What has come to be called ‘analytical Marxism’ is to be celebrated when properly understood. It is a phenomenon that has engaged some of the best people in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. In the last fifteen years there has been a blossoming of anaytic studies on Marx and on Marxism in the mainstreams of academic disciplines, with the first impetus coming from philosophers who had been working in the analytic tradition. During the previous sixty years of analytic philosophy virtually nothing was said about Marxism. It was not even considered worthy of philosophical attack. Bertrand Russell, who did write on Marxist topics, confined his considerations on Marx to popular texts. Karl Popper, who did take Marxism seriously philosophically, concentrated on criticisms which were in any case ignored by analytic philosophers.

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 What follows will consider instead a style of theorizing that has effectively superceded Western Marxism, just as Western Marxism earlier replaced the Marxism of the Second International.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 make no apology for what is by now a hackneyed title. It derives, of course, from Croce’s book on Hegel, and I choose it because I want to suggest that the question ‘What is living and what is dead in Marxism?’ is the right question to ask. The analytical approach is appropriate if it means distinguishing and discriminating between different aspects of Marxism, and refusing to reject or embrace it en bloc as a monolithic creed. However, this does not mean that Marxism can be chopped up into a number of disconnected theses, with a view to producing an inventory of those which are true and those which are false. Marxism claims to be a systematic theory, whose various elements hang together in an organised way. Some would say that this creates an unbridgeable gulf between Marxist and analytical philosophies. Nevertheless, though Marxism’s claim to be systematic should be taken seriously, there are different readings of the theory and of how its components are connected, and different versions will see different elements as central. This is where the careful discrimination of meanings and interpretations is needed. It is not simply a question of deciding whether each of the various elements, in isolation, is true or false, more a matter of deciding where the emphasis should lie if Marxism is to continue to illuminate our understanding of the social world. It is in this sense that we can talk about Marxism or any other theory as ‘living’ — not just as containing true assertions, but as being capable of playing a vital and creative role in human thought and action. In what version, then, if any, is Marxism a living philosophy?

Marxism has probably been the most influential philosophy of this century. Until recently, however, it was either ignored or dismissed without serious consideration by the great majority of English-speaking philosophers. If the situation is now changing, that is thanks in good measure to the development of analytical Marxism.

Professor Jon Elster advances the proposal that Marx – and Marxists–really stand for ‘methodological individualism,’ as opposed to ‘methodological collectivism.’ He defines ‘methodological individualism’ in the following terms:

This paper is concerned with the treatment by Jon Elster of methodological aspects of Marx’s work, and, in particular, with his assessment of Marx’s distinctive contribution to methodology. The relevant material is to be found in a variety of writings with the most complete and systematic presentation in Making Sense of Marx. The issues to be discussed here comprise, of course, only a single dimension of Elster’s view of Marx. It is, however, a strategic one whose influence is felt throughout the whole. Moreover, it is the dimension which is closest to the intellectual interests of Elster himself. Prominent among those interests has been the question of the relevance of methods of formal reasoning, particularly of modal logic and of game theory, to the study of society. Hence, the present emphasis should take one near the heart of Elster’s Marx, and offer a perspective on his thought in general.

A particularly important topic for Marxist theory is that of popular politics: the ways in which the underclasses of society express their interests and values through collective action. Classical Marxism postulates a fundamental conflict of interest among classes. It holds that exploited classes will come to an accurate assessment of their class interests, and will engage in appropriate collective actions to secure those interests. The result is a predicted variety of forms of underclass collective action: boycotts, rent strikes, tax and food riots, rebellion, and revolution. Underclass members of society instigate and support such protests because it is in their material class interest to do so. It will emerge, however, that this account is too schematic to provide a basis for explanation of popular politics. The microfoundations approach to Marxist theory will prove useful in this context because it directs us to some of the resources needed to provide a more adequate account of popular collective action.

‘Feuerbach,’ Marx famously complains in the first paragraph of the 6th Thesis, ‘resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’ This paper takes it that Marx was saying more than that people’s identities are socially formed. In his day, as in ours, this must surely have been recognized as banal by everyone except those with obviously ideologically warped perspectives. At the same time, it is debatable that Marx meant this Thesis, or any of the other 10, to express a philosophical theory, for instance of epistemology or philosophical anthropology. In this essay the comment is taken just as a critique of Feuerbach for allowing philosophical bias to misdirect him from empirical study of real world conditions in the service of progressive practical activity.

Jon Elster believes that methodological individualism is self-evident (Elster 1986, 66). Not finding it so, and being suspicious of philosophers who claim that their views are so obvious as to demand no arguments in their favor, I went back to retrace the outlines of the methodological individualism debate. It turns out that the participants to the debate disagree widely as to what they are arguing about; it is not obvious to them what methodological individualism is. The defenders of methodological individualism agree with their critics much more than those critics acknowledge. Each side ascribes views to the other which its proponents disown explicitly.

The definition of capitalist exploitation that I put forth was as follows. Let a society be divided into a coalition S and its complement S’. S is exploited and S’ is exploiting if: (1) S would be better off if it withdrew with its per capita share of productive, alienable assets; (2) S’ would be worse off if it withdrew with its per capita share of productive, alienable assets; and (3) S’ would be worse off if S withdrew from society with its own assets. Call this the property relations (PR) definition of exploitation. I favored the PR definition over the traditional approach, which focuses upon the relationship between capitalist and worker mediated by a labor market and consummated at the point of production, because the classical approach fails to locate the source of exploitation in the unequal and unfair distribution of the productive assets.

John Roemer’s recent work uses the mathematics of Social Choice Theory to examine the structure of socialist ideals. One striking conclusion is that the social ownership of the means of production entails the strict equalization of ‘utility.’1 The conclusion is surprising. While of course opposing many existing inequalities, socialists (as opposed to their critics) have not traditionally understood socialism to require strict equalization. Marx, for example, is scathing in his criticism of levelling, which he sees as a form of ‘crude’ communism.2

This paper is both exposition and critique. By way of exposition, I show with less than full mathematical rigor what several of Roemer’s axioms of social ownership mean and why they entail the equality of utility.

There is no more intriguing or provocative argument in the Marxian corpus; it is the theoretical and rhetorical heart of Capital; not surprisingly, it is the locus of endless controversy: capitalist profit is possible, Marx argues, only because the capitalist is able to find on the market a unique commodity that possesses ‘the specific use-value ... of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.’ This commodity is labor power, the capacity to work, which, Marx insists, must be sharply distinguished from the activity of laboring, since it is precisely this distinction that lays bare capitalism’s essence, revealing it to be —exploitation.

G. A. Cohen and John Roemer, two of the most influential of the ‘Analytic Marxists,’ have argued convincingly that the Marxian concept of exploitation must include injustice as part of its definition. ‘Exploitation’ is more like ‘murder’ which includes injustice in its very meaning, than like ‘killing’ which describes a fact which is often unjust but need not be. ‘Forced extraction of unpaid or surplus labor,’ then, is not sufficient for exploitation. The extraction must be unjust to be exploitative. Otherwise we would have to call it exploitation if people were forced to labor without pay as just punishment, or if people-selected by lottery-were drafted to fight a defensive war and provided no more than subsistence for their trouble, or if initiators of an unjust war were forced to labor to repair the damages they had caused.

This paper argues that exploitation is a central and non-redundant concept in a Marxian understanding of capitalism. This finding runs counter to John Roemer’s conclusion in his critical reexamination of exploitation. For a static setting with perfectly competitive markets, Roemer shows that exploitation is a property of agents which derives from unequal wealth endowments, that is, from differential ownership of productive assets (DOPA), not a social relation between capitalists and workers. Further, he shows that DOPA suffices in this setting to generate core phenomena in Marxian theory-accumulation, domination, alienation, and inequality-with no reference to an independent notion of exploitation. Roemer concludes that DOPA is the central analytical category in Marxian theory, and exploitation a redundant, indeed incorrect, concept therein. A direct implication is that distributive justice should be Marxism’s central ethical concern. The basis for Roemer’s sweeping conclusion is that his model is general, incorporating no special institutional assumptions and abstracting from any impediments to market equilibria. That is, his conclusion rests on an ahistorical, timeless economic model.

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ (for proletarians) and ‘pay for labour services’ (for independent, self-employed ‘professionals’). Unlike labour services (living labour, living labour, i.e., work itself) but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value (it contains a specific amount of embodied labour) and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work (necessary labour) confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself (necessary and surplus labour) confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer.

The theory of historical materialism is the core commitment of Marx’s social theory. More than his views on markets, philosophical methods, the state and social institutions, it is this theory which sets Marx’s views apart from alternative traditions in political philosophy. Marx believes that there is a tendency for societies to make moral and material progress. The point of Marx’s theory of historical materialism is to offer a theory of the mechanisms which produce this tendency. However, in Marx’s own formulation, the precise nature of these mechanisms remains obscure. In The German Ideology, Marx emphasizes the growth of human productive powers as the fundamental cause of historical change and progress: social forms (e.g., feudalism, capitalism) change in order to adapt to the requirements of further productive development. By contrast, in The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse, Marx emphasizes the desires and interests of classes as fundamental to explaining social change. Here, it is class struggles (aimed at ending specific conditions of oppression) which determine not only when an old social form will be replaced by a new one, but also the nature of the new social form itself. Marx never specifies the connection between these two explanations of historical change, between the development of human productive powers and class struggles. In particular, Marx is not explicit as to whether there are two distinct mechanisms at work in the production of historical progress, or only one.

In a volume entitled Analytical Marxism, John Roemer portrays analytical Marxists as ‘largely inspired by Marxian questions, which they pursue with contemporary tools of logic, mathematics, and model building.’ Eschewing dogmatism, analytical Marxists raise foundational questions that conventional Marxism often overlooks and are committed to the necessity for abstraction in seeking answers to them. One such foundational question is raised by Jon Elster in a companion volume, Making Sense of Marx. His question is the subject of this essay.

Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.

Every single day, every newspaper in the world carries some further evidence as to how limited the Earth’s resources are. Every single day, therefore, we should grow more deeply convinced that the notion of abundance has become hopelessly irrelevant and can safely be shelved forever. Or so it seems. In the final section of this paper, I shall defend the opposite view: that growing awareness of the limits of our resources should make the notion of abundance, suitably (though still plausibly) defined, more and not less relevant to our pursuits. Whether or not this defence turns out to be successful, I hope this paper will go some way towards clarifying this notoriously elusive notion, as well as its no less elusive and no less important antonym: scarcity.

Analytical Marxists stress that Marx did not just want to provide a plausible historical narrative but sought ‘to provide a theory,’ as Debra Satz well put it, ‘which explains the real causal structure of history.’ But it is also the case, as Richard Norman stresses, that ‘Marxism claims to be a systematic theory, whose various elements hang together in an organized way.’ It claims to be able to trace the connection between different aspects of social existence where these aspects are not viewed as merely conventional or ideological connections but ‘real, objective connections... to be established by an examination of historical facts...’ For Marxists, analytical or otherwise, historical materialism is central in such an account. It is for Marxists the theory which seeks to explain in a systematic scientific way epochal social change. Keeping this firmly in mind, I want to start from a series of issues emerging principally from a consideration of three essays in this volume which both significantly complement and conflict with each other. Seeing how this works out points to a way Marxian social theory can be developed. I then want to set such an account against more discouraging conclusions for Marxist social theory pointed to in Allen Buchanan’s careful survey article on analytical Marxism as well as some remarks with a similar overall thrust by Jon Elster.2 The three articles in question are Sean Sayers’s ‘Analytical Marxism and Morality,’ Richard Norman’s ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Marxism?’ and Debra Satz’s ‘Marxism, Materialism and Historical Progress.’