Marxism Without Tears: a Review of John E. Roemer's “Free to Lose”

Abstract

John E. Roemer's Free To Lose* Geoffrey M. Hodgson Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic Whatever the details of the verdict, this is a major book. John Roemer here presents a clear summary of his immense analytical scholarship over the last decade. The corpus of this work is impressive in its own right, displaying as it does such great flair and analytical precision, but it is also a significant milestone in the development of both Marxist theory and economics as a whole. Notably, after reaching a postwar peak of popularity and academic interest sometime in the 1970s, Marxist theory has since declined from prominence, partly due, of course, to the changed political climate of the 1980s. However, after the varied and turbulent debates of the 1970s, Marxist economic theory has now been consolidated into no more than two major innovative and developing schools of thought. The first is the regulation school, originating in France and pioneered by Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, Pascal Petit and others. Its focus has been on the dynamic, evolutionary and macroeconomic aspects of Marxist and other allied economic theories. The second is the school to which John Roemer has made such a major contribution, perhaps best titled as Rational choice Marxism (Carling, 1986), and including also G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster. It focuses on the analysis of the concepts of exploitation and class, and uses, as Roemer (p. 172) admits, standard tools of microeconomic analysis. Notably, both schools of thought reject much of the invalid Marxist theoretical baggage, particularly in most cases the labor theory of value and the theory of the falling rate of profit. Both schools are innovative and creative, in contrast to the Marxist fundamentalism which dominated many debates of the 1970s. But clearly there is a great divergence here. One group of Marxists reject the validity or priority of the search for sound microfounda tions and concentrate, instead, on macro-modelling in an evolutionary framework. In contrast, for the other group, microfoundations are almost everything, and they are keen to preoccupy themselves with