Rational Choice Marxism Research Articles

ANALYTICAL MARXISM

Abstract This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on Analytical Marxism (AM) and analyses its relevance for social theory. AM is precisely defined and distinguished from Rational Choice Marxism (RCM). The different substantive implications of the two approaches are discussed: according to RCM, the role of Marxism in the social sciences is exhausted, whereas AM has reconstructed a set of propositions that aim to provide the foundations of a distinctive approach in social theory. The methodological debate around and within AM is analysed and the shortcomings of methodological individualism and rational choice theory are stressed, raising doubts on the claim that RCM is the only scientific approach to Marx's theory. Yet, wholesale rejections on a priori methodological or exegetical grounds are questioned. A focused, immanent critique of RCM is developed, which emphasizes the lack of an adequate analysis of structural constraints and endogenous preferences in RCM models. It is argued that the analysis of endogenous preferences and structural constraints is consistent with an anti‐reductionist AM approach and it may provide the outline of a fertile, distinctive research programme in explanatory social theory that builds on the core of Marxism identified by AM.

Review Essay: A Future for (Analytical) Marxism?

Andrew Levine analyses the theoretical legacy of recent Marxist schools, focusing in particular on analytical Marxism (AM). He argues that AM is uniquely suited to provide the foundations for a revival of Marxist theory. In this paper, Levine's reconstruction of the core of Marxism and his analysis of the trajectory of AM are critically discussed. Although the theoretical contribution of AM should not be overlooked, some objectionable methodological and theoretical tenets of AM, and in particular of Rational Choice Marxism, are discussed, which may help to explain the demise of the school. Various directions for further research are suggested, which emphasise the importance of structural constraints and endogenous preferences.

G. A. Cohen and the Critique of Political Economy

Abstract G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History (KMTH) bears examination from the standpoint of the renewed critique of capitalism promoted by the anti-globalization movement. Cohen's own current view of his book places it firmly within the framework of rational-choice Marxism, which is characterized by a nihilist attitude towards the entire tradition of Marxist political economy. KMTH itself displays an ambivalent attitude towards Capital, simultaneously basing itself on a close reading of Marx's economic writings and seeking to make ever more explicit Cohen's rejection of the labor theory of value. This results in significant conceptual tensions, notably in Cohen's effort sharply to distinguish between the material and the social, but also weakens KMTH's account of the fettering of the productive forces by capitalist relations of production. The effect — particularly when combined with Cohen's espousal of rational-choice Marxism — is, regrettably, to shut him off from the current renaissance of Mar...

The Spatiality of The Limits to Capital

In The Limits to Capital, David Harvey (1982) sets himself three goals. First, he offers a dialectical reading of Das Kapital, together with Die Grundrisse (Marx 1972; 1983), replicating the spirit of Marx’s own analysis in opposition to the more analytical and methodologically individualist readings of rational choice Marxism prevailing at the time (Barnes and Sheppard 1992). Second, he extends Marx’s analysis to pay explicit attention to space, in order to demonstrate that the geographical nature of capitalism fundamentally shapes its evolution. Third, he seeks to explain why capitalism cannot transcend its own limits, despite its flexibility and inventiveness (hence the book’s title). With respect to the first goal, he succeeds brilliantly. Of the many accounts of Capital that I have read, Harvey comes closest to replicating the spirit and scope of Marx. It is a sad commentary on radical political economy, and on the status of economic geography among economists of all ideological persuasions, that the book never received the attention it deserves outside geography. 1 His geographical extension of Marx has been enormously influential, however, among geographers and others interested in the geographical dynamics of capitalism. A whole lexicon of concepts, now widely used and discussed, is articulated for the first time in Limits. These include uneven geographical development; the spatial fix; the built environment as a barrier to capital accumulation; the three circuits of investment capital; territorial regulation; space–time compression; local entrepreneurialism and inter-place competition; the production of place, space and scale; finance, fixed and fictitious capital; rent and urban redevelopment; and the instability of the capitalist spaceeconomy. When I sat down to re-read Limits for this symposium, I was surprised to find him developing concepts that received little attention until even a decade later. This prescience is further tribute to how much the efflorescence of radical geography owes homage to Harvey, also among those who have become vocal critics. In this brief essay, I seek to summarize how Harvey spatializes Capital; to assess this achievement in light of subsequent research

A Japanese Contribution to the Critique of Rational Choice Marxism

L'A. contribue a la critique du marxisme du choix rationnel en proposant un autre paradigme de la theorie marxiste fonde sur la pensee economique du japonais K. Uno. Examinant l'analyse theorique que celui-ci entreprend du materialisme historique, de l'economie politique et du capitalisme de Marx, l'A. montre que Uno critique la reconstruction particuliere de la position marxiste que represente le marxisme du choix rationnel tel qu'il est defendu par J. Roemer.

Rational Choice Marxism and Social Class Boundaries

Rational Choice Marxism (RCM) is an increasingly influential strand of thought in an increasingly post-Marxist world. Part of its interest is the attempt of some thinkers to move beyond the exegetical debates that have often passed for Marxist social science. This article attempts an assessment of how fruitful this shift of focus has been in one area where there is significant overlap with the interests of more mainstream social scientists, the conceptualization of social class boundaries. The conclusions are mainly negative and it is pointed out that rational choice discussions of class need not necessarily take an explicitly Marxist form. The article ends with a construal of a relatively familiar sociological class schema in terms that should be congenial to rational choice theorists.

GAME THEORIES? SPATIAL DIVISIONS OF LABOUR AND RATIONAL CHOICE MARXISM

Criticisms of Spatial Divisions of Labour have argued that the model ultimately dissolves into empirical particularities so that its theoretical tenets and context have been neglected. This paper attempts to draw out these premises by comparing Spatial Divisions of Labour with rational choice Marxism. Rational choice Marxism has aimed to provide microfoundations for structural categories by analysing the strategic interactions of individual actors. The approach has been criticised for relying on a rational, utilitarian and individualistic theory of action and, therefore, for assuming the constitution of agents to be given. The spatial divisions of labour approach also involves a move towards the microscale and emphasises the importance of strategic relations. In this case, the specified actors are collective entities. Once again, the aims and interests of the actors appear to be predetermined so that the significance of their interactions is limited. In conclusion it is argued that studies of uneven development should pay greater attention to the historical constitution of agents within their institutional contexts.

Making History. Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory.

Preface Introduction to the Second Edition Introduction Chapter 1 Subjects and Agents 1.1. There concepts of agency 1.2. The orthodox conception of agents 1.3. Human nature: the need for a philosophical anthropology 1.4. Human nature: morality, justice and virtue. 1.5. Practical reason and social structures Chapter 2 Structure and Action 2.1. The concept of social structure 2.2. The basic concepts of historical materialism 2.3. Orthodox historical materialism 2.4. Rational-choice Marxism 2.5. Structural capacities and human action 2.6. What's left of historical materialism? Chapter 3 Reasons and Interests 3.1. Expressivism and the hermeneutic tradition 3.2. Interpretation and social theory 3.3. Charity, truth and community 3.4. The Utilitarian theory of action 3.5. Interests and powers Chapter 4 Ideology and Power 4.1. Collective agents 4.2. Falsehood and ideology, I 4.3. Falsehood and ideology, II 4.4. Nation, state and military power 4.5. A note on base and superstructure Chapter 5 Tradition and Revolution 5.1. Revolution as redemption: Benjamin and Sartre 5.2. Marxism and the proletariat 5.3. The rationality of revolution 5.4. Revolution and repetition 5.5. The tradition of the oppressed Conclusion Index

Analytical Political Economy: A Geographical Introduction

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on ‘space and analytical political economy’. First, the term analytical political economy is defined by an examination of the historical rise of the political economy perspective within economics. Second, three leading variants within the analytical political economic tradition are distinguished and described—neo-Ricardianism, fundamental Marxism, and rational choice Marxism. Last, the consequences of inserting geography into the aspatial theories of analytical political economy are briefly reviewed.

Politics and Judgment: A Critique of Rational Choice Marxism

This article is an attempt to confront the assumptions underpinning rational choice Marxism along with its implications for politics and social theory. That initially calls for setting the new tendency within the Marxian tradition in order to see whether its proponents can deal with the issues deriving from the collapse of the old teleological vision. In this way, the subsequent epistemological critique will be undertaken within a theoretical and practical context. From this critique, it will become apparent that rational choice builds on the utilitarian assumptions of what Marx termed “vulgar materialism” and simply ignores the role of philosophical idealism entirely.

The Rational Choice Marxism of John Roemer: A Critique

(1989). The Rational Choice Marxism of John Roemer: A Critique. Review of Social Economy: Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 392-413.

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

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

Marxism and methodological individualism

“Analytical” or “rational choice” Marxism explicitly proposes to synthesize non-Marxist methods and Marxist theory. It is therefore in-appropriate to attack it solely by demonstrating that the methods advocated were not Marx's: this is, after all, acknowledged at the outset. (For this reason I have tried to show that both the assumption of MI and the process of reduction are problematic on their own empiricist or positivist terms, and have therefore largely been discarded as viable projects by philosophers of science.) Any attempt to synthesize two such distinct research traditions nonetheless demands some consideration of the metatheoretical problems that one might expect it to encounter, and this is particularly so if Marxist theory is to be recast on the basis of the positivist and empiricist assumptions explicitly rejected by Marx. Curiously, however, the analytical Marxist literature does not address such problems: indeed, metatheoretical considerations are notably absent. Discussions focus instead on particular “tools of analysis,” e.g., rational choice theory and game theory, as if these were neutral with respect to the underlying philosophical commitments of the two traditions. In fact, of course, these methods do reflect such commitments; after all, the justification for rational choice Marxism, infusing Marxian analyses with “scientific” rigor, reflects the rejection of the conception of science embodied in the Marxist tradition. By way of a conclusion I therefore briefly discuss the uneasy relationship between rational choice Marxism and classical Marxist theory. I argue that this relationship cannot be one of synthesis because the empiricist assumptions of rational choice Marxism violate the “hard-core” of the Marxist research tradition in at least three important ways: 1) most generally, its atomistic ontology directly contradicts the relational ontology of Marxist theory; 2) the empiricist conception of science undermines the Marxist conception of social science as critique; and 3) more specifically, rational choice and game theory mark a retreat from the social and relational philosophical anthropology of Marx back to the liberal individualist tradition initiated by Hobbes.

The greening of rational choice Marxism, or bio‐wine from sour grapes? Interview with Helmut Wiesenthal

The greening of rational choice Marxism, or bio‐wine from sour grapes? Interview with Helmut Wiesenthal