Analytical Marxism
There are a number of threads that can be followed in exploring analytical Marxism, such as the application of Hegelian method by Engels to scientificise Marxism and the subsequent endeavour to release from Hegel. This appears a contradiction as it is well known that Marx ultimately eschewed philosophy as a vehicle for change rather than as one of interpretation. But he was later to return to it, as philosophy was essential to the development of his theory, rooted as it was in German idealism filtering through from influences of Feuerbach and Shelling. Marx had said prior to writing the Grundrisse that he had begun reading Hegel, found the method to be of significance to his theory, and desired to write something that would separate the rational kernel in Hegel’s philosophical system from its mystical shell. Through this we necessarily trace the harnessing of Hegelian method to Marxist theory via Engels and then explore the problem of trying to separate the method from the theory.
To arrive at analytical Marxism, a robust thread takes us to Althusser’s valiant effort to separate the method from the theory so to reduce the problematic, teleological nature of Marxism, and a final point of communism towards the Hegelian tradition of arrival at an absolute ideal. The failure in Marxism is the realisation of this final point, and such a missed point is taken up in analytical Marxism. According to Callinicos (1989), a second thread finishes the teleological tradition of Hegel, and also finalises the Althusser’s failure (p. 3). Further, analytical Marxism no longer grapples with the problem of allegiance, wherein analytical Marxism is negated as a bourgeois philosophy. It may be that analytical abstraction can no longer be called Marxism, but nevertheless certain foundational values remain true to the essential theories of Marxism. These essential features as outlined by Roemer (1986), continue to predominate: history as human production, the reality of exploitation, and the possibility of a social production that is ultimately emancipatory (p. 2).
The roots of analytical Marxism are found in analytical philosophy. The break with Hegel began in English philosophy, then began to diverge from continental trends and take up philosophical investigations in logic and language. Analytical philosophy was directed through its full break with Hegel. Ultimately this influenced continental thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida. The irony was the emergence of a strong English Marxism which ultimately outstripped Marxist work on the continent. The thrust of this English Marxism was supported by the analytical focus on reinterpretation of Marx using modern approaches such as positivistic social science and analytical philosophy (Roemer, 1986, pp. 1-2). According to Callinicos (1987), analytical Marxism essentially investigates the important question of structure and agency, where shifts in respect of agency are a feature. Callinicos writes:
The question of structure and subject has been placed firmly at the top of the agenda for social theory by the recent emergence in the English-speaking world of a version of Marxism which treats individual action as primary, reducing social structures to the consequences of such action. I have in mind here most of the practitioners of what has come to be known as ‘analytical Marxism’. (p. 3)
The complexity of the structure/agency in analytical Marxism is explored in the intellectual debate between Levine, Wright, Elster, and Cohen in Callinicos’ (1989) Marxist Theory. Cohen’s (1978) Karl Marx’s Theory of History -- a Defence is identified by both Roemer and Callinicos as the foundational work opening out analytical Marxism.
In their article Rationality and Class Struggle Levine & Wright (1989) critique Cohen’s position on Marx’s famous 1859 Preface.3 The Preface outlines Marx’s new theory of history -- historical materialism. It was later easily harnessed to orthodox Marxisms and available to dogmatisation. Interest in the Preface was abandoned in academic discussion, but Cohen’s book reflects a revitalised interest among analytical philosophers in interpreting Marxist theory from the Preface. Levine & Wright argue that Western Marxism has contradicted this basic premise of the Preface because it has been harnessed to these disfavoured orthodox positions. Another problem is that the Preface emphasises productive forces over relations of production. This is the ideological source for the evolutionary account that produced the political organisation in the Soviet Union which Western Marxists eschew. Orthodox Marxisms have emphasised the productive forces and this historically undermined the possibilities for interpretation of the Preface, but the analytical Marxist position is that the Preface and the political programme of the Soviet Union are not one and the same. Levine & Wright point out that for Althusser and Balibar the Preface is redirected from the productive forces trajectory to a Marxist science of history, a feature of a methodological position that covers causality and explanation, ‘contradiction’, concept formation and theory construction (p. 20). Cohen’s contribution to analytical Marxism is of interest because it incorporates positivistic methods towards analysis of the Preface and arguing that the construals of the Preface that preceded orthodox Marxism and the intellectual abandonment of the Preface were distorted. The meaning of the Preface when reevaluated using a “traditional view”” is according to Cohen serious and defensible (p. 21). Cohen supports a Primacy Thesis which maintains that relations of production are guided by the level of development of the productive forces. Cohen’s position is towards the structural, while his analytical Marxist adversaries argue that “Cohen’s account neglects what is crucial for any adequate account of revolutionary social transformations: the question of class capacities” (p. 22). According to Cohen, it is the Primacy Thesis that identifies Marx’s theory of history: “the nature of a set of production relations is explained by the level of development of the productive forces embraced by it (to a far greater extent than vice versa)” (p. 134). Levine & Wright disagree with Cohen’s position using the following logic:
Socialist political strategies must contend directly with the obstacles in the way of developing appropriately revolutionary class capacities: the institutional form of the capitalist state, divisions within the working class, and between the working class and its (potential) allies, and mechanisms of ideological domination and deflection. Such obstacles are irreducible to the forces of production, and thus the fettering of those forces in no way ensures the eventual erosion of these obstacles to working class capacities. (Levine & Wright, 1989, p. 46)
Thus one clear position in analytical Marxism is Cohen’s defence of the Primacy Thesis and its contribution to academic debate: “Cohen’s book thus lays down a political as well as a theoretical challenge” (p. 47). Levine & Wright (1989) map out an area relative to such stances: “The ‘orthodoxy’ Cohen has reconstructed and defended is, in our view, ultimately inadequate politically, as well as theoretically, whatever its roots in Marx’s writings” (p. 47). Cohen’s structural emphasis in his writings on the Primacy Thesis are functional in focus. Callinicos (1989) writes that Elster’s position reorders Marxism along methodological-individualist lines (p. 9). Both Elster (1989) and Roemer (1986) develop rational-choice Marxism (Callinicos, 1989, p. 10), supporting it with neoclassical economics and game theory. The structure/subject debate Callinicos refers to, and the emphasis on subject over structure is a key component in analytical Marxism as it has developed and is argued by Elster and Roemer.
According to Callinicos (1989) since Giddens joins agency with structure, his version counters Cohen’s historical materialism on the basis on diversity of human nature, on the idea of people as primarily only productive (p. 10). While complex and in need of deeper future study and consideration in respect of the goal to which this paper is ultimately directed, Callinicos provides a guide to the complexity inherent in the theory of structuration and the related challenge of distinguishing between ‘system’ and structure: “Giddens suggests that we should further distinguish between social systems and structure, the latter being conceived as ‘an absent set of differences, temporally 'present' only in their instantiation, in the constituting moments of social systems” (p. 40). As asserted by Callinicos (1987) in Making History, Giddens adds important dimensions into the problem of conceptualising social structure, considerations that implicate into systems comparatives. This in turn led to important connective analytical challenges, particularly in terms of defining what we mean by ‘system’.
An explanation of the work of Giddens is in keeping with the foregoing discussion. Analytical Marxism debates the problem of structure and agency. Cohen’s position is structural, placing the forces of production placed in contrast to agency. Elster’s position of methodological individualism and rational choice derives from a principle of agency incorporating some residual acknowledgement to the questions that Marxist theory proposes. But the question of the possibility of social change is thus not accounted for in either position. What is the relationship between system and structure? Giddens (1979) writes in Central Problems in Social Theory [CPST] that system and structure are different. Giddens argues that systems are construed in the tradition of structuralism founded on the model of linguistics, its foundations located with Saussure. This representation contains an error in logic. (Structuralism is different from traditional Durkheimian functionalism which uses a biological metaphor to conceptualise the system.) The linguistic model produced by Saussure when applied to social structure produces similar problems to that identified existing at the level of linguistic meaning. Saussure’s analyses contains an unrecognised dualism: “The recursive character of language -- and, by generalisation, of social systems also -- cannot be understood unless we also understand that the means whereby such systems are reproduced, and thus exist as systems, contain within them the seeds of change” (p. 18).
In CPST Giddens defines structuration, “The concept of structuration involves that of the duality of structure, which relates to the fundamentally recursive character of social life, and expresses the mutual dependence of structure and agency” (p. 69). On this view Giddens asserts that, “...every social actor knows a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member” and, “All actors have some degree of discursive penetration of the social systems to whose constitution they contribute” (p. 5). In a later treatment, the Giddenian split from the Durkheimian sociological concept of society is set out in (1986) Sociology: A brief but critical introduction. Durkheim argued that social facts could be studied as ‘things’, where Giddens asserts that social facts are not objects: “... we have to grasp what I would call the double involvement of individuals and institutions: we create society at the same time as we are created by it” (p. 1). Here is the essential idea in Giddens theory of structuration. Additionally, Durkheim’s conceptualisation of structure was physical. Giddens (1986) says that structure must be understood not as static, mechanical, or functional, but rather as discursive and fluid (p. 13). This is also a feature of his theory of structuration, and it has the linking condition into transformation: “sociological analysis can play an emancipatory role in human society” (p. 13). His critical sociology has its comparable link with Western Marxism. Giddens circles us back to analytical Marxism and Roemer’s (1986) list of foundational concepts developed from Marxism: 1) history as human production; 2) the reality of exploitation, and; 3) the possibility of a social production that is ultimately emancipatory (p. 2).
In reference to the work of Levi-Strauss, Giddens (1979) concedes that structuralism and functionalism become somewhat more united. Levi-Straussian structures are “analogous to phonemes, whose significance can only be grasped in their mutual relations” (p. 19). However, neither the functionalists nor Levi-Strauss separate structure from system. In either case they are still rather understood as interchangeable ideas (p. 23). Giddens’ position is that “a distinction between structure and system is highly important to social theory” (p. 23). For Giddens, the presence of structure does not explain the existence of social systems. Structure shapes the action of human actors, but it is only effective through such action and can at the same time be altered as well and altering. This is similar to language where ‘langue’ or the ‘diachronic’, the rules constituting language and parole or the diachronic, perform in relation to the underlying structure. Language is always shifting and transforming in usage and this mode is translatable to structure.
Giddens (1979) disagrees with Marx’s theory of evolution, proposing a theory of historical development that incorporates ‘time-space distanciation’, where ‘presence-availability’ such as that experienced by tribal societies, is incrementally reduced over time. This directs to the instance of the complex integration of societies. Giddens defines two -- social integration and systems integration -- social integration refers to individual/social actor connections, and system integration refers to social group/collectivities connections. In less developed systems such as tribal societies, as Giddens argues, the dichotomy is merged, but in class-divided societies systems integration relies on the interventions of the state. Callinicos writes in Anthony Giddens: A Contemporary Critique (1989a) that he finds Central Problems in Social Theory, “an arid treatise heaping definitions and diagrams on the bewildered reader’s head” (p. 125). This goes towards the sizable challenge involved in interpreting and integrating Giddens theory of structure and agency in theorising Canadian educational policy. The problem of defining ‘system’ in respect of structure and system is a theme to be grappled within systems research.
To proceed to close this section, we may again draw from Callinicos who asserts that Giddens none-the-less privileges agency over structure in his theory of structuration (Callinicos, 1989a, p. 116). Giddens has a non-harmonistic (conflict) view of society, says Callinicos, which appears to be influenced more by Weber than Marx, a position Callinicos says Giddens doesn’t seem willing to account to (p. 123). Callinicos does not support Giddens’ orientation to mediating the structure/agency dichotomy using the concept of structuration, arguing, “The attempt to strike an equipoise between Marxism and mainstream sociology seems to me not only impossible, but to lead often to an intellectually rather dubious approach to empirical questions...Marxism remains to be transcended” (p. 146). Of course, Callinicos’ position is functional and Marxist, with leanings towards newer interpretations available in analytical Marxism through work done by Cohen. The various points raised in this section underline the complex range of positions and subtle sub-positionings available in analytical Marxism and related post-Marxist approaches.
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