the end of their careers.

[cyu]

Kind of off topic, but this reminds me of the following from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

[Die Neue Zeit]

On a side note, another failure of this "school" was/is its inability to predate Behavioural Economics and Finance.