actualism

[gauchisme]

http://jeffrubard.wordpress.com/2007...and-actualism/
_
“Analytic Marxism” is usually disappointing to me on two counts. Firstly, analytic Marxists don’t generally seem to have taken the advice about changing the world to heart — instead, they write books imagining questions being put to them like If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? It’s a good question, since all observers are agreed that there are lots of ways to come in contact with the contemporary economy without coming away healthy, wealthy and wise — and shouldn’t the perils be so much more for someone espousing any variety of Marxism? But I more peculiarly also feel let down by the “analytic” ambitions of the genre. A lot of works in this vein think that standards of logical stringency and careful linguistic explication of terms will do the trick to be analytic, but this is really the analytic philosophy of forty years ago; granted, the main texts of analytic Marxism were written not so long after that, but history, intellectual and political, has continued apace without there being an effort to keep pace.


So, sometimes I wonder what an assessment of Marx using contemporary analytic tools would look like; and here is a very small part of what I imagine such an approach might amount to. In contemporary metaphysics of modality, there is a position called “actualism”; this is not related to the “Actualism” of the fascist Giovanni Gentile, but does share some features with an “actualist fallacy” Roy Bhaksar decries in Marx. Modal actualism is the belief that only the actual is real; possible things and states of affairs (in the area of time, the past and the future) can only be constructed out of actual ones (the present). On an actualist view it makes no sense to say that mythical beings like unicorns are “possible” though not real, because we have ruled them out of our picture of what actually exists: whatever does exist in our world is by definition not a unicorn.


As a general explanation of what it means for something to be possible, actualism has its defenders. But I think that it is especially applicable as a principle for interpreting several of Marx’s key theses about the social world and its functioning. Marx certainly did not have the tools of contemporary metaphysics available to him, but he was well-acquainted with the philosophy of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers who employed modal reasoning; and although some may suggest that modality plays no important role in the philosophy of Hegel, Marx’s “chief influence”, I think this fails to allow for Marx’s own innovations as a thinker. (I have gradually come to the view that Hegel’s influence on Marx was primarily “cultural”, Hegel having provided a matrix in Germany within which social critique could take place, rather than primarily “theoretical”).


“Ordinary” economic thinking, including the marginalism that is supposed to have superseded Marx, relies on a model of agents choosing between possible alternatives in action — in some Bayesian models, choosing from what they subjectively perceive to be possible alternatives. And in mainstream political philosophy, we are encouraged to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of certain possible forms of social organization from behind a “veil of ignorance”. Now, compare Marx. Marx denies that individual preference ranging over possible alternatives is the root of economic activity: rather, the entire structure of capitalism determines the individual’s real options, sometimes at variance with their ideological construal of the matter. Furthermore, the proletariat — who are less prone to being confused about the real situation — “have no ideals to realize” as a political force, because they simply represent the inherent potentials of modern industrial production.


It seems to me that these are actualist positions. In fact, I think that the issue of economism can be partially resolved by so viewing them. Perhaps economics as Marx practices it — full of detail about every element of social functioning, certainly a far cry from the airless game theory and econometrics of contemporary orthodoxy — is really something like a science of the actual, and historical materialism’s dependence on it is equivalent to the principle that only the actual affects the actual; that there are no “irruptions” from religious ideals or utopian visions into history which cannot be explained as concrete this-worldly realities (the reality that theory becomes when it grips the masses, etc.) If viewed in this way, the difference between Marxist precept and the idealist systems that preceded it becomes especially sharp, and the complaints that widget production could hardly be the determining factor in an era’s aesthetic values appear less convincing.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thank you for that Gauchisme, but is this your own work, or someone else's?

Analytic Marxism was a major step in the right direction (in that it ignored Hegel, for one thing, and Continental 'Philosophy', for another), but was nowhere near analytic enough (it gestured at appropriating the methods of Analytic Philosophy and classical (post Fregean) logic), and quickly abandoned Marxism.

It is now largely defunct.

You are right, however, to criticise the methodological individualism that several analytic Marxists tried to peddle.