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Methodological Individualism and Marx:Some Remarks on Jon Elster, Game Theory, and Other Things

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Paul Wolff
Robert Paul Wolff*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts/Amherst, Amherst, MA, 01003, U.S.A.
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Extract

In recent years, philosophers trained in the techniques and constrained by the style of what is known in the Anglo-American world as ‘analytic philosophy’ have in growing numbers undertaken to include within their methodological ambit the theories and insights of Karl Marx.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 469 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1990

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References

G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978)

Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)

David Schweickart has written a splendid review of the book which exposes both the inadequacies of some of Elster's scholarship and also the deeper political significance of Elster's anti-Marxian ‘Marxism.’ See Praxis International 8 1988).

Cf. where Elster writes: ‘Methodological collectivism - as an end in itself- assumes that there are supra-individual entities that are prior to individuals in the explanatory order’ (6). Although he does not say so explicitly, it is clear from the context that he rejects the appeal to such entities.

By alluding to degrees of risk aversion, Elster implicitly invokes the assumption that utility is cardinally measureable, with no apparent awareness of the enormously powerful premises required for that assumption. There are even suggestions, as we shall see, of interpersonal utility comparisons. Here, as elsewhere, Elster uses what I should call the rhetoric of game theory with no attention to its logic.

The notion of a ‘difference’ between two gains presupposes cardinal utility. Elster's formulation also makes sense only so long as there are no more than two strategies for each of two ‘players.’ Since, in general, there will be many strategies available to each of many players, the notions of gain from cooperation, freerider gain, and loss from unilateralism are incompletely defined. As we shall see, Elster is mesmerized by the elementary pictures of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and forgets to ask whether these little sums and differences correspond to anything in the real world.

Marx labelled the efforts by Vulgar Economists to read economic laws out of the imagined experiences of isolated producers ‘Robinsonades’ (Robinsonaden). See Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1962 B. 23, 90. see also S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: The University Press 1976), 273 ff.

Elster, 331. Needless to say, this sounds more like a neo-classical than a Marxian definition, but so be it.

The game is much simpler if A automatically goes first. Then, A has 3 strategies, B has 4, and the matrix is 3 x 4. For those who are curious, here are the strategies available to the two players in this simpler game. A's strategies are (1) Take 2. H B takes 1, take 1. (2) Take 1. H B takes 1, take 1. H B takes 2, take 1. (3) Take 1. H B takes 1, take 2. H B takes 2, take 1. B's strategies are (1) H A takes 2, take 2. H A takes 1, take 1. H A then takes 1, take 1. (2) H A takes 2, take 2. H A takes 1, take 2. (3) H A takes 2, take 1. H A takes 1, take 1. H A then takes 1, take 1. (4) H A takes 2, take 1. H A takes 1, take 2.

Elster then gives, as a supposed example of this, a passage from the Communist Manifesto, but in fact the passage quoted does not describe an example of the free rider problem at all. It alludes to the fact that competition for jobs in the labor market interferes with the ‘organization of the proletarians into a class,’ an entirely different matter.

See, for example, the misuse of the term ‘constant-sum game’ on 373, and the completely garbled term ‘variable-sum game,’ which has no meaning in the formal development of Game Theory. A two-person strictly competitive game is correctly describable as ‘zero-sum’ or ‘constant-sum’ under certain extremely powerful assumptions about the preference structures of the players – who, incidentally, can be classes of individuals only if one can give meaning to the notion of the preference structure of a class! Games which are not constant-sum can only be described as not constant-sum. The concept of a sum of payoffs is undefined for such games (because such a sum would involve interpersonal comparisons of utility). Hence, they cannot be said to be variable sum. Since it is precisely the notion of class interests rather than individual interests which Elster is trying to elucidate, it is especially misleading to throw these terms around with no awareness that their use begs precisely the questions about the nature of collective interests which are at issue. This is the way in which the unrigorous use of formalism conceals rather than dispels confusion.

Formally speaking, all of this amounts to stipulating that each player's utility function is inversely monotonically related to sentence length, or, alternatively, that each player's utility function is a lexicographic function which first minimizes that player's sentence, and only then responds to other variables. Without assumptions like these, we can construct an outcome matrix which specifies what each player gets for each pair of strategy choices, but we have no way of translating that outcome matrix into a payoff matrix. The point of the phrase ‘as little as another minute’ is that with only ordinal rankings (and no interpersonal comparisons of utility), one cannot say anything about how much one is giving up in relation to how much one is inflicting on the other player.

See Chapter Five, ‘Community,’ in Robert P. Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press 1968).