analytical Marxism

analytical Marxism, a movement within Marxist theory and in various branches of social science and philosophy that seeks to investigate and develop the substantive theses of standard Marxism using the techniques of conceptual analysis associated with analytic philosophy and the methods of standard neoclassical economics.

Analytical Marxism represents a break with conventional Marxist theorizing precisely in its rejection of the view that there is a profound methodological divide between Marxism and bourgeois social science. Indeed, its approach is the exact opposite of that of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who famously argued in his book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923; History and Class Consciousness) that the distinctive feature of Marxism lies not in its substantive conclusions but rather in its methodological commitments. Analytical Marxists, by contrast, are directly concerned with addressing the truth or falsity of Marx’s substantive findings in social science and have attempted to reconstruct or salvage his arguments using the same tools that conventional social scientists or philosophers would use. They place great emphasis on the need to state arguments clearly and in a manner that optimizes the possibilities for rational discussion and critique, and they often characterize the methodological stance of other Marxists as being obscurantist or directed toward evading falsification.

Functionalist Marxism

In his book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), the British political philosopher G.A. Cohen developed a traditional reading of Marxian historical materialism as outlined by Marx in the 1859 preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). Until Cohen’s work, most analytic philosophers had thought that historical materialism was marred by an apparent inconsistency. Specifically, it appeared that Marx had been committed both to the claim that the social and economic structure of a society was to be explained as a function of its scientific and technological development and to the claim that the very same structure caused (and therefore explained) that scientific and technical progress. A parallel difficulty was widely thought to afflict Marx’s conception of the relationship between social structure and political and legal superstructure. Cohen argued that those supposed inconsistencies could be avoided if Marx’s explanatory theses were taken to be instances of functional explanation. Just as evolutionary theory might show how the fact that birds have hollow bones is explicable by the role those bones play in the life and survival of the organism, so Marxian historical materialism could show that the selection of a particular structure of social relations for a society (and especially its system of property) was to be explained by the role that such a structure would play in developing the society’s productive resources.

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Cohen’s work was subjected to critique on a variety of grounds. Some critics objected to it as an interpretation of Marx, whereas others thought that Cohen’s reconstructed historical materialism was either implausible as a reading of historical development or philosophically flawed. In the third camp was the Norwegian philosopher and political scientist Jon Elster, who argued in a series of papers and in his book, Making Sense of Marx (1985), against Cohen’s deployment of functional explanation. Elster did not oppose the use of functional explanation in principle but rather argued that, to be legitimate, it had to be underpinned by more conventional causal or intentional modes of explanation. Whereas the theory of evolution by natural selection provided such an explanatory underpinning for biological science, Cohen had provided no such supporting mechanism for historical materialism or for the social sciences more generally.

Marxism and methodological individualism

Although Cohen disputed Elster’s view that functional explanation was inadmissible in the absence of supporting foundations, other analytical Marxists were keen to supply them for other areas of Marxian theory. In particular, analytical Marxism became widely associated with methodological individualism in social theory (the claim that large-scale social phenomena should be explained in terms of the behaviour of human individuals), rational-choice theory (the claim that large-scale social phenomena should be explained in terms of the choices of rational individuals seeking to maximize utility, or benefit to themselves), and game theory (the mathematical analysis of interdependent decision making).

At the forefront of such developments was the American economist John Roemer. In his first book, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (1981), Roemer sought to reconstruct Marxian economics using the tools of neoclassical economic theory. In his second, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), he employed game theory to show how the emergence of coalitions of agents, closely resembling Marxian social classes, could be explained by the differential endowment of such agents with productive resources such as labour power or ownership of capital.

Roemer’s work on class and exploitation inspired, in turn, a program of research by other analytical Marxists, including the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who used Roemer’s conceptual framework to analyze the class structure of modern capitalist societies in his book Classes (1985). Another important contribution to analytical Marxism was made by the Polish American political scientist Adam Przeworski, who used rational-choice theory in his Capitalism and Social Democracy (1985) to argue that social democratic parties are fatally driven to compromise in modern liberal democracies: the need to secure a sufficiently broad coalition to achieve electoral success necessitates the dilution of the socialist program.

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