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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Much as what we now call ‘the Marxism of the Second International’ long ago passed from the scene, the Age of ‘Western Marxism’ has apparently come to an end. Internal theoretical developments, changes in intellectual culture and, above all, political circumstances have joined together to hasten the demise of this episode in the history of radical theory. It would be instructive to trace the trajectory of Western Marxism, and to reflect on the political conditions for its decline. In both Western and Eastern Europe, Marxian politics has been in crisis at least since the watershed year of 1968, and in disarray for more than a decade. Western Marxism has always been joined programatically to currents within these political movements and has suffered grave, indeed fatal, damage in consequence. But it is not my intention to reflect on the vicissitudes of Western Marxism here. What follows will consider instead a style of theorizing that has effectively superceded Western Marxism, just as Western Marxism earlier replaced the Marxism of the Second International. This new kind of radical theory is widely designated—approvingly by some, disparagingly by others—‘analytical Marxism.’
I am grateful to Daniel Hausman, Kai Nielsen, Debra Satz, Robert Ware and Erik Olin Wright for comments on an earlier draft.
2 I use the term ‘Western Marxism’ in the widely accepted sense made current by Merleau-Ponty and Anderson. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Bien, Joseph (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1973), 30-58Google Scholar, and Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: NLB 1976)Google Scholar. Roughly, the term denotes that current of theorizing that runs through the work of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, the ‘critical theorists’ of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, et al.), existentialist Marxists (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), structuralist Marxists (Althusser, Balibar), and so on. Politically, Western Marxism is oppositional with respect to the official Marxism of the Soviet Union and the Western European Communist parties-though, in some cases, only implicitly. Philosophically, Western Marxism is shaped in varying ways by ‘continental’ philosophical currents-neo-Hegelianism, above all-and tends to focus programmatically on grand reconstructions of Marxian philosophy.
3 There are, of course, other survivors of Western Marxism’s demise-strains of radical theory that draw on surviving remnants of Western Marxism, but also on ‘deconstructionist’ literary theory and other post-structuralist tendencies. However, these currents have had little impact on analytical Marxism and vice versa, and will therefore hardly impinge on the discussion that follows here.
4 See, for example, Elster’s, jon encyclopedic Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)Google Scholar. Some Western Marxists ought to have drawn similar conclusions. Thus, it was plainly untenable for Althusserians to defend the scientificity of Marx’s theoretical practice, while insisting, at the same time, on orthodoxy. Sciences change; orthodoxies do not. No science has ever been nor could ever be fixed infallibly by a Master Thinker. Nor, more generally, could any body of doctrine be expected to provide an infallible purchase on Truth.
5 Here and in what follows, I assume, as did Marx, that there is indeed a truth to be discovered, and that the truth conditions for theoretical claims are supplied by a mind-independent reality, not by thought or language. Many Western Marxists-and their ‘post-Marxian’ successors-effectively deny this assumption, making ‘truth’ dependent on particular points of view (the point of view of the proletariat, for example) or on ‘discursive structures’ without subjects. I would hazard that positions of this sort are of very dubious intelligibility. In any case, it is worth noting that what strikes most analytical Marxists as obvious is actually denied by some non-analytic survivors of Western Marxism’s decline, and that, in this respect, analytical Marxists, unlike their contemporary rivals, are faithful to the core idea underlying the materialism Marxists have always vociferously professed.
6 See Georg Lukács, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ in History and Class Consciousness, trans. , RodneyLivingstone (London: Merlin Press 1971)Google Scholar; Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Sheridan-Smith, Alan (London: New Left Books 1976)Google Scholar; Althusser, Louis, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination,’ in For Marx, trans. Brewster, Ben (London: New Left Books 1971)Google Scholar.
7 There is another indisputably legitimate explanatory objective social scientists might maintain: the interpretation of cultural forms in the manner of anthropologists and (some) cultural historians. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of interpretation, a topic that has vexed social theorists and philosophers of social science for more than a century. It must suffice to declare without argument what seems clear enough on its face: that interpretation is complementary to the explanatory practice of modern science, not opposed to it.
8 Cf. my ‘Althusser’s Marxism,’ Economy and Society 10, 3 (1981) 243-83.
9 Another reason is the wish of many who identify with Marxism to distinguish themselves and their theoretical work from mainstream social science, and a complementary desire on the part of mainstream practitioners to differentiate themselves from Marxists. These motives will be discussed below.
10 See Levine, A., Sober, Elliott and Olin Wright, Erik, ‘Marxism and Methodological Individualism,’ New Left Review 162Google Scholar for a portion of that argument, focusing on the dispute between methodological holists and methodological individualists. Ostensibly, holists believe that societies are somehow more than the sum of their individual parts, while individualists regard societies just as collections of individuals. But the holist view, formulated plausibly, devolves into the claim that relational properties (or individuals) are explanatory. No reasonable individualist could deny this claim. Similarly, the individualist claim, properly understood, is just that ‘social facts’ work through individual agents-a position no reasonable holist could deny. Of course, it is possible to imagine holist or individualist programs that genuinely are incompatible. Holists might assert the explanatory relevance of emergent, supra-individual properties; or individualists might deny the explanatory relevance of relational properties. But these positions are plainly untenable. In short, either the dispute is only apparent or else one or another of the disputants is saddled with an unsustainable case.
11 Cf. Geuss, Raymond, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981)Google Scholar.
12 But see n. 26.
13 Roemer, John, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982), and Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Roemer’s account is also directed against views held by declared Marxists who advance the idea that exploitation is a consequence of differential authority relations at the point of production. See, for example, Jeffrey Reiman, ‘Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen: Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, 1 (1987) 3-41.
15 Cf. Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (New York: Harper and Row 1983).
16 See Free to Lose; ‘Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, 1 (1985) 30-65; ‘Equality of Talent,’ Economics and Philosophy 1, 2 (1985) 151-87; ‘Equality of Resources Implies Equality of Welfare,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 101 (1986) 751-84; and Value, Exploitation and Class (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers 1986).
17 Cf. Walzer, Michael, ‘Review of Making Sense of Marx,’ New York Review of Books (Nov. 21, 1985)Google Scholar.
18 The eminence grise behind this departure in post-Marxian theory is Michel Foucault. A clear example of the genre is provided in the work of Anthony Giddens. See, for example, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan 1982). For a rejoinder to Giddens, see Wright, Erik Olin, ‘Gidden’s Critique of Marxism,’ New Left Review 138 (March-April 1983)Google Scholar. Similar ideas inform many strains of contemporary feminist theory.
19 See my The End of the State (London: Verso 1987) 87-9.
20 See, among many others, Cohen, G.A., Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense; Wood, Allen, Karl Marx (London and Boston: Routlege and Kegan Paul 1981)Google Scholar, part 2; Shaw, William, Marx’s Theory of History (Stanford: Standford University Press 1978)Google Scholar; McMurtry, John, The Structure of Marx’s World View (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978)Google Scholar; Miller, Richard W., Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984), ch. 5 & 6Google Scholar; Little, Daniel, The Scientific Marx (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), ch. 2Google Scholar; and my Arguing for Socialism, ch. 5, and The End of the State, ch. 5.
21 Historical materialism, as a theory of the trajectory of underlying economic structures, is a general theory of history; that is, it is an account of history’s structure and direction. Strict Marxism consists in commitment to this general theory. This question should not be confused with the question of the extent to which historical materialism is also a theory of general history. Historical materialism is, of course, commonly thought to be a theory of general history, an account of superstructural forms and cultural phenomena. But see Cohen, G.A., ‘Restricted and Inclusive Historical Materialism,’ in Ullmann-Margalit, E., ed., The Prism of Science (Dordrecht 1986) 57-83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence
23 Cf. The End of the State ch. 5.
24 See, for example, G.A. Cohen, ‘Self-Ownership, World Ownership and Equality, part 1 in Lucash, Frank S., Justice and Equality: Here and Now (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986)Google Scholar, and part 2 in Social Philosophy and Policy 3, 2 (Spring 1986) 77-96; and John Roemer, Free to Lose.
25 Ironically, some of Roemer’s own strictures against the account of equality provided by Ronald Dworkin suggest precisely this possibility. See esp. ‘Equality of Talent’ and ‘Equality of Resources Implies Equality of Welfare.’ Liberalism, in Dworkin’s version, insists on holding individuals responsible for their choices. Thus liberal egalitarians should not seek to correct for the distributional consequences of choices that are freely made. Roemer, however, calls this conclusion into question—suggesting a far more radical conception of what it is to treat people as equals.
26 See my Arguing for Socialism: Theoretical Considerations, 2nd ed. (London: Verso 1988) for support of the idea that, at a level of abstraction not too remote from actual political discourse, there exists a consensus on many normative standards.
27 Cf. my The End of the State (London: Verso 1987).
28 See, for instance, Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx and Przeworski, Adam, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)Google Scholar. A critical survey is provided in Carling, Alan, ‘Rational Choice Marxism,’ New Left Review 160 (Nov.-Dec. 1986)Google Scholar.
29 Cf. Roemer, John, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Seen. 24.