Guest Post: Marx’s Most Damning Critics are Analytical Marxists, not Right-Wing Pundits

This is a guest post from Tibor Rutar, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Maribor, Slovenia.

It has been almost a century and a half since Karl Marx’s death, and decades since the collapse of really-existing socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. In the still nominally Communist China, almost 90% of the workforce is employed in the private sector today, whereas the share amounted to a whopping 0% when Deng Xiaoping took power. The core structures of capitalist society are more firmly entrenched across the world today than ever before in history. Even the daunting spectre of climate change is not enough to challenge capitalism’s total domination – no IPCC climate mitigation scenario presumes the abolition or radical restructuring of existing economic institutions. It seems there really is no alternative, and one does not have to share Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing ideological dispositions to arrive at that conclusion. Still, the debate between defenders of Marx and his critics rages on without a hitch, showing no signs of abating.

Best-selling books such as Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right and popular Marxist textbooks such as David Harvey’s Companion or Michael Heinrich’s Introduction are a cottage industry, and even ‘bourgeois’ publications such as The Economist come out with the obligatory ‘Marx was Right!’ article each year. The widely publicized 2019 debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek was subtitled ‘Capitalism vs. Marxism’, although Peterson embarrassed himself with his own lack of knowledge of Marxism, relying on only a few passages in The Communist Manifesto as a stand-in for Marx’s oeuvre.

At the same time, many illustrious critics are just as adamant that there is nothing much to learn from Marx. Jon Elster, author of the magisterial tome Making Sense of Marx, pulls no punches when he declares – after decades of striving to renew Marxism for the contemporary age – that ‘Marxist theory has nothing to contribute to empirical social science’. In line with that, Frank Parkin astutely observed almost half a century ago that, ‘Inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Weberian struggling to get out,’ intimating that once one rightly moves away from the determinist and reductionism schemas of naïve classical Marxism, one is in danger of moving away from Marxism tout court. Even Erik Olin Wright, the neo-Marxist Parkin had in mind when he wrote that, conceded after a lifetime of labouring under Marx’s paradigm that he no longer believes it to be ‘inherently incompatible with a “bourgeois” sociology’.

I want to intervene in this long-standing debate, an instance of which just recently flared up on Twitter with Jacobin’s Ben Burgis defending Marx from his right-wing critics, and I want to do so by employing a different approach that hopefully helps the bemused spectator find their way about. As a former Marxist who wrote his PhD (alongside more than a dozen scholarly articles and volume chapters, and two books) defending Marx’s historical materialism and articulating it for the contemporary age, I know my Marx quite well. At the same time, I have come to agree over the years with critics like Elster that much of Marxist theory is significantly less powerful or distinctive than Burgis (or Eagleton or Harvey) make it out to be. Crucially, my critical stance is a sympathetic one. I have not converted to libertarianism or the right. Moreover, I maintain that quite a few Marxist conclusions about capitalism and society more generally are correct, or at least approximately correct, even as I think that these conclusions are not distinctively Marxist or are frequently arrived at by Marxists by way of faulty reasoning.

In his recent Jacobin piece Burgis makes two main points. First, famous right-wing pundits are ill-informed about Marx’s theory of history, which is why their critiques of it usually fall completely flat. Second, Marx’s actual theoretical insights, say with regards to his theory of history or exploitation, are much richer and, on the whole, empirically correct. The libertarian historian Phil Magness fired back at Burgis, conceding that Peterson and his ilk are indeed poor critics of Marxism, but also pointing out that there exist serious and damning critiques which Marxists too often tend to handwave away.

Even though I do not share Magness’ libertarianism, I think there is a very important kernel of truth to what he says in this exchange. Contemporary Marxists tend not to take their most capable critics seriously enough, and this is on display even in Burgis’ own writing. I want to demonstrate that by focusing on the three pieces of Marx’s system underlined by Burgis as important and virtually unequivocally true, namely Marx’s theory of history, the ostensible impossibility of socialist development in pre-capitalist Russia, and the notion of worker exploitation under capitalism.

To tackle the first issue, Burgis is seemingly unaware that the canonical Marxist theory of history he summarizes in the piece – according to which history proceeds in definite stages, determined primarily by technological development – is unequivocally dead. Even its most rigorous exponent, G. A. Cohen, recognized after writing his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence how unsubstantiated ‘historical materialism’s functional explanatory theses’ are. That Marx’s canonical theory of history is terminal was also reached by Vivek Chibber in a careful review for the journal Historical Materialism some ten years ago. Burgis does note that there are ‘real criticism you can make of Marx’s vision’, but the ones he mentions are of marginal importance and do not even touch the theory’s core weaknesses diagnosed in the previous decades by scholars such as Elster, Wright, Ellen Wood, and Robert Brenner.

Perhaps even more peculiar is the fact that Burgis quickly brushes over the important question of whether the experience of the Soviet Union is in some sense a refutation of Marx or not. Relying on Paxton’s Unlearning Marx, Burgis says that Marx did not believe semifeudal Russia could skip capitalism and jumpstart socialism. This, he notes, follows directly from his deterministic theory of history. In this sense, the failure of Soviet Union is a clear confirmation of Marx’s theory. But is this right?

Much has been made of various Marx’s statements, particularly in various letter drafts to Vera Zasulich, which indicate that in his later life Marx started modifying his theory of history. (Paxton’s book spends less than a few lines on these drafts.) In them, Marx anticipated future theories of late development, such as Alexander Gerschenkron’s and Leo Trotsky’s, posing the suggestive rhetorical question, ‘If the Russian admirers of the capitalist system deny the theoretical possibility of such an evolution then I would ask: did Russia go through a long incubation period of manufacture before it could utilize machinery, steamships, railways, etc.’ He directly said that the Russian commune can evolve into a nation-wide communal society ‘without passing through the capitalist regime’! In his actual short reply he was also clear that, ‘The analysis provided in Capital … provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune, but the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.’ Kalyan Dasgupta comments on the letter drafts, sympathetically, that Marx ‘did not have the slightest doubt regarding Russia’s capability of bypassing capitalism by utilizing her revolutionary potential.’ The same conclusion is reached by Ian Angus, writing for the Marxist journal Monthly Review.

In his piece, Burgis also proceeds as if it is a matter of course that Marx’s theory of exploitation under capitalism still stands. But it definitely does not stand in its classical formulation, dependent as it was on the obsolete and question-begging labour theory of value, which simply assumes that labour-power is the only source of value and then summarily concludes that profits (a part of value not received by workers) cannot exist but as a deduction from workers’ efforts. Of course, Burgis might argue in return that even if this is true, we can nevertheless still lean on neo-Marxist formulations of capitalist exploitation that do not rely on the labour theory of value.

One such popular formulation defended by contemporary Marxists, such as Wright and Chibber, simply states that the asymmetric bargaining position that exists between powerless individual workers and powerful individual capitalists in the labour market enables the latter to exploit the former. And, indeed, this idea truly can be sustained completely apart from Marx’s labour theory of value and his notion of surplus value. The issue is that Marxists rarely opt to advertise this humbling fact. More importantly, neo-Marxists’ insistence that the unequal playing field of labour markets leads to workers’ wages being less than workers’ contributions to the firm is not at all distinctive of Marxism. Standard neoclassical economics makes the same point using the monopsony model (or the idea of imperfectly competitive markets), and in contrast to Marxists, neoclassical economists have actually gathered robust quantitative evidence of the amount or rate of workers’ exploitation. The typical statistical estimate indicates that US workers, on average, receive wages that are 20% lower than their actual contribution to the firm (what is called a marginal product).

That one does not need Marx at all to recognize the discrepancy between workers’ contribution and their wages, and that certain mechanisms responsible for this unfortunate fact – such as search frictions and costs – have nothing to do with asymmetries of power or capitalism should trouble Marxists. Needless to say, it should also trouble certain libertarians who for ideological reasons cannot accept the fact that in capitalism workers really are exploited to a degree, and that you do not have to be a Marxist to realize that.

One could go on, as I do in my latest book Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy, enumerating each central Marxist idea that has on the one hand rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history and on the other integrated in, or independently discovered by, mainstream social science. Ironically, it was precisely the movement of Analytical Marxism that has most convincingly demonstrated this. Analytical Marxist were serious, left-wing, Marxist scholars who wanted to use modern social-scientific methodology, philosophy of science, and stringent analytical procedures of reasoning to test and reframe Marx’s theories. What they discovered, however, is that Analytical Marxism is an empty set. Put another way, most of what is analytical and in accordance with modern social science in Marxism is not distinctively Marxist, while most of what is distinctively Marxist is not scientifically justified.

This is not necessarily the end of Marx’s system. In fact, there have always been two possible escape routes open to his would-be defenders. The first is to simply abandon the project of descriptive, scientific Marxism and retreat into Marxist literary theory and philosophical musings and concepts with little empirical import. The Hegelian-Marxist idea of commodity fetishism, or reification more generally, is a good example. The notion of Ideologikritik, or the belief in the existence of an all-pervasive false consciousness that can be uncovered by situating oneself in a ‘proletarian perspective’ is another. Dialectics, understood not as standard multicausal reasoning or one attentive to reciprocal relations between variables, but as a never quite defined mystical method of inquiry completely inaccessible to non-Marxists, represents yet another case. This is not necessarily an unworthy manoeuvre, but it is definitely one which implicitly concedes that Marxism is not a social scientific paradigm capable of providing empirically grounded causal explanations of how the world works.

The second escape route is to decry the project of Analytical Marxism and to deny it represents ‘true Marxism’. Even notable Marxist scholars have too often opted for this predictable, if dishonest, tactic. To Michael Lebowitz, ‘Analytical Marxism is not Marxism … indeed, it is in essence anti­-Marxist’. Guglielmo Carchedi has likewise charged that Analytical Marxists like Erik Wright are not ‘faithful to Marx’s theoretical agenda and political goals’. Ben Agger complains of the Analytical Marxists’ reliance one the ‘methodological apparatus of bourgeois sociology’, by which he means such run-of-the-mill procedures as simple empirical ‘hypothesis-testing via regression analysis’.

I submit this is not the way to go. Marxists like Burgis must seriously consider and answer what Analytical Marxists have demonstrated, and having tried myself for a long time, I doubt they will succeed. In fact, one telling episode of the unavoidability of such an engagement and the profound challenge laid down by Analytical Marxists is ironically revealed by a book-length critique of the very same project. In his Analytical Marxism: A Critique, Marcus Roberts aimed to defeat the paradigm but discovered three unsettling facts along the way. First, he observed that, ironically, his ‘own discussion [of Analytical Marxism] is analytical in style … Furthermore, it mobilises the arguments of allies of this paradigm [i.e., Wright, Levine, Sober, and Brenner] in order to criticise the works of its central protagonists [i.e., G. A. Cohen and John Roemer].’ Second, Roberts concedes ‘the seriousness of the problems engaged by the analytical Marxists, and the need to revise Marxism in order to deal with them … [He] acknowledges the force of their critique.’ Lastly, he admits that he knows of no ‘alternative version of Marxism judged to be in good order (although I do remain committed to socialism as a political project.’

Do not get me wrong. There is some theoretical oomph in the old man yet. Marx’s insistence that conflict revolving around wealth has been a central force in historical developments is spot on; although this is also not lost on Weberian sociologists or institutional economists such as Daron Acemoglu or Douglass North. Marx’s charge that, even in a relatively free capitalist market, workers will tend to be exploited to a degree is undoubtedly correct; although this is not news to anyone but a caricatured neoclassical economist. Marx’s famous slogan that ‘The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ could be written by a libertarian public choice theorist. The issue is not whether Marx and Marxism say true things. The issue is whether they say true things that are surprising or inaccessible to those not hewing to Marxism. And here the answer seems mostly to be ‘No’.

You can listen to podcasts featuring Tibor here and here. Tibor is the author of two books:

Rational Choice and Democratic Government: A Sociological Approach

Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy