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Analytical Marxism
As John Roemer says in his introduction to this volume, 'During the past decade, what now appears as a new species in social theory has been analytically sophisticated Marxism. Its practitioners are largely inspired by Marxian questions which they pursue with contemporary tools of logic, mathematics, and model building … These writers are, self-consciously, products of both the Marxian and non-Marxian traditions.' This volume assembles substantial and original essays, both published and unpublished, by some of the leading practitioners of 'analytical Marxism'. The essays discuss a number of the fundamental issues of Marxian thought as well as questions that conventional Marxists see no need to raise. They exemplify the ways in which analytical Marxists are beginning to reinvigorate the Marxian tradition and, in doing so, to break down the barriers that have divided it from other forms of social theory. The volume will make an excellent textbook and an ideal introduction to this new approach.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 12, 2013
The essays by Cohen, Wood, Wright, Elster, and Przeworski are all worth reading. They are as 'clear and rigorous' as one could hope to be, although some of the logical notation (employed by the latter two) that may be clarifying for some will be downright confusing for others. Those latter two are also the hardest on traditional Marxian theses than the first three, and are especially important to engage with for contemporary Marxists.
Bardhan and Brenner produce worthwhile analyses against the teleological Marxism that must have been prevalent at the time, but after deeply engaging with Cohen, they do not seem to conflict with Marxian analysis as much as the two authors seem to think. Brenner employs a rather drawn-out style to sketch out the mechanism of change from feudalism to capitalism in great detail. Bardhan in particular seems to be demolishing straw men for the purpose of glorifying neoclassical analysis, although I don't doubt that cutting-edge neoclassical concepts perform better in development economics than shitty unilineal Stalinist ones.
Roemer mostly misses the mark: his essays about an equilibrium theory of class/exploitation and his subsequent attack on exploitation as a useful concept depend on an interpretation of exploitation as being in the realm of exchange (as opposed to production) and, importantly, the still commonly-accepted supposition that Marx's value theory is not really worth considering (this itself being a hopefully unwitting result of imposing neoclassical equilibrium theory on Marx). I would have liked to see a more sustained engagement with Marxian concepts before such a complete overhaul, and little justification is given for his formal innovations, unlike the rest of the book (see Kliman's work on Roemer for more perspective). His comments on 'rational choice Marxism' are more well-founded.
All in all, this book is a trying experience for any Marxist but I think it's mostly worth it. I look forward to researching — and producing — rebuttals to these essays in the form given, and to letting go what cannot be maintained. While plenty of pernicious ideological notions are smuggled in with the bourgeois techniques used by the authors, this discussion (particularly the methodological discussion) needed to happen.
Bardhan and Brenner produce worthwhile analyses against the teleological Marxism that must have been prevalent at the time, but after deeply engaging with Cohen, they do not seem to conflict with Marxian analysis as much as the two authors seem to think. Brenner employs a rather drawn-out style to sketch out the mechanism of change from feudalism to capitalism in great detail. Bardhan in particular seems to be demolishing straw men for the purpose of glorifying neoclassical analysis, although I don't doubt that cutting-edge neoclassical concepts perform better in development economics than shitty unilineal Stalinist ones.
Roemer mostly misses the mark: his essays about an equilibrium theory of class/exploitation and his subsequent attack on exploitation as a useful concept depend on an interpretation of exploitation as being in the realm of exchange (as opposed to production) and, importantly, the still commonly-accepted supposition that Marx's value theory is not really worth considering (this itself being a hopefully unwitting result of imposing neoclassical equilibrium theory on Marx). I would have liked to see a more sustained engagement with Marxian concepts before such a complete overhaul, and little justification is given for his formal innovations, unlike the rest of the book (see Kliman's work on Roemer for more perspective). His comments on 'rational choice Marxism' are more well-founded.
All in all, this book is a trying experience for any Marxist but I think it's mostly worth it. I look forward to researching — and producing — rebuttals to these essays in the form given, and to letting go what cannot be maintained. While plenty of pernicious ideological notions are smuggled in with the bourgeois techniques used by the authors, this discussion (particularly the methodological discussion) needed to happen.
August 17, 2025
Analytical Marxism is one of those intellectual curiosities that looks impressive in a seminar room but collapses like a wet cake the moment you try to taste it. Roemer’s edited collection was intended to serve as the manifesto for a new, rigorous, and refined Marxism, stripped of the vagueness, “mysticism,” and dialectical complexity that had made the tradition unpalatable to analytic philosophers and political scientists.
In came G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, Erik Olin Wright, and Roemer himself, armed with rational choice theory, methodological individualism, and the crisp tools of analytic philosophy. Out went dialectics, history, and Marx’s poetic rage against alienation and exploitation.
What remained was a sterile hybrid, a Frankenstein stitched together from equations, preference sets, and game theory, with no revolutionary pulse left in it.
Cohen, bless his Canadian heart, was the spark. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence in 1978 became the blueprint, or perhaps the IKEA instruction manual. Cohen believed Marx’s sweeping historical materialism could be reconstructed step by step, premise by premise, like assembling a Billy bookshelf with an Allen key.
He prized logical clarity over historical messiness, replacing Marx’s sprawling dialectics with neat causal arrows: productive forces develop, relations of production adapt, superstructures follow. Simple, elegant, airtight. But like flat-pack furniture, once you put it together, you realize it lacks soul. Cohen mistook rigor for vitality, and what he produced was not a theory of history but a ghost of one, embalmed in the precision of analytic reasoning. If Marx was once a roaring fire, Cohen reduced him to a fluorescent desk lamp.
Roemer then took the rational choice turn, and things slid into parody. For him, class exploitation wasn’t about lived domination, alienation, or collective struggle. It was a problem of unfair initial endowments, as if capitalism were just a Monopoly game played with lopsided starting conditions. Redistribution could fix things—hand out the properties more evenly and suddenly, exploitation evaporates.
The barricades of 1848 are nowhere to be seen; instead, we’re left with mathematical models of farmers swapping tractors in an imaginary marketplace. The blood and thunder of class struggle gets replaced by the sterile arithmetic of Pareto efficiency.
Elster went harder still, charging at dialectics like a knight at windmills. He dismissed it all as mumbo-jumbo, a smokescreen for sloppy thinking. For Elster, the only respectable Marxism was one built from methodological individualism: rational actors, clear preferences, causal mechanisms.
The problem is that Marx’s whole point was that structures, institutions, and relations have real causal weight, that history isn’t just the sum of individual choices but the drama of classes, states, and systems colliding. Elster’s stripped-down Marxism turned into Hobbes with footnotes, or maybe Bentham with an angry frown. He made Marx digestible for political science departments, but in the process, he bled away everything that made Marxism dangerous, radical, and alive.
The effect of the whole movement was tragicomic. Analytical Marxism was pitched as a rescue mission, a way to make Marx respectable again. Instead, it produced a showroom Marxism: elegant, bloodless, perfectly logical, and utterly uninhabitable. Imagine an IKEA catalog of revolution, where every barricade is sanded smooth and every Molotov cocktail comes with a safety manual.
It was the kind of Marxism you could discuss at an Oxford high table without disturbing the wine glasses, safe for polite company, entirely detached from the workers and struggles it was supposed to serve.
The irony is brutal. The movement called itself “No Bullshit Marxism,” but it ended up peddling the biggest bullshit of all: a Marxism without praxis, without proletariat, without passion. It was too abstract and airless for radicals, too tainted with Marx’s name for liberals, and too irrelevant for the workers themselves. Instead of being the cutting edge of socialist theory, it became a curiosity for graduate seminars, an intellectual experiment that neutered the very force it claimed to defend.
Analytical Marxism is what happens when you run Marx through a washing machine of rational choice theorists and logic-chopping philosophers. He comes out clean, neatly folded, and completely lifeless. At best, it’s Marx for technocrats; at worst, it’s Marx with rigor mortis.
In came G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, Erik Olin Wright, and Roemer himself, armed with rational choice theory, methodological individualism, and the crisp tools of analytic philosophy. Out went dialectics, history, and Marx’s poetic rage against alienation and exploitation.
What remained was a sterile hybrid, a Frankenstein stitched together from equations, preference sets, and game theory, with no revolutionary pulse left in it.
Cohen, bless his Canadian heart, was the spark. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence in 1978 became the blueprint, or perhaps the IKEA instruction manual. Cohen believed Marx’s sweeping historical materialism could be reconstructed step by step, premise by premise, like assembling a Billy bookshelf with an Allen key.
He prized logical clarity over historical messiness, replacing Marx’s sprawling dialectics with neat causal arrows: productive forces develop, relations of production adapt, superstructures follow. Simple, elegant, airtight. But like flat-pack furniture, once you put it together, you realize it lacks soul. Cohen mistook rigor for vitality, and what he produced was not a theory of history but a ghost of one, embalmed in the precision of analytic reasoning. If Marx was once a roaring fire, Cohen reduced him to a fluorescent desk lamp.
Roemer then took the rational choice turn, and things slid into parody. For him, class exploitation wasn’t about lived domination, alienation, or collective struggle. It was a problem of unfair initial endowments, as if capitalism were just a Monopoly game played with lopsided starting conditions. Redistribution could fix things—hand out the properties more evenly and suddenly, exploitation evaporates.
The barricades of 1848 are nowhere to be seen; instead, we’re left with mathematical models of farmers swapping tractors in an imaginary marketplace. The blood and thunder of class struggle gets replaced by the sterile arithmetic of Pareto efficiency.
Elster went harder still, charging at dialectics like a knight at windmills. He dismissed it all as mumbo-jumbo, a smokescreen for sloppy thinking. For Elster, the only respectable Marxism was one built from methodological individualism: rational actors, clear preferences, causal mechanisms.
The problem is that Marx’s whole point was that structures, institutions, and relations have real causal weight, that history isn’t just the sum of individual choices but the drama of classes, states, and systems colliding. Elster’s stripped-down Marxism turned into Hobbes with footnotes, or maybe Bentham with an angry frown. He made Marx digestible for political science departments, but in the process, he bled away everything that made Marxism dangerous, radical, and alive.
The effect of the whole movement was tragicomic. Analytical Marxism was pitched as a rescue mission, a way to make Marx respectable again. Instead, it produced a showroom Marxism: elegant, bloodless, perfectly logical, and utterly uninhabitable. Imagine an IKEA catalog of revolution, where every barricade is sanded smooth and every Molotov cocktail comes with a safety manual.
It was the kind of Marxism you could discuss at an Oxford high table without disturbing the wine glasses, safe for polite company, entirely detached from the workers and struggles it was supposed to serve.
The irony is brutal. The movement called itself “No Bullshit Marxism,” but it ended up peddling the biggest bullshit of all: a Marxism without praxis, without proletariat, without passion. It was too abstract and airless for radicals, too tainted with Marx’s name for liberals, and too irrelevant for the workers themselves. Instead of being the cutting edge of socialist theory, it became a curiosity for graduate seminars, an intellectual experiment that neutered the very force it claimed to defend.
Analytical Marxism is what happens when you run Marx through a washing machine of rational choice theorists and logic-chopping philosophers. He comes out clean, neatly folded, and completely lifeless. At best, it’s Marx for technocrats; at worst, it’s Marx with rigor mortis.
June 11, 2015
Analytical Marxism is a volume of academic papers representing a movement to reevaluate Marxist arguments in light of Positivism. Most of the articles were intended for mathematicians and economists (so I didn't completely understand them) but the last section might be of interest to the lay reader. I enjoyed chapter 12 The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom authored by G.A. Cohen. Cohen asks the question, "Is it true that workers are forced to sell their labor power?" and evaluates the popular arguments for and against before offering his own thought experiments and conclusions.
to-read-in-part
May 29, 2018Teoría de la Justicia. Unidad 2.
Aparentemente, el nombre de “marxismo analítico” fue acuñado por Jon Elster, aunque resultó popularizado a partir de una compilación de John Roemer (Analytical Marxism, de 1986) integrada por algunas importantes contribuciones de los miembros del “grupo de septiembre”.
Aparentemente, el nombre de “marxismo analítico” fue acuñado por Jon Elster, aunque resultó popularizado a partir de una compilación de John Roemer (Analytical Marxism, de 1986) integrada por algunas importantes contribuciones de los miembros del “grupo de septiembre”.
April 20, 2008
A pointless exercise at best.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews