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Analytical Marxism (10-Week Course)
So I developed a 10-week course on Analytical Marxism for myself, and I thought it would be good to share it with RevLeft in case anyone is interested. The Analytical Marxists are often criticized by Marxists without being read, and I think it's a far better policy to understand what one criticizes.
The inclusion of Wright's work is a good counter to the insistence on methodological individualism of Roemer, Przeworski, and Elster. Unfortunately, the discussions of exploitation and economics are based on the idea that the Law of Value and the Law of the Tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit should be rejected. I recommend Andrew Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's "Capital" for a good rebuttal of these claims, but it is not included in the course.
Reading commitment ranges from about 45–80 pages a week. Most of it is available online for free in varying states of legality, aside from the Analytical Marxism reader itself which I had to pick up. Let me know if you have trouble getting your hands on anything.
Analytical Marxism syllabus
Book list
G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History
John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism
Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1982)
Allen Wood, Karl Marx
Erik Olin Wright, Interrogating Inequality
Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism
Week 1: Introduction to Analytical Marxism
II: 178–210, 234–255
Wright: "What is Analytical Marxism?", "Marxism as Social Science", & "Marxism After Communism"
Week 2: Rational Choice Theory and Methodological Individualism
AM: 191–220
RM: 107–127
Roemer: "'Rational Choice' Marxism: Some Issues of Method and Substance"
Elster: "Further Thoughts on Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory"
Wright, Levine, and Sober: "Marxism and Methodological Individualism"
Week 3: Functional Explanation
KMTH: 249–296
TS: 483–494
Cohen: "Functional Explanation: In General", "Functional Explanation: In Marxism", & "Reply to Elster on 'Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory"
Week 4: Historical Materialism I
KMTH: 28–114
Cohen: "The Constitution of the Economic Forces", "The Economic Structure", & "Material and Social Properties to Society"
Week 5: Historical Materialism II
KMTH: 115–174
Cohen: "Fetishism" & "The Primacy of the Productive Forces"
Week 6: Historical Materialism III
KMTH: 175–248
Cohen: "The Productive Forces and Capitalism" & "Base and Superstructure, Powers and Rights"
Week 7: Class Analysis
AM: 81–140
Roemer: "New Directions in the Marxian Theory of Exploitation and Class"
Wright: "What is Middle About the Middle Class?"
Week 8: Complications of Class Analysis
AM: 141–188
Elster: "Three Challenges to Class"
Przeworski: "Material Interests, Class Compromise, and the Transition to Socialism"
Week 9: Marxian Justice
AM: 237–303
Cohen: "The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom"
Roemer: "Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?"
Wood: "Marx and Equality"
Week 10: Marxism and Morality
KM: 125–162
Wood: "Marx on Right and Justice" & "Morality as Ideology"
I honestly don't intend to offend, but why bother studying analytical Marxism? I supposed it served some kind of purpose in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of trying to preserve some aspects of Marxism when the reorientation of the Soviet Union to a bourgeois form of capitalism, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union altogether, followed by the economic bubble of the 90s, made it seems as though capitalism had managed to overcome its crisis tendencies and that Marx's labor theory of value should be thrown out altogether. But now it just seems quaint, sort of like the academy's infatuation with postmodernism around the same time. Both, I think were responding to the same set of problems, albeit in different ways. AM as a school of though, however, was always much smaller. And it is, for all intents and purposes, a dead letter even within the academy. They did manage to say some reasonably important things about democracy, however, though not in the context of their discussions on Marx. Josh Cohen's "deliberative democracy" stuff, I am thinking of.
The real crisis Marxism faced during the 80s and 90s was not the success of capitalism, but the obvious flaws in contemporary Marxism inside and outside the academy; this crisis continues. We just saw a wave of popular upsurges in 2011 in which Marxism has played almost no significant role, or worse, has appeared in the form of aggressively alienating and anti-worker tendencies like the more voluntarist proponents of 'communization' theory (at least in the western United States). The fragmentation and marginalization of Marxism continues, despite the bump in popularity of Marxian economic theory post-2008.
So if postmodern Marxism and analytical Marxism are both responses to this situation, then they are just as relevant projects today. Unfortunately, I think the approach of postmodern Marxism has bitterly failed, and whatever elements of dialectical methodology they retain do not matter because the content is so far away from the reality of class struggle. On the flip side, practicing Marxist activists are rarely willing to reassess their theoretical commitments in favor of something more correct as new evidence comes along, and mostly recite talking points and follow unquestionable 'scientific' doctrines; this appears to me to be a leftist form of anti-intellectualism and anti-science.
The Analytical Marxist school, to what extent it was a cohesive school, also failed in their project. The difference in relation to the postmodern Marxists, other than there being actual successors practicing now, is that I think the basic approach of the school is correct: the important part of Marxism is its content, not its methodology.
I do not think there is a special, unique methodology that has access to unmediated truth. So called 'dialectical methodology' is not even the only way to identify the dialectical phenomena; one could go into the micro-foundations of each part of the dialectical mechanism in order to understand it better. And why not? Speaking generally and holistically is certainly useful and insightful, but why stop there? A concerted effort to include analysis on the individual level to help reinforce the holistic analysis seems appropriate.
So it's not the conclusions the Analytical Marxists came to that I find interesting: it's their application to scientific norms that I appreciate. Their politics and economics are mostly horrible, but Marxists should pay attention to what they have to say about philosophy of social science, especially Wright, Sober, & Levine - Marxism and Methodological Individualism.
If nothing else, it's good to actually understand these arguments instead of just dismissing them out of hand. Curiousity, investigation, and understanding are integral to science; I think it's fitting that the first response to this thread basically amounts to "why bother?"
Your trying to divorce content from methodology is strange and highly problematic. To put it plainly and simply: one of the primary reasons that AM is a dead school of thought is that methodological individualism is not consistent with Marxism, and - to repeat what I said earlier - the only reason there was this bizarre attempt to meld the two together was the wrong-headed idea that Marxism could be saved (as if it needed saving) by reinforcing it with assumptions drawn from neoclassical economics. As a school of thought, it has contributed literally nothing, mostly because the foundational premises of its attempted "innovations" are highly flawed and at any rate not likely to flesh out new insights in a school of thought that arose from a completely opposed way of understanding the individual. The only contributions members of the school made were in areas outside of their attempts to engage Marx directly. I don't consider this anti-intellectualism. I've engaged with a lot of AM literature, especially Gerry Cohen's book. But I don't think it's a good idea to invite Marxists, many of whom on this board haven't even begun to engage with Das Kaptal to spend what little time they have to start reading analytical Marxists. Just my opinion.
Only three members of the AM school endorse Methodological Individualism (Roemer, Elster, and Przeworski); the rest are skeptical or openly critical. The Wright, Levine, and Sober article I've recommended ("Marxism and Methodological Individualism") is a detailed refutation of MI and a defense of Anti-Reductionist thought. This is what I mean by (for the third time) knowing what you're talking about before criticizing.
As for my personal opinion, I think it's not a good idea to encourage Marxists to seal themselves off in an ecclesiastical bubble where there is only one doctrinal method for the discovery of the truth, and all others are to be dismissed. This is a religious approach, no matter how many nineteenth-century scientistic words we pile onto it.
And honestly, I highly doubt newbies are going to read my nerdy course on an obscure branch of Marxism with a terrible reputation instead of reading Marx. If by chance someone does start off with Analytical Marxism, at least they are also learning the tools to reject what is bad about it.
Are any of those available online?
Luís Henrique
Luís, check your PMs
Even the members of the September School who did not explicitly adopt methodological individualism smuggled its empiricist assumptions into their work (e.g., Gerry Cohen, Levine, Erik Wright). So while they made not have been operating explicitly from a rat-choice perspective, they were arguing from a perspective that was compatible with rat-choice, while incompatible with Marx's methodology and project. I know a hell of a lot about the AM project, so I am not prepared to be lectured by some Johnny-Come-Lately random on revleft who knows nothing about me or my background.
Second: arguing that delving into AM is a waste of time is different than encouraging Marxists to seal themselves off in "ecclesiastical bubbles."
Lucretia, I'm not trying to attack you or undermine your cred, but I'm also not going to take it on faith that there's something intrinsically wrong with the approach of Analytical Marxism without you having to demonstrate it to me. Saying that these authors' work is compatible with 'rat-choice' and that they harbor secret empiricist assumptions (like what?) is not specific enough.
At this point, I don't really think this is the forum for this debate and I'd like to reserve this thread for folks interested in learning about AM. There are plenty of other places on RevLeft to hate on it, anyway.
I am interested in learning about Analytical Marxism. Is there one straightforward text to start from?
Well, I have read Erik Olin Wright's "What is Analytical Marxism?".
It raises a few questions, some of which regarding his understanding of Marxism, or of Marx's work, some regarding his understanding of "science". Where do we go now? Do we debate such issues here? Is there another place to discuss them? Do we have to wait for more people to read it? Or should I ask those questions only after reading the three chapters mentioned above?
Luís Henrique
Mkay.
Wright describes the emergence of "Analytical Marxism" as follows:
What would be those methodological and metatheoretical commitments, that so seriously undermined the explanatory potential of Marxism as an intellectual tradition?Originally Posted by Erik Olin Wright
Wright discusses them while describing what, to him, are the four specific characteristics of "Analytical Marxism". Those are:
As it is easy to see, there is a difference between the three first principles, or "commitments" as he calls them, and the last one: the former three are strictly methodological principles, but the latter one advances on ontology, anticipating the conclusions of the theoretical work.
But the actual criticism of, hm, "non-Analytical" Marxism only comes when he discusses these four principles more in detail. In further discussing the "commitment to conventional scientific norms", Wrights describes the situation of Marxist theory previously to "Analytical Marxism" as having
So Wright at least concedes the existence of two very different, and indeed quite opposite, Marxist traditions, to both of which it opposes its four principles. It is easy to see that the first tradition is named - the Critical Theory tradition -, but the other is not, and the reason why its name is passed in silence is not theoretical, but political: it is a problem of what Perry Anderson calls "Western Marxism" and its relation to the unnamed tradition, ie, Stalinism, which needs to be criticised from a theoretical point of view, but that also needs to be ignored from a political standpoint. Anyway, here we get the first glimpse of the "methodological and metatheoretical commitments" that encumber Marxism. While we still don't know what such commitments are, we now are lead to understand that they have to do with the relation between Marxism and science. But, in so doing, Wright piques our curiosity: the description that he makes of Critical Theory contrasts starkly with the description he makes of Stalinism; would he be saying that the underlying problems of each of those traditions be only superficially opposed, but, more in depth, related to the same kind of "commitments" that burden Marxism and mar its explanatory potential?
This we will try to find out in the following episodes of our thrilling intellectual soap opera.
Luís Henrique
Last edited by Luís Henrique; 13th July 2013 at 21:54.
Of the trend, I have only studied Jon Elster, who was one of the "methodological individualists" and a classic case of educated idiocy as far as I can tell. I have a life, so I most likely won't be studying any more "Analytic" Marxism. There's too much better stuff to read out there.
In my humble and ignorant opinion: these people are just intellectual masturbaters.
"It is necessary for Communists to enter into contradiction with the consciousness of the masses. . . The problem with these Transitional programs and transitional demands, which don't enter into any contradiction with the consciousness of the masses, or try to trick the masses into entering into the class struggle, create soviets - [is that] it winds up as common-or-garden reformism or economism." - Mike Macnair, on the necessity of the Minimum and Maximum communist party Program.
"You're lucky. You have a faith. Even if it's only Karl Marx" - Richard Burton
Friday I wrote a really nice post continuing my analysis of Wright's text, but... it was so good that the lizardian Wittgensteinians that control the net ate it preemptively. So I am now going to try a less smart post, in hopes the it circumvents The Conspiracy. [/paranoia]
Wright argues that, unlike Critical Theory, which is hostile to science, or to the canons of conventional science (he should make his mind up here, for those are different things, and the way he writes it looks like he is trying to smuggle one for the other), and unlike The Tradition That Must Not Be Named, which while identifying with science, holds a "particularly distorted and unscientific" view of science, "Analytical Marxism" is "committed to the view that Marxism should, without embarrassment, aspire to the status of a genuine social science" (p. 182).
Now there are certainly problems with these points.
First, I see no reason why Marxists shouldn't be critic of "science". As Wright writes, to Critical Theory, "positivism and claims to scientificity are often looked upon as instruments of ideological domination rather than emancipatory knowledge". I don't know what Wright understands by "positivism", but to me it is sheer ideology (and, indeed, a brand of ideology that Wright himself denounces, as we will see in the near future); and quite evidently "claims to scientificity" are very different from "science", as Wright seems to realise in his critique of You Know Which Tradition. All of us - and I would say especially "Analytical Marxists", if they want to be true to their "commitment" to "the importance of systematic conceptualisation, particularly of concepts that are at the core of Marxist theory" which should involve "both careful attention to the definition of concepts and to the logical coherence of repertoires of interconnected concepts" - should understand "science" is not such an obvious and obviously simple concept that can be taken for granted without some actual analysis. There is a scientific method, that could be called "science" (or "conventional canons of science"), no doubt, but there is also a body of accumulated knowledge, a cadre of specialised professional, an institutional frame for the production of knowledge (and ideology), etc, all of which can either be called "science" in and of themselves, or are intrinsic parts of what we call "science" in generic, "ordinary" use. Those things cannot be argued for or against without some serious "misuse of language" if they are not clearly distinguished. And, as a consequence, it looks quite clear that Critical Theory is, or at least could be, quite justified in being "hostile" to something that has brought us, among other things, planned obsolescence, atomic bombs, evolutionary psychology, electrotherapy, eugenics, or monetarism.
Second, the notion of Marxism as "a" genuine social science is, frankly, weird. What we would usually call "a" social science is something like, say, sociology, or history, pre-history, law studies, economics, etc: fields of knowledge. It doesn't seem to make any sence to further such a list with something like, "and political science, anthropology, and Marxism". If for no other reason, because we certainly have things like Marxist sociology, Marxist history, Marxist anthropology, and so on. True, Marxism is a very radical tradition, which means that some of its interventions in few fields of knowledge seem to negate the concerned individual "science" as a whole (it has been noted that Marx was more of an "anti-economist" than really an economist). But even so, negation is not the same thing as an accretion to a list.
But let's go further, putting those issues aside for the moment. Wright argues that
What this does not do, unhappily, is to explain us what those "standards of science" are, as he immediately recognises:
Wait, philosophy? I can distinctly hear many eyebrows being raised, some of which in an evidently asymmetric way. How is systematic conceptualisation of everything a matter of science, but conceptualisation of science itself is remanded to the cloudy, misty realm of philosophy?
This is probably an unwitting attempt to avoid problems of regression when talking about meta-science and meta-knowledge, problems that cannot however, be really avoided, as we will see quite soon. But, for the moment, Wright tries to cut the Gordian knot by discussing "science" in a way that goes directly against "Analytical Marxism"'s promises of concerns "with the relatively fine-grained specifications of the steps in the theoretical arguments linking concepts, whether the arguments be about causal processes in the construction of explanatory theories or about logical connections in the construction of normative theories", ie, he attempts to evade the question by giving an impressionist description of "science", or even, admittedly, not even of "science", but merely of "science" as self-servingly defined by "Analytical Marxists":
His description of such a "realist view of science" will have to wait for a further post, but for now I am taking the somewhat sadistic pleasure of noting how "Analytical Marxist" commitment to rigorous conceptualisation is funded in an admittedly "loose" description of science, that certainly does not stand up to all the seriousness and haughtyness of the initial promises.
As soon as possible, in a revleft thread close to you, an analysis of the problems posited by Wright's "realist" view of science, both regarding an effective comprehension of science and what passes for an "Analytical" comprehension of science in revleft (and that is very, very different from what an actual "Analytic Marxist" as Wright upholds).
Luís Henrique
Last edited by Luís Henrique; 14th July 2013 at 21:51.
Is this resistance or a costume party?
Either way I think black with bandanas is a boring theme.
fka Creep
So, let's now have a look at what Wright calls a "realist view of science".
This, of course, involves not only a methodological view of science, but also an ontological view of the world: not only there are empirical phenomena to which we have more or less immediate access through our senses, but there are mechanisms that generate such phenomena, mechanisms which in turn are not (necessarily, at least) empirical phenomena in and of themselves. And so, according to Wright, reality is composed of two different orders of "things": empirical phenomena that we can see (or hear, or smell, etc., either with our naked eyes/ears/noses, or through more or less sophisticated prosthetic devices (telescopes, microscopes, stethoscopes, amplificators, mass spectrographers, x-ray devices, etc.) on one hand, and "mechanisms that create empiric phenomena", which can be identified through "science" but are not immediately accessible to the bodily organs of our senses.Originally Posted by Erik Olin Wright
Of course, much can be said pro or against such ontological view; an evident point for criticism of it would be the ontological status of Wright's "mechanisms that create empiric phenomena", as well as the issue of whether they are the subject of science, too, or constitute "philosophical" matter; the latter would bring into issue all the problems we have with "metaphysics", and put into question how can we really reject "metaphysics" with a concept of science that opposes the physical level of "empiric facts" to a "deeper" level of "mechanisms that create facts"; "metaphysics", after all, means "beyond physics", which is an evidently possible interpretation of Wright's take on "mechanisms" beyond the "facts". On the other hand, the former interpretation brings again problems of infinite regression; one would wonder whether beyond "mechanisms that create facts", one can find "mechanisms that create mechanisms that create facts", and so on, and so on.
Anyway, Wright's "realist view" of science is clearly at odds with visions of the world that maintain that "the world is made of facts" or that you can understand your subject of study by merely "looking" at it. The following makes it even more clear:
Here he attempts an explanation of his previous ontological distinction. Since we cannot observe all phenomena, but must necessarily select some, an actual knowledge about "the world" implies the ability of filling up blanks. In other words, of finding the mechanisms that generate empirical "facts": science is not about knowing whether the cat is on the table or not (which is a mere empirical observation) but about knowing why cats are, or are not, on top of tables - if there is indeed a mechanism, or a series of mechanisms, that can give us an explanation of such phenomena.
In a previous post, I have highlighted that:
And now I will establish what constitutes "positivism" to me: it is precisely the "naïve empiricist" view that Wright has just dismantled and rejected. So, unless he makes a different use of the word "positivist", he has just shown that he has no agreement with "positivism", and, accordingly to his description of science as something directly opposed to "naïve empiricism", he has just rejected "positivism" as an unscientific view. So what are exactly his complaints against Critical Theory and its liminar rejection of positivism? Unless someone can point to me that either Wright or Critical Theory are relying in a different definition of positivism (but I doubt so), his supposed Critical Theory's "hostility to science" boils down to to an "hostility" to two very non-scientific "abuses of science": naïve empiricism, and "claims to scientificity".Originally Posted by Luís Henrique
Now, of course, Wright must also reject another anti-scientific view:
Now, we see that Wright is able to circumvent the theoretical trap that opposes (a naïve, at least) empiricism to complete idealism, and asks us to take sides in such excluded middle fallacy. But he is able to do that because he is a Marxist, not because he is "Analytical": the grounds for rejecting such false dichotomy are clearly in Marx (particularly in the Grundrisse), not in the Circle of Vienna - which, with good reason, was also called the "logical positivists".Originally Posted by Erik Olin Wright
Of course, the latter, "anti-realist", view that Wright denounces has its adherents as of today, particularly among "post-modernists" who would try to reduce any analysis of the world to the limits of "discourse" or "narrative", and, by denying the actual existence of any reference of such discourse, dissolve "reality" into absolute relativism. But this is a kind of view, that while can certainly relate in a way or other to both Marxism or Analytical Philosophy, and even use Marxist or Analytical verbiage, is unlikely to appeal in depth to most actual Marxists. It is, on the contrary, the former, "naïve empiricist", view, with its apparent materialism, its apparent rejection of "metaphysics", that seems appealing to some Marxists, especially those who think it necessary to reject or deny any Hegelian influence on Marx as "mystical", which, of course, includes those attracted by the "Analytical Marxist" project.
In this sence, it is refreshing to notice that Wright doesn't fall that easily for empiricism, especially of the "naïve" brand. But his view of science, although necessary, is still insufficient, one of the big problems with it being that it olympicly ignores the fact that talking about "science" as a unified activity that proceeds the same regardless of the objects it looks at is already quite of a mystification. It would be more productive to talk about "sciences", at least until being able to set up a definition that goes beyond a rejection of both empiricism and idealism, and that can fit better into the purported goal of paying "careful attention to the definition of concepts and to the logical coherence of repertoires of interconnected concepts".
Somewhat related to this problems are the consequences that Wright takes from "Analytical Marxist" commitment to "conventional scientific norms". They are three, and they are
The third of these consequences is quite trivial, and is only problematic concerning the systematic, or asystematic, misuse of the concept of science by Stalinism-Voldemortism; but the problem with the distortions of Marxism at the hands of Stalin & company aren't theoretical, but political. Anyway, it demands clarification, first because the political-instead-of-methodological nature of the problems with Stalinism must be demonstrated; second because there are methodological misunderstandments of science in pre-Stalinist Marxist authors - especially Engels and Plekhanov - that must be extricated from the issue, implying a reading of the Engels-Plekhanov-Stalin chain that distinguishes the apparent methodological continuity (that cannot, besides, ignore the problems and limits of science as a social practice in the late 19th century) from the political rupture that takes advantage of former. The second consequence is way more important, and, in Wright's words, seems directly linked to his anti-empiricist points discussed above. However, without a discussion of what those "theoretical models" are, how do they relate (or not) to science and Marxism, and of how science creates and evaluates theoretical models (including the issue of whether there are theories that cannot or deserve not being put to empirical testing), we are likely to be epistemologically mislead.
But the crucial point, of course, is the first of Wright's consequences, skepticism - that can be quickly followed by rejection - of "claims of traditional Marxist claims to a distinctive "Marxist Methodology". There are two basic interrogations that must be made to this "skepticism". First, if it is based on the supposition that there is one and only one "scientific methodology", that applies equally to Physics and Biology, Chemistry and Sociology; and, if so, to what extent does "bourgeois science" apply such uniform methodology to social sciences as well as to natural sciences. Second, if there is no such thing as a specific Marxist methodology, what is specificly Marxist about Marxism?
In the next post, I'm going to try to address these issues, or some of them at least, since they may require some extensive writing.
Luís Henrique
Last edited by Luís Henrique; 16th July 2013 at 22:51.
