Publication date: 1990 | First published in Nature, Society, and Thought
Note: This essay summarizing Dr. Monteiro’s dissertation at Temple University, is a revolutionary critique of Analytical Marxism — an iteration of Western Marxism’s assault in the 1980s on the revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism. It exemplifies his philosophical investigation of the crisis of Marxism at the end of the Cold War, which would culminate in his rediscovery of W.E.B. Du Bois as the revolutionary thinker for our times.
Because of its origins in England and the United States, Alex Callinicos refers to analytical Marxism as “Anglo-Marxism.” Jon Elster, G. A. Cohen, John Roemer, and E. O. Wright are its principal exponents. A less prominent group of writers include Adam Prezeworski, Philippe Van Parijs, Robert Brenner, and Andrew Levine. Its leading exponents claim to establish scientific and rigorous foundations for Marxism. They claim to divest Marxism of its teleological and normative shell, leaving intact its rational kernel, thereby constructing a positive science. Analytical Marxists insist that Marxist categories, concepts, and theories of the social world be subjected to the same standards of validity and empirical falsifiability as other sciences. In seeking to achieve these objectives they impose upon Marxism a positivist canon of science which embraces a set of assumptions that are fundamentally alien to Marxism.
Analytical Marxism’s narrow view of science
Analytical Marxism therefore narrows the range and explanatory scope of Marxism. Jon Elster makes this point clear when saying, “At the present time the social sciences cannot aspire to be more than chemistry; inductive generalizations that stick closely to the phenomena.” He continues, “The time for social physics is not yet here and may never come.” The claim that Marx was unable to develop his scientific objectives consistently is in reality an expression of the fact that classical Marxism and analytical Marxism fundamentally differ in their views of the nature of science. Although they claim a scientific approach, analytical Marxists never quite establish that theirs is but one of several alternatives among competing approaches to science. In the end, however, science is defined from the standpoint of analytical philosophy and neopositivism.
In this respect history and dialectics are seen as metaphysical appendages upon the body of scientific explanation. The scientist, from this standpoint, is viewed as a passive observer of facts. Explanation is the logical clarification and organization of facts. Formalization, abstraction, and quantification are considered basic to explanation. This conceptualization of science equates it with the achievements of Enlightenment thinkers and Newtonian mechanics. New developments in systems theory, nonlinear dynamics, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, fractal geometries, theories of catastrophe and chaos are, finally, outside the boundaries found in this definition of science. Ultimately, analytical Marxism’s approach to science is unable to address the new sciences of complexity, nor to garner from them crucial insights in the explanation of growing social complexity.
A shift in the strategic center of Marxist discourse
A foundational objective of analytical Marxism is to alter the strategic center of the discourse within Western Marxism and within the Left and liberal social sciences generally. This shift within academic Marxist discourse could in Kuhnian terms be looked at as a paradigm shift. From this perspective Western Marxism itself is viewed as a multi-paradigmatic movement. Analytical Marxism is, therefore, a recent development within the struggle for paradigm dominance within Western Marxism. From a Lakatosian perspective analytical Marxism might be viewed as a renovation of most of Western Marxism’s core methods, concepts, and theories. In this sense analytical Marxism could be seen as an epistemic break with the Hegelian and West European centered traditions of Western Marxism. In a Lakatosian sense such a break would be considered essential to restore progressiveness to what might be considered a regressive research program. Critics with commitments to varying traditions within classical and Western Marxism consider analytical Marxism a self-defeating compromise with bourgeois social theory and subversive to Marxism. Nonetheless, the “analytic rigor” which its principal exponents claim to bring to this project is directed at dissecting the body of Marxist texts and in the end establishing commensurability between Marxism and analytic philosophy. Such an achievement would alter the strategic centers of discourse within academic social science and create conditions for heightened prestige for this new Marxism.
The fact that analytical Marxism situates itself within the analytic philosophical and neopositivist traditions of social science is especially significant. This philosophical and theoretical locus associates analytical Marxism with the anti-Hegelian intellectual field within Marxism. This field includes Austro-Marxism, the Della Volpean Circle, and Althusserian structural Marxism. Austro-Marxism’s research approach centers upon developing Marxism as an empirically based social science. It was influenced by the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Mach and showed affinity with the outlook and positivist doctrines which later assumed distinctive form in the Vienna Circle. Bruno Bauer, Max Adler, Rudolph Hilferding, and Karl Renner claimed to be making Marxism into a positive science. Della Volpe and his followers in Italy sought to take Marxism from the plane of humanism, normative concerns, and a theory of action to a science. This objective ineluctably brought them into the field of positivism. Louis Althusser and the structural Marxists pursued an anti-Hegelian and antihumanist direction which shared a common terrain with earlier neo-Kantian formulations within Marxism. This field within Marxism is counterpoised to the humanist, Hegelian, and antiscientistic traditions that are associated with Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and existential Marxism. More specifically, analytical Marxism’s locus with respect to bourgeois philosophy generally is as significant as its place within Marxism. It is part of that scientific field with roots in Mill, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and Carnap. This locus constitutes, therefore, an important challenge to continental European dominance within Marxism. It challenges that tradition of epistemologically centered philosophy which has its modern roots with Descartes. It seeks to shift the epistemic center of Marxism from epistemology to science, from metaphysics and metatheory to analysis and modeling, from the social totality to the social atom. Hence, while the most recent continental imports are from post-structuralists and deconstructionists like Foucault and Derrida, a robust Anglo-Marxism is thriving in the North American academy.
Marxism within analytic philosophy
Analytically trained philosophers and social scientists until recently might have agreed with Karl Popper, who argued that Marxism was an enemy of the “open society” and scientific discourse. Marxism was, therefore, seen as a dead issue in the academy. However, in the last decade and a half it has been precisely such academicians who have been on the forward edge of looking at Marxist questions from an analytic perspective. Allen Buchanan contends, “Only fifteen years ago the works of Marx received scant attention and even less respect from the analytic mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy.” Since Allen Woods’s 1972 article, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” a spate of books and articles on Marx by analytically trained philosophers have appeared.
At the same time the activism of the sixties and seventies—in particular the civil-rights movement, the struggle against the Vietnam war, and the women’s movement—created an impulse for change and a new look at the positivist canons and protocols that dominate the academy and, in part, accounts for a new openness at that time. Marxist questions began to find their way into the university and into social science and philosophical discourse. However, interest in Marxism among the philosophers and social scientists trained in, and more or less committed to, the analytic tradition and positivist social science is more recent. Richard Miller demonstrates the wide scope and deep roots of this conjuncture.
G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence remains the most influential work in this direction. Jon Elster, John Roemer, Eric Olin Wright, and others consider this work to have been the catalyst for the analytical Marxist project. Wright holds that many students and assistant professors who initially led the Marxist movement in the universities in the seventies, after receiving tenure and publishing in respectable journals, sought an approach to Marxism “tempered by a more cautious and nuanced stance,” a stance more compatible with prevailing academic norms and standards. Moreover, they needed a Marxism not out of step with the requirement of academic success and promotion. Analytical Marxism in many respects is fashioned to fulfill these needs. At the same time the rise to power of conservative, racist, antilabor, and militarist governments in the United States and Britain in the early 1980s created an atmosphere of retreat and resignation on the part of many liberal and left academics. This was a retreat from the very movements and commitments that made it possible for Marxism to be heard within the academy in the first place.
The analytic approach to Marxism has been present in ethics, philosophy, philosophy of science, and political economy for more than a decade. Analytical Marxism is part of this movement. Specifically, a decade ago, it grew out of the annual meetings of a group of left scholars with varying sympathies to Marxism. Wright, speaking for the group, says that analytical Marxism is “the systematic interrogation and clarification of basic concepts and their reconstruction into a more theoretical structure.” Roemer and other proponents of analytical Marxism say the project is motivated by the fact that capitalism has not fulfilled the trajectory predicted by the founders of Marxism; hence, they say, the claims made by classical Marxism of capitalism’s failures are “dubious.” Second, they argue that the real failures of socialism and the failure of “conventional” Marxism to raise many important questions concerning actual socialism and capitalism have also propelled this movement.
The postpositivist and postanalytical movements in philosophy
Among academic philosophers and philosophers of science a significant movement in a postpositivist direction is underway. Analytical Marxism, however, moves in the opposite direction. Neopositivist methods, epistemologies, and logics are its foundation. Analytical Marxism, in fact, is an effort to salvage what can be salvaged of neopositivism.
The decline of positivism within the academy is discussed in a wide body of literature. Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature signaled a sharp turn in this direction. Putnam, Toulmin, and Feyerabend have waged sharp polemics with the “received view” on the unity-of-science program, the correspondence theory, methodological dominance, and other artifacts of modern positivism. Cornel West recently addressed the remoteness of professional philosophy from the world of real people and events as a consequence of the analytic approach in philosophy. Buchanan argues that analytic political philosophy, in particular, was near dormant before the appearance of Marxist questions.
On the other hand, Richard Rorty expresses the severity with which leading circles within academic philosophy reject analytic philosophy and neopositivism when stating, “The notion of ‘logical analysis’ turned upon itself and committed suicide.” Hilary Putnam was equally blunt when declaring, “The accomplishments of analytic philosophy are only negative; it destroyed the very problems with which it started by successive failure even to determine what would count as a solution.” Yet the entire weight of analytical philosophy and its epistemological, methodological, and logical commitments, as well as its view of science, are brought to bear in the research agenda of analytical Marxism. In the end, materialism and dialectics, the primary philosophical foundations of Marxism, are either rejected or recast to fit the requirements of this new Marxism. History as foundational to Marxian social theory is dismissed. Historicity is viewed as teleological and nonscientific. Even G. A. Cohen’s “traditional” defense of historical materialism is methodologically closer to Hempel’s covering-law schema than to Marx’s historical approach. In this sense, Cohen’s methodology is neither historical nor materialist.
Inverting Marxism in the name of Marx
Elster insists that Marxism’s historical method undermines social theory’s capacity to discover the actual causal mechanisms of human behavior. Rather than history and social structure, Elster argues that individual motives and intentions are the causal foundation of individual and class action. The objective of Marxian analysis, he argues, should be to discover the microfoundations of collective behavior. In the place of social class, class motives, class consciousness, and class struggle, Elster insists upon individual (i.e., microlevel) motivations, intentions, strategies, and outcomes. Game theory, for Elster, becomes the methodological alternative to historical materialism. The Marxist method of “ascension to the concrete,” and the method of enriching theories, categories, concepts, and models with increasing reference to, and verification based upon, the nonconceptual, noncategorical and nontheoretical is replaced with formalization, modeling, and increased abstraction. Roemer views the dialectical method as obscurantist. Of dialectics he says, it “is based on several propositions which may have a certain inductive appeal, but are far from being rules of inference: that things turn into their opposites, and quantity turns into quality. In Marxian social science, dialectics is often used to justify a lazy kind of teleological reasoning.” Hence, in the interest of “analytical rigor” the very substance of Marxism is inverted.
A neo-utilitarian and neoclassical approach to economics
In economic terms, Marxist political economy is fused with neoclassical methods and theories. Roemer claims that in so doing a new logical rigor is brought to the understanding of the concept of exploitation and class struggle. He claims that analytic and technical sophistication is imparted to the theory of exploitation. In agreement with Elster, Roemer insists that Marxist political economy to be scientific must remove all references to structural and historical determinants of collective behavior. Individual preference and rational choice are the final determinants of economic behavior. Social class and the labor process, as structural determinants of exploitation and class struggle, are rejected. This is a turn to the neo-utilitarianism and neoclassical marginal- utility theory which was developed in the work of Alfred Marshall. In both instances rational behavior is considered transhistorical and reflective of natural human characteristics. Unlike traditional utilitarianism, which sought to define that set of social arrangements that allow for the achievement of pleasure and happiness, analytical Marxism, in contrast, emphasizes pure economic and technical categories as the measure of the good society. Roemer’s social ontology situates humans in a set of economic relations where they are presented with an array of choices. Rational behavior is defined as that behavior which achieves the highest economic efficiency. Social efficiency and rationality are measured in Paretian Optimality terms, as increasing at least one individual’s utility without limiting that of others. This on Roemer’s part is a return to what is considered “positive economics,” which frees economic thinking from normative or value judgments.
Analytical Marxism’s theory of social change and revolutionary transformation inverts the Marxist class-struggle approach and substitutes for it a microfoundational, rational-choice theory of social change. Social transformation, in Pareto Optimality, is the result of human reason operating to overcome problems of inefficiency and suboptimality in the achievement of social outcomes. The body of normative questions that emerge from Marxism’s analysis of capitalism and exploitation, and the consequent moral choice for socialism, are rendered of minor significance. Capitalism is accepted or rejected on the basis of purely rational criteria that ultimately transcend normative determinations, ideology, class, and class consciousness. Positive measures like Pareto Optimality are the final determinants.
A logico-methodological and epistemological shift
Analytical Marxism is part of a logico-methodological and epistemological shift in the leading traditions within Western Marxism. The sense is given by those who support this shift that a process of revitalization of Marxism and social science is underway. A wide range of epistemological, ontological, methodological, and logical problems are an unalterable part of this process of “renovation.” Essentially, this shift is nothing less than an effort to radically reconstitute Marxism from the standpoint of analytic logic, neoclassical economics, and methodological individualism. The ultimate result of this project is to substantially alter the categorical grid and logical foundations of Marxism. As Roemer suggests, a “new species of social science” is central to the project. In social-theoretical terms the shift is away from a focus upon structures, hierarchies, levels, and instances, the principal concerns of Althusserian Marxism. It is, at the same time, a repudiation of dialectics, a major source of Western and classical Marxist thinking. Rational agency, freedom and choices, intentionality, motives, strategies, and the supra-individual outcomes of individual actions are thus its central dimension. Underdetermination, rather than overdetermination, freedom rather than social constraint, informs this enterprise. In a sense the entire body of continental social theory from Rousseau through Comte, Durkheim, and Marx is replaced with the tradition rooted in Locke and Mandeville.
Analytical Marxism is already refashioning the discourse within Marxism. Although the logico-theoretical sources of this project are manifold, a major part of them are, however, external to classical and continental Marxism. In this respect, Roemer questions the extent to which that which is emerging can legitimately be called Marxism in the traditional continental sense.
The challenge to what is considered functionalist explanation in Marxism—that is, explanation in which “consequences are used to explain causes”—is part of a larger challenge to the nonliberal and nonindividual trend in social theory. Structural explanation in itself, for Elster and Roemer especially, is considered inherently functionalist and teleological. The rejection of structural causality and structural explanation as functionalist and teleological lays the foundation for a return to methodological individualism. All social phenomena, Elster argues, can be explained by reference to individuals, their properties, goals, beliefs, and action. In the absence of individual foundations, Elster argues that it is impossible to establish causality. Elster correctly defines this strategy in social explanation as reductionist. It is this reductionist strategy which informs much of analytical Marxism.
Analytical Marxism views its project in part as taking on Althusserian Marxism’s antiagenoy/anti-individualist excesses. The Althusserians put forward what was perhaps the most robust anti-individualist program within Marxism. The Althusserian project, which appeared a generation earlier in Western Marxism and claimed to reconstitute politics and history and to establish fresh foundations for the class struggle, is a principal target of this effort. Currently, much of the Althusserian project is out of favor. Upon its ruins and in combat with the remnants of its influence has emerged this “new species of social theory.”
However, the body of Marxist texts is but a paradigm to be logically refashioned using the tools of modern mathematical logic, rational choice, and game-theoretic logic, as well as the modeling techniques of neoclassical economics. Lash and Urry argue that this movement provides the basis of a “fundamental mutation in Marxism and in left social science.” Elster contends that the best of bourgeois social theory and philosophy is combined with the best of Marxism. The “best of Marxism” is its anticollectivist and individualist characteristics. Marxism’s nonindividualist and structuralist features are deemed its metaphysical and speculative shell. Marx’s development of choice and rational agency is the rational kernel of his system. The scope and final substance of this “mutation” is yet to be determined.
The effort to achieve commensurability with bourgeois theory
Along with Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence the more than decade-long debate within Marxian economics which centered on the labor theory of value is a major influence. The discourse on justice and its forms prompted by the works of Rawls and Nozick has been important to this discussion. Lastly, the attempt begun by Elster to use game theory to explain collective behavior is another critical element. Jon Elster’s Logic and Society and Making Sense of Marx remain the most extensive effort to deconstruct dialectical logic and recast Marxism in a nondialectical and non-Hegelian form. Elster, furthermore, is inimitable in his robust claim that game theoretic/rational-choice modeling provides the way out of functionalism in social-science explanation.
The effort to combine the positivist, postpositivist, and Marxist discourses into a single discourse is quite extensive. In the fields of economics, philosophy, ethics, and social theory there is an elaborate search for commensurability. It is argued that the analytic project within Marxism has animated a new interest in Marxism and with it fresh possibilities for social theory. At the same time a new level of commensurability between diverse and competing explanatory paradigms is being sought. With expected diversity and varying degrees of allegiance, common commitments have emerged. These are to abstraction and formalism in logic, a focus upon rational agency in social theory, and a social ontology that establishes the rational individual as its primary unit. The analytical project’s methodological commitments are to reductionism and subjectivism—which is expressed as a commitment to methodological individualism.
The leading figures in analytical Marxism share the view that Marx intended his work to be received as scientific and that he sought to establish socialism as a science rather than a mere utopia. They claim, however, to have uncovered profound weaknesses that undermine Marx’s scientific ambitions. Dialectical logic is the chief source of these weaknesses. A qualitatively different approach to the fundamental texts of Marx is required. The results of this new reading of Marx are emergent and cumulative. This new tendency has been variously named “game-theoretic Marxism,” “rational choice Marxism,” “analytical Marxism” and “neo-classical Marxism.” The term “analytical Marxism” reflects its primary inspiration in analytic philosophy and the manifold and robust commitments inherent therein. As a designation it locates the project theoretically and geographically in the way that the designation “structural Marxism” achieved the same function for Althusserianism. Moreover, the term allows for the possibility of including a wide range of efforts that go beyond game theory or rational-choice theory, but which nonetheless can be considered a part of analytical Marxism. Furthermore, this new rendering seeks to reconstruct Marxism, utilizing the foundational philosophical methods and theoretical approaches of Anglo-American thought. Its immediate opponents are structuralism and functional explanation in Marxism; however, in essence, it seeks nothing less than a broad reconstruction of social theory and to the hegemony, in this regard, of the Anglo-American academy. In the broad sense, analytical Marxism is to social theory what analytic philosophy and logical positivism were to philosophy. Its paramount aim is to establish rational, analytic, and allegedly scientific foundations for Marxism and social theory defined in the analytic and positivist traditions.
Cohen and Roemer: A vital nexus
Elster, Cohen, and Roemer argue that the analytic method permits the testing and clarifying of the varied claims of Marx and Marxism. The initial concrete elaborations of this approach are to be found in Cohen and Roemer. Carling suggests that Cohen’s and Roemer’s work taken together establishes a formal theory of social change and exploitation. Cohen imposes a nomothetic structure upon the theory of historical materialism; Roemer treats Marxian economics as an object of neoclassical modeling. Cohen’s approach is viewed as a general theory of history and historical change. Roemer’s is a special theory with application to exploitation and class struggle under capitalism. Carling believes these two theories accord with Marx’s intention to demonstrate the law-likeness of capitalist development and general social development in the analysis found in Capital. In each case, nonetheless, agency and the rational individual are the primary center.
Cohen, while acknowledging patterns, structure, and regularity in human history, asserts that the principal impetus to dynamic social renovation is human deliberation and rational choice. Rationality and choice, Cohen holds, take place over the choice of forces of production in the face of scarcity. Scarcity creates dynamic pressure for technological innovation or choice of productive forces. Rationality works directly in the development and choice of productive technology and derivatively in the choice of the relations of productions that are most suited to promote the further development of the productive forces from their existing level. Cohen, in this manner, recasts the methodology of historical materialism. The subject of history is not the proletariat, in Lukacsian terms, as the bearers of rationality, or the revolutionary class whose purpose is determined by its place in the process of production as conceived in Engels’s formulation of historical materialism. Agency turns out to be rational individuals acting to make history. Social class, therefore, ceases to hold its traditional central place in Marxian analysis. For example, in arguing that workers are not forced to sell their labor power, Cohen and Roemer suggest a whole set of nonclass, individualist options for workers under capitalism. There are, according to this line of reasoning, degrees of proletarian freedom and unfreedom. Proletarian freedom correlates with each individual’s level of resource endowment. Therefore, the possibility always exists that some workers can escape the working class and escape being forced to sell their labor power and thus escape exploitation. Hence exploitation is not necessary to the conceptualization of the working class under capitalism. Methodologically, the emphasis is placed upon individual choices and freedoms. Rational workers can become rational petty bourgeoisie. The working class is then a collection of individuals with differing levels of freedom, resource endowment, and information.
Elster emphasizes this point when he states, “Classes are characterized by the activities in which their members are compelled to engage by virtue of the endowment structure.” The intentional behavior of agents becomes the theoretical object of analysis. Moreover, the rational individual is socially constituted, i.e., emerges as part of a social class, as a result of a choice to cooperate with other individuals with whom he or she shares similar social characteristics and resource endowments. Social class is neither inevitable nor a stable feature of capitalist society. It is derived from the social choices and behaviors of individuals. Class emerges, therefore, from the intentional behaviors of rational agents/actors. It ceases to be an objective phenomenon.
Elster’s recasting of dialectics
Elster redefines dialectics in a manner to account for the disaggregation of structure and at the same time achieve the centrality of agency and rational choice. Here resides the philosophical attempt to meet head on the Hegelian challenge to analytical and positivist social theory. Dialectics, Elster insists, is the suboptimal allocation resulting from individual optimizing behavior. He redefines dialectics in a manner which is compatible with game theory and Paretian Optimality theory. In game theory the standard example of this “dialectic” is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Elster defines the dialectic operationally and in such a way that suggests that it is the “conflict” between intentions, strategies, and outcomes. According to Elster, dialectics, rather than being the logic of natural, social, and historical processes, is the logic that emerges as a result of individuals acting to maximize social outcomes. The point is that the dialectic is not the result of social-historical processes, but of individual intentions and choices. Elster’s conceptualization of dialectics as the relationship between intentions and suboptimal social outcomes reduces all logics and logical concerns to the microlevel of events. In the end, dialectics is rendered in an antihistorical fashion.
Roemer’s view of exploitation and class
Roemer constructs what he calls a relationship of production, as opposed to a labor-theory-of-value explanation of exploitation. The market, rather than production, is the mechanism through which the wide possibilities of social relationships of production are determined. The system of exploitation is, in the end, the result of the variable resource endowment of individuals. Exploitation then is a market relationship, not a production relationship. In the case of the market, individual choice and rationality are paramount. Social classes, according to this definition, are similarly endowed collectivities. Those with greater resources are exploiters, those with less are exploited. Social classes are the consequence of these varying levels of resource endowment among groups of individuals. An exploiting class is that group of individuals who would be hurt by another group withholding their resources. The group which is hurt are exploiters, the one which benefits are exploited.
Roemer offers a second theory of exploitation. In this explanation, exploitation is seen as a form of unequal exchange of capital goods. In this way, as well, exploitation is divorced from production and is mediated through the market. Labor-market explanations, labor-theory-of-value formulations, as well as questions concerned with the extraction of surplus value, are unnecessary to understanding exploitation in the Roemerian system.
Roemer asserts that the most significant feature of capitalist production is not what happens at the point of production, or in the labor process, but “the differential ownership of production assets.” Hence, rather than property relationships, especially ownership of means of production, being a consequence of production relationships, in Roemerian exploitation the situation is reversed. As Lebowitz argues, in Roemer’s system “logical priority has shifted.” It does not matter, Roemer argues, whether labor hires capital or capital hires labor; the poorly endowed are exploited and the rich exploit in either case. This is Roemer’s “isomorphism theorem.” It flows from a quantitative measure, rather a qualitative measure of social class. It shifts the logical center away from the process of production to the market. At the same time, this theorem assumes an atomic ontology (the notion that social complexity emerges from the actions of equal social atoms), methodological individualism and the assumption of a universal and single social reality for all social classes. The rich and poor, finally are collection of individuals—the consequence of aggregating individuals based upon similar features. Rich and poor as social categories are quantitative measures of varying levels of resource endowments of individuals. The categories capitalist and worker, on the other hand, measure qualitatively distinctive and fundamentally different social properties emerging from fundamentally different relationships in the labor process and the social structure generally. However, the Roemerian argument denies this qualitative relationship and develops in its place a linear theory of capitalist relationships predicated upon unequal endowments rather than class relationships. Roemer’s approach predisposes analysis to the individual and away from social class as socially determined.
Briefly, Roemer’s theory of class and exploitation assumes that all actors begin as equally rational and share a single definition and evaluation of rationality. Rationality, moreover, is viewed as transhistorical. Rationality, efficiency, and optimality have the same meaning for all classes and individuals. This assumes a single social universe for all classes. They differ in their unequal endowments of social resources. This focus upon rationality and endowments, rather than labor power, which is unique to the working classes, turns the explanation of exploitation away from surplus labor and surplus value. In this sense, agents with fewer endowments can choose either to continue to be exploited or to withdraw from the game. In so doing, less endowed agents make a choice of productive techniques and mode of production by agreeing to continue to be exploited or by refusing to continue in the game. Given this approach, exploitation is deemed a condition of every mode of production, because in every economic system there are those who have more and those who have fewer resources. Thus exploitation is transhistorical.
Exploitation and rational choice
For Roemer, in contrast to Marx, exploitation is not a form of slavery and force (Reiman 1987); it is a choice made by strategic players in a rational game. Roemer’s theory, because it is a distributive and market explanation of exploitation, rather than a production or labor explanation, can be viewed as a special instance of the general theory of historical change as articulated by Cohen. It will be recalled that Cohen argues that agents choose their productive techniques and, indirectly, their relations of production. Roemer argues the special case that rational agents choose their mode of production. For Roemer and Cohen all questions of struggle are ultimately questions of the choice of modes of production. These questions rest, finally, upon the best technology and most efficient and rational arrangement of social relations. The day-to-day economic and trade-union issues, the struggles for democracy and other political issues find no place in this theorizing. Finally, Roemer and Cohen narrow the struggle of the working class solely to issues of modes of production, thus denying struggles short of maximum demands.
For Roemer exploitation characterizes feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Exploitation emerges as a natural outgrowth of rational choice. It is a metafeature of human existence. Moreover, rationality is a quality of individuals and transcends class position and history and is prior to social structures. Exploitation is the consequence, therefore, of strategic choices. Hence, the two principal categories of Roemer’s system, exploitation and rationality, are ahistorical.
Roemer claims to situate his effort between traditional Marxist definitions of exploitation and neoclassical or market definitions. As a part of Marxist discourse, Roemer’s thinking is an interpretation of Marx’s political economy and his rendering of Marxist economic categories must be seen as part of a strategy that seeks to achieve commensurability between Marxist and neoclassical economics. The strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s work are determined by using the standards of positivist social science and neoclassical economic theory. Along with Roemer, Elster and E. O. Wright make significant contributions to this interpretation. It is claimed that this interpretation enhances the predictive and explanatory power of Marx’s work. It emerges, Roemer argues, out of a “crisis of Marxism.” This crisis is to be found as much in the changed nature of capitalism as compared to Marx’s day as in the failures of socialism.
Game-theory and rational-choice techniques are used to demonstrate the socially necessary nature of exploitation and that exploitation continues after the democratization of the labor process and socialism. Following Lash and Urry, Brewer argues that through using game-theory proofs Roemer seeks to modernize the traditional conception of historical materialism and the types of collective action necessary to eliminate exploitation as it is articulated in his system. Lash and Urry emphasize the fact that exploitation and its elimination is the central point in Roemer’s work. The elimination of capitalist exploitation only leads to a system of socialist exploitation.
Game theory and Marxism
Elster is responsible for developing the main theses connecting game theory with Marxism. In the strongest terms Elster makes the case for a robust intentionality, as against structural causality, to explain human adaptation. In summing up Elster, Lash and Urry say:
“Elster argues for the importance of two basic premises of rational choice theory (1) that structural constraints do not completely determine the actions individuals take and (2) that within the feasible set of actions compatible with constraints and possessed with a given preference structure an individual will choose those that he or she believes will bring best results.”
The disaggregation of structures ultimately results in an investigation of the interdependence of decisions and the rational-choice foundations of decisions. Elster claims that game theory captures three sets of interdependencies. First, “the reward of each depends on the reward of all, by altruism, envy, a desire for equality and similar motivations.” Second, “the reward of each depends on the choices of all, through general social causality.” Third and last, “the choice of each depends on [the anticipation of] the choice of all.” Elster argues that in order to short circuit the possibility of infinite regress, game theory introduces the notion of equilibrium—a suboptimal, yet “satisficing” (in the sense of Simon’s theory of limited rationality) point. These conditions are based upon assumptions of symmetry—that the agents are equally rational and know (as well as expect) each to be equally rational.
Elster extends what is already implied in Cohen and Roemer, i.e., the inversion of Marxist materialism and the turn to individualism in explanation. At the same time, Elster extends the assumptions of methodological individualism further than either Cohen or Roemer. He argues for the convergence of Marxism and game-theoretic and rational-choice mechanisms of explanation of individual preference.
Methodological individualism, Elster argues, represents a strong commitment to agency. Elster delineates four stages of agency, each reflecting a different stage of human rationality. In the current stage of human rationality the main contradiction is the suboptimal outcome of human rationality and intentions. Humans are not yet able to overcome the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” manifested in a lack of shared preferences and a preference for cooperation. Human outcomes in the current stage are characterized by the feature of unanticipated consequences. The next stage of human rationality occurs as humans overcome the contradiction of suboptimality in outcomes and choose assurance games, which are based upon universal cooperation and shared preferences.
Class struggle, class consciousness, as with collective action generally, are operationally defined in game-theoretic terms and are problems of suboptimality. Class struggle is defined as a form of bargaining between individuals. Class consciousness is the capacity of the working class to overcome the “free rider” problem—that is, to achieve cooperation and break out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Class consciousness is, therefore, a form of rational behavior, which ultimately leads to assurance games and preferences for universal cooperation. This new stage, however, is arrived at as a consequence of individuals changing their behaviors, not of class conflict.
Methodological individualism combines in Elster, therefore, commitments to an atomistic ontology and a reductionist methodology. On the side of method the commitment is to the individual as the principal unit of analysis. On the side of ontology it views the social individual as the primary social reality. Moreover, rational-choice/game-theoretic analysis and methodological individualism encounter similar ontological constraints. Both are compelled to accept individuals and their properties as sufficient conditions of explanation of the social world. Ontological individualism, moreover, holds that social facts cannot be said to have status of their own, since no such facts could exist if there were no individuals who thought and behaved in specific ways. Hence the entire social structure is never given in structural terms à la Durkheim, but constructed from the familiar and the apparent—that is, the observable individual. In summary, Elster’s proposal contains two major components: first, all social explanation is reduced to the micro or individual level; second, the individual is viewed as the ultimate constituent of social complexity.
Philosophical method, logic, and social theory
Logical analysis, empiricism, and reductionism are inseparable in analytical Marxism. Logical analysis, furthermore, is foundational to the methodological-individualist and rational-choice/game-theoretic dimension of the project. It expresses robust commitments in logical terms and epistemologically represents the disaggregation of the social totality. It stands in opposition to the synthetic, dialectical, structural, and developmental in philosophical method and logic. It supports abstraction, formalism, and description in logic.
Philosophical method and logic meet social theory at the point that the results of dialectical reasoning are “rendered into straightforward logical arguments.” “I believe,” Elster insists, “that dialectical thinkers have had a unique gift for singling out interesting and sometimes crucial problems even if their attempts at a new method must be deemed a failure. As I see it, there is nothing of real importance in Hegel or Marx that cannot be formulated in ordinary language and formal language.” The results of these thinkers are viewed solely as “paradigmatic examples.” Unless these results are reconstituted and liberated of their functionalist and teleological shell, their scientific claims will go unrealized. Nothing is lost, according to Roemer, in the inversion save Marxism’s teleology. What is gained are mechanisms that explain human behavior on its own terms without reference to consequences and prior goals. In Making Sense of Marx, Elster submits that his objective is to demonstrate how the “Marxist paradigm” can be addressed without recourse either to methodological collectivism or dialectics and ultimately without regard to Marxist method.
Repudiation of the communist objective
The anticapitalist and communist objectives of Marxism are relaxed and received with extreme skepticism by analytical Marxism. Analytical Marxists suggest a number of possible nonworking-class solutions for workers under capitalism. Cohen argues that exploitation and proletarian unfreedom are not necessary conditions of capitalism. In other words, there are several means by which individual workers or groups of individual workers can realize their class objectives under capitalism. Elster ultimately argues that traditionally defined class struggle will not be the route to communism. It is, he insists, the achievement of a qualitatively different state of rationality that creates the conditions for assurance games and reciprocity—the basis of communism. Thus the concerns of analytical Marxism with respect to social transformation and revolution shift away from the class struggle and socialism and to the possibilities of gradual evolution under capitalism. This evolution is oriented to issues of the elevation of human rationality. E. O. Wright supports Roemer’s argument that communism and socialism as social formations are characterized by a lack of “skilled-based exploitation.” Socialism, and eventually communism, is the withering away of resource-endowment inequality, particularly of skill-resource inequality. Education, then, becomes the motive force of history. Analytical Marxists, in particular Roemer and Elster, argue that socialism and communism are exploitative systems. They contend that exploitation need not be considered an injustice. They argue that under socialism and communism there is “just exploitation.” It is possible, they argue, that due to patterns of endowments and leisure preferences, the endowment-poor person exploits the endowment-rich person. This situation can occur under any social system and is actually the outcome of a preference for leisure and the endowment situation. Elster agrees that this demonstrates “conclusively that exploitation is not inherently wrong.” This idea of “just exploitation” or, to use Elster’s formulation, exploitation with “a clean causal history,” suggests that exploitation is and will remain a part of human social behavior. Its intentional content and relationship to strategic games are what changes.
Analytical Marxism and revisionism within Marxism
Vaillancourt argues that positivism influenced Austro-Marxism. The Second International and the dominant line within the German Social Democratic Party was characterized by an abandonment of class-struggle concepts and the belief in the gradual evolution of capitalism into postcapitalism, characterized by expanding democracy and proletarian freedom. It would appear that analytical Marxism has much in common with both of these trends. On the other hand, it is analogous to empirio-criticism. The Marxist followers of empirio-criticism viewed it as a way of updating and modernizing the philosophical foundations of Marxism. Ultimately this represented a turn away from materialism and dialectics. What the success and final outcome of this new Marxism will be cannot yet be determined. Whether it will create a new research program within Marxism is not yet clear. Its long-term impact upon Marxism and social science is still being weighed. Some, including McLennan and Lash and Urry, believe its impact is already significant. McLennan believes that analytical Marxism “will dominate discussion of Marx and Marxism for the next decade.” Lebowitz feels that analytical Marxism has a great deal to offer to Marxism. Roemer’s examination of exploitation as a counterfactual proposition, Elster’s fallacy of composition, and Cohen’s discussion of proletarian unfreedom are considered by him as substantial new thinking. He, however, believes there is not much left of Marx in analytical Marxism. Anderson and Thompson view the project as a form of academic opportunism. They say “to people who feel they must publish books and articles in respectable places, Analytical Marxism offers only more elegant taxonomies and more promising agendas. This is why it threatens to enervate Marxist theory in the name of rigor.” Lenin, when referring to the empirio-critics, who claimed that philosophy stood above politics and the class struggle, used words that could politically contextualize analytical Marxism. He said, “One must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.”
Although there are novel formulations and correlations in the thinking of several analytical Marxists, there is a great deal that lags considerably behind science in general and the social sciences in particular. For instance, Elster’s riveting of social science to chemistry and his view of physics is some years behind current thinking in science. Elster recently argues for social scientists to recognize the limits of the predictive power of the social sciences. He suggests that macrotheory and structural analysis are illusionary. We, he contends, are bound to the most immediate level of empirical facts. On the other hand, the return to nondialectical and linear modes of thought constitutes a return to older logical methods. The most recent thinking in science poses a powerful alternative to the Newtonian rendering of the world. Moreover, new forms of realism and emergent materialism pose a scientific alternative to the mechanical materialism present in analytical Marxism.
Marxism, if it is to be scientific, requires commensurability first and foremost with what is emergent in science. The new sciences of complexity, which radically break with the Newtonian and Enlightenment traditions, are decisive in this respect. In failing to come to terms with these new realities and their meaning for social theory, analytical Marxism fails to advance Marxism.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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