Analytical Marxism

Based on Wikipedia: Analytical Marxism

In the late 1970s, a group of left-wing academics decided that Marxism had a clarity problem. They gave themselves a name that captured their frustration perfectly: the No Bullshit Marxists.

These scholars looked at the dense, often impenetrable prose that characterized much Marxist theory—the dialectical spirals, the Hegelian obscurities, the metaphorical language that could mean almost anything—and decided enough was enough. If Marx's ideas were going to survive serious intellectual scrutiny, they needed to be stated plainly, tested rigorously, and defended with logic rather than jargon.

What emerged from this rebellion was Analytical Marxism, a school of thought that would spend the next two decades systematically dismantling much of what traditional Marxists held sacred, while attempting to salvage whatever could withstand the harsh light of Anglo-American philosophical analysis.

The Catalyst: A Canadian Philosopher Takes On Marx

The movement crystallized around a single book. In 1978, Gerald A. Cohen, a Canadian philosopher working at Oxford, published "Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence." The title promised vindication of Marx, but what Cohen actually delivered was something more complicated and ultimately more subversive.

Cohen applied the tools of analytical philosophy—the same rigorous logical methods used to dissect arguments about knowledge, language, and existence—to Marx's sweeping claims about human history. His goal was to determine what, exactly, Marx meant when he claimed that economic forces drive historical change, and whether those claims could actually hold up.

The conclusion Cohen reached was that Marx's view of history was fundamentally about technology. In Cohen's interpretation, the story goes like this: human beings are rational creatures who want to reduce the burden of their labor. When a more productive technology becomes available, people will generally adopt it. These productive forces—the tools, techniques, and knowledge we use to make things—shape the economic relations between people. If you're a peasant working land with a wooden plow, your relationship with your lord looks very different than if you're a factory worker operating a power loom. And these economic relations, in turn, shape everything else: the laws, the political institutions, the ideologies that justify the whole arrangement.

This interpretation gave Marx's theory a clarity it had often lacked. It also made it vulnerable to criticism in ways that vaguer formulations had avoided.

The September Group

Cohen's book attracted a cohort of like-minded scholars who began meeting regularly to hash out these ideas. They called themselves the September Group, after the month they typically convened. Besides Cohen, the core members included Jon Elster, a Norwegian philosopher with expertise in rational choice theory; John Roemer, an American economist who had been using neoclassical economics to analyze Marxist concepts; Adam Przeworski, a Polish-American political scientist; and Erik Olin Wright, a sociologist who would become famous for his empirical studies of class structure.

These thinkers shared certain commitments. They believed in logical rigor. They believed claims should be testable against evidence. They distrusted metaphor and demanded precision. But they also diverged sharply on methodology. Some, like Elster and Roemer, embraced rational choice theory and game theory—approaches that model human behavior as the outcome of individuals pursuing their interests strategically. Others, like Cohen, remained skeptical of these tools while still insisting on analytical clarity.

What united them was a willingness to follow arguments wherever they led, even if that meant abandoning positions that traditional Marxists considered non-negotiable.

Exploitation Without the Labor Theory of Value

Consider John Roemer's work on exploitation. Traditional Marxist theory holds that workers are exploited because they produce more value than they receive in wages. The difference—surplus value—is appropriated by capitalists. This analysis rests on the labor theory of value, which says that the value of any commodity comes from the human labor required to produce it.

Roemer asked a provocative question: does exploitation really depend on this theory of value? Using the formal tools of economics and game theory, he showed that you could explain how some people end up exploiting others purely through the dynamics of market exchange—without any special theory about labor being the source of all value. In fact, you could pick any commodity—oil, wheat, whatever—and construct a similar analysis.

This was intellectually elegant, but it led to an uncomfortable conclusion. If exploitation didn't require the labor theory of value, then maybe Marxists should stop defending that theory. More unsettling still, Roemer's analysis suggested that exploitation wasn't always morally wrong. It was a technical term describing a certain economic relationship, not an automatic ethical condemnation.

For many traditional Marxists, this felt like a betrayal. The labor theory of value wasn't just an economic hypothesis; it was the foundation of Marx's critique of capitalism, the proof that workers were being robbed. Roemer was saying the robbery could happen without the proof.

Making Sense of Marx—By Taking Him Apart

Jon Elster went further still. His 1985 book "Making Sense of Marx" was a monumental act of intellectual archaeology, sifting through Marx's writings to determine what, if anything, could survive rigorous examination. Elster's tool of choice was methodological individualism—the principle that all social phenomena must ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and beliefs of individual people. No appeals to historical forces, class consciousness, or dialectical processes would be permitted.

The results were devastating to traditional Marxism. Elster concluded that no general theory of history as the development of productive forces could be saved. The labor theory of value had to go. Virtually all of Marxian economics failed the test. The dialectical method—that distinctively Hegelian approach to understanding contradiction and change—was dismissed as obscurantism, a way of making muddled thinking sound profound.

What remained? Some insights about ideology, about how ruling ideas tend to serve ruling interests. Some useful observations about revolution and social change. But these had to be rebuilt on individualist foundations, explaining how actual people with actual beliefs and interests could produce these outcomes.

Elster wasn't trying to destroy Marxism. He was trying to save what was valuable by discarding what was indefensible. But when you're done saving only the pieces that pass your tests, you might not have much of the original edifice left.

Mapping the Middle Classes

Erik Olin Wright took a different approach. Rather than analyzing texts, he went out and collected data. His 1985 book "Classes" tackled a problem that had long troubled Marxist theory: the existence of people who didn't fit neatly into the categories of capitalist or worker.

Traditional Marxism painted a picture of two great classes locked in struggle. But what about managers who don't own the company but exercise authority over workers? What about professionals with specialized expertise? What about supervisors who are themselves supervised? In the mid-twentieth century, these "intermediate classes" had grown enormously, and their existence seemed to complicate Marx's predictions about class polarization.

Wright developed sophisticated typologies of these ambiguous class positions and tested them using large-scale surveys and quantitative models. This was Marxism as empirical social science—not philosophical speculation or revolutionary prophecy, but careful measurement of how class and economic power actually operated in contemporary capitalist societies.

The work was rigorous and influential. It also represented a dramatic shift in what it meant to do Marxist analysis. Wright wasn't trying to foment revolution; he was trying to map social reality with precision.

From Revolution to Ethics

By the mid-1980s, something striking had happened to most of the analytical Marxists. They had largely given up on the idea that Marxism could explain revolution as an inevitable outcome of capitalism's economic dynamics and the objective interests of the working class. The theory, as traditionally understood, seemed too damaged to repair.

But they hadn't given up on the project of transforming capitalism. They just reconceived it as an ethical project rather than a scientific prediction.

This shift was partly inspired by developments in mainstream political philosophy. John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," published in 1971, had revived serious philosophical discussion of justice and equality after decades in which such talk was considered naive or unscientific. If liberal philosophers could construct elaborate theories of what a just society would look like, why couldn't Marxists do the same?

G. A. Cohen led this turn toward normative philosophy. In books like "Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality" and the pointedly titled "If You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich?", Cohen developed a sophisticated critique of capitalism based not on the labor theory of value but on principles of autonomy and fair distribution.

His argument ran roughly as follows: what's wrong with capitalism isn't that workers' labor is "stolen" in some technical economic sense. It's that the system infringes on people's autonomy and produces a distribution of benefits and burdens that is simply unfair. Some people work hard and remain poor; others do little and inherit vast wealth. The pattern of who gets what bears no reasonable relationship to what people deserve or need.

Wrestling with Libertarians

Cohen found himself in unexpected intellectual territory. The traditional Marxist critique of capitalism relied on the idea that workers have rights over themselves—what philosophers call "self-ownership." If you own yourself, you should own what you produce with your labor. But capitalists extract surplus value from that labor, effectively taking what rightfully belongs to workers.

Here was the problem: self-ownership was also the foundational principle of right-wing libertarianism, most famously articulated by the philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick used self-ownership to argue against taxation and redistribution. If you own yourself and your labor, he reasoned, then you own what you earn. Taking any of it—even for worthy social purposes—is a form of theft.

Cohen engaged seriously with this challenge. He agreed that self-ownership captures something important: the idea that people should be treated as ends, never merely as means. But he argued that Nozick made a crucial error. Nozick extended the moral force of self-ownership to the acquisition of external resources, treating the natural world as something that could be legitimately appropriated as private property with virtually no restrictions.

In Cohen's view, this was a sleight of hand. The world is not simply "up for grabs." The appropriation of land, resources, and capital by some people inevitably affects what's available to everyone else. And there's no reason to think that the current distribution of property—shaped by conquest, theft, exploitation, and historical accident—has any moral legitimacy.

This was egalitarianism rebuilt on philosophical foundations that could compete with the best arguments from the right. It was also a long way from anything Marx would have recognized as his theory.

The Dialectical Pushback

Not everyone was impressed. From the other side of the Marxist world came fierce criticism that the analytical Marxists had missed the point entirely.

The "No Bullshit" label, critics noted, implied that dialectical Marxism was bullshit. But what if the dialectical approach captured something essential that analytical methods couldn't? What if Marxism wasn't supposed to be a set of propositions that stand or fall based on logical consistency and empirical testing, but rather a form of engaged practice, a way of intervening in the world rather than merely describing it?

For dialectical Marxists, analytical Marxism had eviscerated the tradition. By breaking Marx's thought into discrete theses to be evaluated one by one, they had destroyed its systematic character. They had turned a revolutionary doctrine into an academic exercise. They had transformed a critique of capitalism into a seminar room debate about the fine points of distributive justice.

Worse, they seemed oblivious to their own social position. The analytical Marxists presented themselves as neutral scholars seeking truth through rigorous methods. But their critics argued that intellectual activity never occurs in isolation from the struggles of the society in which it takes place. The analytical Marxists had good jobs at prestigious universities. They weren't workers on the factory floor. Their version of Marxism, unsurprisingly, was one that could be pursued comfortably within the existing academic system.

Methodological Battles

Even sympathetic critics raised serious objections. Against Elster and the rational choice Marxists, scholars like Terrell Carver argued that methodological individualism wasn't the only valid form of social explanation. Sometimes appealing to structures and institutions explains human behavior better than trying to reduce everything to individual decisions. The fact that game theory was mathematically elegant didn't mean it accurately captured how people actually behave in complex social situations.

Cohen's technological determinism faced its own problems. His analytical Marxist colleagues, including Wright and the philosopher Andrew Levine, pointed out that he had underestimated the role of class actors—actual people organized into groups with interests—in driving historical transitions. It wasn't just that new productive forces emerged and then society reorganized around them. Class struggles determined how those forces were developed and deployed. The relations of production weren't simply downstream effects of technology; they shaped technological development itself.

The philosopher Richard Miller, while sympathetic to Cohen's analytical approach, offered a competing interpretation that placed class struggle at the center of historical change. And the Greek philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis argued that Cohen's distinction between material and social properties—technology versus social relations—couldn't be drawn as sharply as his theory required. Technologies are always embedded in social relations; you can't cleanly separate the two.

Even non-Marxists had criticisms. They argued that Cohen, like Marx before him, underestimated how much the legal and political "superstructure" shapes the economic "base." Laws about property, contracts, and labor aren't just reflections of economic forces; they actively constitute what markets are and how they function. And Cohen's assumption that humans will naturally adopt more productive technology seemed naive. Whether people embrace new technologies depends on whether those technologies fit with existing beliefs, practices, and power structures—not on some ahistorical rationality.

Cohen, to his credit, acknowledged many of these criticisms in his later work.

What Remains

So what was the legacy of analytical Marxism? By the 1990s and into the 2000s, the school had largely dissolved as a distinct movement. Some of its members continued working on questions of justice and equality without much reference to Marx at all. Others pursued empirical research on class that was more sociological than Marxist in any traditional sense.

But something important had happened. The analytical Marxists demonstrated that Marx's ideas could be taken seriously by mainstream philosophers and social scientists—not as sacred texts to be interpreted, but as hypotheses to be tested. They showed that you could be committed to egalitarian transformation without accepting every element of Marx's theoretical apparatus. They created space for a left politics grounded in ethics rather than historical inevitability.

They also showed the limits of their own approach. By insisting on logical rigor and empirical testability, they stripped away much of what had made Marxism a living political tradition. The passion, the sense of world-historical destiny, the claim to be on the side of the oppressed—these didn't survive translation into analytical philosophy.

Perhaps the most honest assessment came from the movement's own logic. The analytical Marxists asked: what can be salvaged from Marx once we apply rigorous critical analysis? Their answer, after two decades of work, was: less than we hoped, more than nothing, and the enterprise of critique itself might be the most valuable inheritance of all.

For Erik Olin Wright, who continued developing what he called "Real Utopias" until his death in 2019, the analytical project evolved into something more constructive: not just criticizing capitalism or defending fragments of Marx, but carefully designing and studying alternatives. That pragmatic, empirical, yet still radically egalitarian approach may be the No Bullshit Marxists' most enduring contribution—a willingness to take both rigor and hope seriously, even when they pull in different directions.