I am very pleased that our very own Chris Bertram has responded to Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and polemical “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. Chris has made some important corrections to the public record, and the comments on his post are extending that.
As it happens, I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.
Before I get to my criticism of Heath — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist – Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy in which Heath gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).
Heath’s piece on the death of Marxism seems to have ‘triggered’ the living (philosophical) Marxists and so generated quite a storm on social media—I fear this was almost certainly its purpose. So, on its own terms it must be judged a success. It also has (this is non-trivial) a true thesis: “the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.” This is (allowing for some exaggeration) right (although ‘liberalism’ here covers a quite wide spectrum), and so is his judgment on the use of Pettit’s republicanism (go read the piece).
Heath plausibly suggests that it was the intellectual encounter with Rawls (and crucially Nozick) that was a key step in the process of analytic Marxism’s demise. As he puts it, “Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.” (Emphasis added.) Lurking here is the realization among analytic Marxists that inequality will remain even if one fixes exploitation. To put the point in a way that Heath wouldn’t, the analytic Marxists discovered they implicitly agreed with the Italian sociological (elite) school and reconciled themselves with liberalism.*
So much for set-up.
I have emphasized ‘normative framework’ because this should tell us that there is a puzzle here. The puzzle is something like this: why would any Marxists embrace a normative framework at all as their main intellectual instrument? I put it like that because I want to remain neutral among those who think Marxism diagnoses all normative frameworks as sources of bourgeois ideology (and opiate for the masses) and among those that think Marxism quietly presupposes its own normative framework — one that, say, helps recruit new members to the revolutionary cause — but doesn’t treat it as an important revolutionary and/or intellectual instrument. (My own view inclines toward the latter, but I am very eager to read Vanessa Wills’ new book, so may revisit.)
The key bit of background information is that analytic Marxism was founded on two bits of intellectual self-emasculation. First, it gave up on dialectical materialism, or (as in the case of Elster) watered it down greatly. Oddly, this is the ‘bullshit’ that Heath doesn’t discuss. But dialectical materialism is the mechanism/method (in Marxist thought) between revolutionary and intellectual activity. Without commitment to something like it (analytic) Marxism is fundamentally not a revolutionary activity, but a part of the professional credit economy, or scholasticism. (Back in 2020, I wrote a post on G.A, Cohen’s rejection of dialectical materialism; see also this piece on Sydney Hook and the pre-history of Cohen’s argument [and more serious scholarship here].)
The second bit of self-emasculation among analytic Marxism is the retreat from social functionalism (and the simultaneous embrace of methodological individualism among some of them). (To be fair this is less so in Cohen.) This is, in fact, most puzzling because even a high bourgeois theorist like my teacher, the late Dan Dennett, could argue his way into it (just look at what he has to say about ‘reasons without a reasoner’)! Elster, in particular, was quite dogmatic on this point (see my other bit of real scholarship on this here).
But the commitment to a normative framework is also a feature of the professional (ahh) habitus that analytic Marxists opted to occupy. There are two structural mechanisms working here in the background that are path dependent features of twentieth century academic developments. First, to simplify: Marxism has two natural academic homes: professional economics and professional philosophy. These separated in the late nineteenth century and generated a division of labor where one (again to simplify) dealt with positive/empirical science and the other dealt with normative questions, including the setting of ends (for a scholarly version of that story see here). To be a professional political philosopher just meant to be a normative theorist (or a conceptual analysist of terms that may enter into purported normative theory [cf. Felix Oppenheim’s work back in the day (which I have discussed here)]). This automatically leaves those Marxists that reject normative theory without a home in philosophy. (Some did find a home in central bits of economics, of course, one only needs to mention say, Oskar Lange and Hirofumi Uzawa in addition to Roemer of more recent vintage.)
At this point one may well think that in the wake of Gramsci many Marxists eventually found a home in other Humanities. Fair enough, but that’s a different topic. More important, one may well think that despite the demise of analuytic Marxism, Marxists might have snuck into professional philosophy as philosophers of science (or scientific philosophers), as they surely did. (Regular readers know that I argue analytic philosophy is incapable of gatekeeping against substantive worldviews.) However, and — this is the second path-dependent development — by treating the ‘context of discovery’’ as ‘’unphilosophical,’ much of the ideology critique of Marxism became irrelevant. So, that left Marxism the slim slice of critical theory (which for contingent reasons has an awkward fit with analytic philosophy–the dominant approach inside the American empire), or in neo-Hegelian history of philosophy.
As an aside, and to explain the pushback that Heath received on social media, in recent years these path dependent trajectories have been bypassed in all kinds of ways (effortlessly one can find many avowed Marxists in social ontology, philosophy of language, philosophy of biology, and formal epistemology/philosophy of science), and even in political philosophy (where Marxists reject the ethics first commitment of the field).
So, my point is this: only if one screens off, or take for granted, these structural background conditions does Heath’s story really make sense. As we move further away from these conditions, Heath’s story will become increasingly puzzling (I pontificate as a philosopher of history). There is, of course, an important remaining question lurking here: whether these path dependent, structural conditions also shaped the self-emasculation (apologies for the gendered language, but from afar analytic Marxism seems to have been a boys’ affair) I have diagnosed.
- A revised version of this post was published before at Digressionsnimpressions.+
*I warmly recommend Richard Bellamy (1987) Modern Italian social theory: ideology and politics from Pareto to the present alongside Burnham’s (1943) The Machiavellians in order to get the richer story. One need not accept the axioms that the analytic Marxists and Italian ‘elite’ theorists have in common.
+I thank Chris Bertram, Richard Bellamy, and David Gordon for discussion.
{ 17 comments }
Chris Bertram 08.30.24 at 8:13 am
I confess that there’s quite a bit in Eric’s post that I don’t understand, such as the claim that without dialectics “(analytic) Marxism is fundamentally not a revolutionary activity, but a part of the professional credit economy, or scholasticism.” But as I understand it, the central analytical Marxist claims are that Marxism is basically a set of positive theses about the way the social world is (rather than a distinctive method) and that these theses (or updated variants of them) should and can be defended (or abandoned) using the same methodological toolkit employed by “bourgeois” social scientists.
I note that in the passage Eric cites from KMTH as being Cohen’s rejection of dialectics, what Cohen actually says (follow link) is that he rejects dialectics as a rival to analysis. Cohen italicises “rival” in order to make the emphasis clear, but the italicisation does not survive Eric’s transcription. I confess that I agree here with Cohen’s rejection of some funky Marxian special sauce that is untranslatable and unassimilable into more conventional modes of thinking and argument.
On the second point, well, I don’t think that MI is really a defining characteristic of AM. Only Elster, who bailed from the September Group pretty early, and Przeworski (also an early bailer) were strongly committed to it as a foundational principle. Cohen never resiled from the permissibility of functional explanation and nor, imo, should anyone else. Our very own former co-blogger Dan Davies in his recent book The Unaccountability Machine does a very good job of explaining how the internal complexities of systems make them unamenable to microfoundational explanation and why we have to treat them as black boxes and look at the ends they serve in practice.
John Q 08.30.24 at 10:30 am
Marx can be viewed in lots of different ways. I think of him as an economist. In that setting, much of his work is just the last gasp of the labor theory of value, including the misconceived distinction between productive and unproductive labor, baggage inherited from Adam Smith and the rest of the classical school.
What is interesting in Marx, for me, is his discussion of economic crises, the first economist to address the issue seriously. With this view of things, it was Keynes rather than Rawls, who displaced Marx. Since the 1930s, the big debates about crises have been between Keynesians and their (neo or New) classical opponents.
MisterMr 08.30.24 at 12:00 pm
OP
“At this point one may well think that in the wake of Gramsci many Marxists eventually found a home in other Humanities.”
I think that Gramsci is generally misunderstood, he was basically a leninist as far as I understand. I think that what happened in the humanities is that french structuralism (linguistic structuralism) had a big impact in european philosophy, but less so in anglo one, because basically linguistic structuralism is a methodological competitor to analitic philosophy.
French structuralism is not marxist per se but many european thinkers who were marxists experssed their thories through it. These theories had greater impact in other parts of the umanities (like critical studies), but not in anglo philosophy because that space was already taken by analitical philosophy (both structuralism and analitical philosophy are at their root philosophyes of language, and therefore epistemologies).
With an increased globalisation of academy, the thread of thought of french structuralism is losing ground VS analytical philosophy, and this diminishs the impact of those thinkers who were part of that school.
But this has nothing to do with Gramsci, even though for some reason he become the symbol of “cultural marxism” (to use a bad term).
@Chris Bertram 2
“Marxism is basically a set of positive theses about the way the social world is (rather than a distinctive method) and that these theses (or updated variants of them) should and can be defended (or abandoned) using the same methodological toolkit employed by “bourgeois” social scientists.”
IMHO, as a non philosopher, the way ideal theory is done today is quite contrary to the way it is expected to do in marxism. This is not because marxism has a secret sauce, but because “ideal theory” presupposes that one can speak of equality, or morality, in an abstract sense, whereas Marx, in his opposition to leftish hegelians and to idealism, assumed that all this sort of highly abstract concepts or categories are just a projection of current social circumstances (or previous ones). This might lead to an extreme relativism, that does not appear in Marx because he (both because of Hegel influence but also because that was the normal way of thinking at the time) believed in progress and therefore that new societies were better than older ones. When you try to apply the sort of very specific and abstract way of thinking of analytic philosophy to Marx’s moral views, they appear underdeveloped and too fuzzy; on the other hand if you apply Marx’s theory that abstract moral reasoning is just a projection of current society “ideal theory” looks quite silly.
@John Q 2
Hey the LTV is the truth!
But that said, the influence of Keynes is not just on the economics theories about crises, but also practical: crises became less bad after WW2 and for a while postwar capitalist countries had very high wage shares (so low “exploitation” in Marx’s terms). Then starting from the 80s there was “neoliberalism”, the wage share fell, and crises might be becoming stronger. If it is true that keynesianism cannot “solve” definitively crises, for one reason or the other, this creates a lot of problems for “social democracy”.
J, not that one 08.30.24 at 2:58 pm
I’ve been very surprised to find in the past few years that social functionalism is (still, now?) considered a respectable stance. I suppose most directly by discovering that Habermas takes Talcott Parsons as apparently obviously a continuing authority. It could be possible that Parsons is influential still within (Anglophone/North American) sociology departments but I had gathered since undergraduate days that most work for the past several decades was being done in opposition to him. There is of course a difference between “institutions should be examined in terms of how they function within the whole of a society” (which I would expect from Dennett, say) and “institutions should be explained in terms of the fact that they help maintain a society in some definite way” (which Dennett may veer into in what are for me his more puzzling moments).
This is tangential to the OP but for me at least raises questions that seem more fundamental than something like normativity vs. power.
Peter Dorman 08.30.24 at 8:56 pm
Most of the analytical Marxist corpus was uninteresting to me, but I wrote a dissertation centered on the use of a principal-agent model in an employment setting, so that piece was important. P-A was widely viewed as a formalization of the Marxian labor/labor power tussle; is that still the case?
One problem is that the normative use of this model depends on the choice of a counterfactual: if you don’t like the way this plays out for workers, what’s the alternative? For Sam Bowles’ 1985 AER article, it was a regime, like a worker-managed firm, in which the workers monitored each other. That didn’t sound very attractive to me, and in the end it didn’t go anywhere.
The deeper issue, which I think gets at what’s wrong with the Marxist theory of exploitation, is that the relationship between whoever is directing the firm and is motivated by its performance on the one hand, and the workers on the other, is strictly about the inducement of effort. But surely there is so much more: workers not only have to work hard enough, they also have to work consistently with each other according to some operational plan. In a way, this applies Marx’s planning/implementing linkage to firms as well as individual workers (architects vs bees, although M may be giving bees short shrift). In that case, any instrumental use of workers in an enterprise adhering to a plan risks exploitation, even in an idealized “community of workers”. Hell, self-exploitation is a real problem for individuals doing projects on their own.
The debate between Proudhon and Marx on the nature of profit is worth revisiting. I think P was closer than M, but both failed to recognize the importance — the value-creating role — of planning and organization. The take homes for me are that (1) the normative case for socialism does not mainly rest on exploitation, which would continue to be a problem in any realistic alternative, and (2) it is based far more on the merits of a more democratic and somewhat less mercenary framework for the selection of plans.
Seekonk 08.31.24 at 5:28 pm
I agree with the late journalist and writer Robert Fitch (1938-2011) who said, “Vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world.”
Seekonk 09.01.24 at 12:35 am
@6
PS: I understand “vulgar Marxism” to imply a focus on
1) the means of production – who controls them and what are they used for, and
2) the relations of production – primarily experienced as wages and working conditions.
John Q 09.01.24 at 7:04 am
MrMr “If it is true that keynesianism cannot “solve” definitively crises, for one reason or the other, this creates a lot of problems for “social democracy”.
Indeed, Keynesianism and social democracy were in retreat from the crisis of the 1970s, and the associated neoliberal counter-revolution until the GFC. Since then, things have gone back and forth, but there’s no sign of obvious victory. My point was that, as this debate has raged, Marxist economics has played no role at all. A handful of Marxists like David Harvey (who’s described as a “critical geographer”) have had some interesting things to say, but mostly it’s either pointless debates about the LTV or commentary from a radical but largely atheoretical perspective.
wacko 09.01.24 at 7:52 am
If indeed Rawls destroyed Marx, then how come no one ever heard of him? Are there hundreds of Rawlsian political parties all over the world? Thousands of Rawlsian clubs, federations, unions, societies, associations? How many people wear t-shirts with Rawls’ portrait?
Timothy Sommers 09.01.24 at 4:52 pm
“Lurking here is the realization among analytic Marxists that inequality will remain even if one fixes exploitation.”
I don’t think that is quite right. It’s worse for Marxism than that.
(i) There is no such thing as a nondistributive account of exploitation. Theories that appear to not be distributive are either (a) not at all plausible or (b) under pressure collapse to distributive theories. (A productive relation is exploitative when the products of that relationship are not shared fairly.)
(ii) Distributive theories are normative. Some distributive inequalities are unfair, despite marx’s famous footnote: “It is true that the daily maintenance of the labor power costs only half a day’s labor, and that nevertheless the labor power can work for an entire working day, with the result that the value which its use creates during a working day is twice the value of a day’s labor power. So much the better for the purchaser, but it is no wise an injustice to the seller.”
MisterMr 09.02.24 at 6:07 pm
@Timothy Sommers 10
As a general point about “exploitation”, people who are unemployed are not “exploited” in the sense that Marx uses the term, but they are still “victims” of capitalism in Marx’s account: I think there is a confusion between an “unjust society” and “interpersonal injustice”: Marx for a variety of reasons is thinking about the first while apparently analytic philosophers think to the second. Also about normativity: clearly Marx is normative, he wants to start a revolution! What he is against is moral systems based on concepts of interpersonal injustice (also the citation you make is about this). This is because interpersonal injustice can only exist relative to norms that are culturally determined, and according to Marx are a reflection of current society.
@John Q 8
Yes, but that is because the idea that we are going into bigger and bigger levels of inequality didn’t really sink in yet.
engels 09.08.24 at 9:49 pm
the misconceived distinction between productive and unproductive labor
Not An Economist but I think eg building a reservoir is productive, doing whatever tf Macquarie did to Thames Water probably isn’t.
LFC 09.09.24 at 2:02 pm
MisterMr @11
That’s not right. Rawls takes as the subject of justice the “basic structure” of society. Cohen criticized that focus as (among other things) too narrow, but that doesn’t save your stated distinction. (For discussion, see e.g. S. Scheffler, “Is the Basic Structure Basic?,” in C. Sypnowich (ed.), The Egalitarian Conscience, OUP 2006.)
engels 09.09.24 at 6:40 pm
I note that in the passage Eric cites from KMTH as being Cohen’s rejection of dialectics, what Cohen actually says (follow link) is that he rejects dialectics as a rival to analysis. Cohen italicises “rival” in order to make the emphasis clear, but the italicisation does not survive Eric’s transcription. I confess that I agree here with Cohen’s rejection of some funky Marxian special sauce that is untranslatable and unassimilable into more conventional modes of thinking and argument.
So it’s okay to read Hegel/modern European philosophy/20th century Marxism as long as it can be assimilated to Oxford-style analysis. I like Cohen but I can sort of see why that would wind some peoplle up.
Chris Bertram 09.10.24 at 7:00 am
@LFC, I seem to remember Brian Barry praising Rawls somewhere for the fact that the idea of the basic structure incorporates ideas from Marx (Critique of the Gotha Programme) and Weber in seeing the distribution of wealth and income as being downstream from the shape and ownership of institutions.
LFC 09.10.24 at 1:22 pm
@ Chris B.
That’s interesting. I think Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme (and elsewhere) is focused on the mode of production whereas Rawls has the broader (and perhaps somewhat vaguer) focus of “major social institutions.” Still, an interesting point by Barry. Cohen’s criticism, as I understand it, was that an exclusive concern with the basic structure pays insufficient attention to individuals’ particular decisions or, to put it differently, that the obligations individuals have to work toward and then maintain the operation of just institutions aren’t demanding enough in terms of individual behavior and choices. But you know Cohen’s work much better than I do and I’m not sure I’ve put his position accurately. (Btw the Scheffler piece I cited looks to be carefully done but I haven’t read it; I just happen to have checked that book out from a library.)
engels 09.11.24 at 10:17 am
If Rawls did incorporate ideas from Marx in his work he wouldn’t be the first prominent bourgeois thinker to have done so (Weber himself being another example).
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