6 - Analytical Marxism

Summary

The reconstruction of Marxism essayed by a loose collective of thinkers in the US and the UK since the 1970s is best described as “analytical Marxism”. This is a designation that captures members' allegiance to an “analytically sophisticated Marxism”, based on “wholesale embrace of conventional scientific and philosophical norms” (Wright et al. 1992: 5). Possible alternative nomenclatures include the movement's colloquial name, NBSMG – the “Non-Bullshit Marxism Group” – and “Rational Choice Marxism”, a label based on the adherence of a majority of these thinkers to particular techniques of social scientific modelling (Roberts 1996: 3). The idea of no-nonsense Marxism gives a sense of the impatience of these thinkers with bewildering talk about dialectical contradictions and relational-strategic class oppositions, but it perhaps lacks a bit of specificity. Rational Choice Marxism, meanwhile, designates with all the specificity one could desire a set of methodological strictures based in the research strategies of analytical philosophy, the search for sociological microfoundations based on methodological individualism, the modelling techniques of game theory and the mathematical approach of neo-classical economics. But it rules out too much, for it excludes important analytical contributions that are methodologically holistic, albeit based on a “wholesale embrace of conventional scientific and philosophical norms”. It also overlooks those who modify the central postulate of Rational Choice approaches, that people are basically “rational, self-interested optimizers”, in the direction of descriptive realism.