Introduction to the 2000 Edition: Reflections on Analytical Marxism THIS book received more attention than would otherwise have been bestowed upon it by virtue of the coincidence that it appeared just when a number of other Marxist scholars were also beginning to devote themselves to work of a kind that is now called 'analytical Marxist'. They, like me, had a 'Commitment without Reverence'1 to Marxism, and we formed a group that has now been meeting annu- ally for more than twenty years. In the present Introduction, I shall say (section i) what analytical Marxism is, and I shall describe (section 2) the formation of the Group that has promoted it. Section 3 is a personal interlude: it recounts how I, in particular, became an analytical Marxist. In section 4 the analyticality of analytical Marxism is delineated in greater detail, and section 5 discusses bullshit, the bete noire of ana- lytical Marxism. The final section addresses the irrepressible ques- tion: is analytical Marxism Marxist? (1) Analytical Marxism I shall not try to define 'Marxism'.2 As for 'analytical', it has two relevant, and relevantly different, senses in the present context, a broad sense and a narrow one. All analytical Marxism is analytical in the broad sense, and much is analytical in the narrow sense. In each sense of 'analytical', to be analytical is to be opposed to a form of thinking traditionally thought integral to Marxism: analytical thinking, in the broad sense of 'analytical', is opposed to so-called 'dialectical' think- ing, and analytical thinking, in the narrow sense of 'analytical', is opposed to what might be called 'holistic' thinking. The fateful opera- tion that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own. Rejection of that claim enabled an appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology that Marxism, to its detriment, had shunned. ' That is the title of an article that bears the subtitle 'Reflections on Analytical Marxism', which appeared in Imprints for 1997, and from which the greater part of the present Introduction is taken. 2 But see section 6 for some effort in that direction. xviii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION The mainstream methodology that I have in mind deploys intellectual techniques that were shaped within several currents of non-Marxist Western (and mainly anglophone) social science and philosophy. The techniques in question are commonly styled 'analytical', in a broad sense, because their use requires and facilitates precision of statement on the one hand and rigour of argument on the other. We can distinguish three such sets of techniques. First, there are the techniques of logical and linguistic analy- sis that developed within twentieth-century positivist and post- positivist philosophy, initially in the German-speaking but dien (as a result of Nazism) dominantly in the English-speaking world. Next, there are the techniques of economic analysis which descend from Adam Smith and David Ricardo but which were given mathematical form within neo-classical economics, roughly from the time of Leon Walras and Alfred Marshall. And, finally, there are the techniques of the representation of choice, action, and strategy that developed out of and alongside that neo-classical economics: those techniques belong to what are now called 'decision theory', 'game theory', and, more generally, 'rational choice theory', and they are widely applied within contemporary political science. Now, scholars who write about analytical Marxism usually name three people as its founders: G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer. That is a reasonable judgement, and I shall follow it here. Without too much distortion, one may say that Cohen is associated with the philosophical techniques identified above, Roemer with the economic, and Elster, who is a political scientist, with rational choice theory. There is some distortion there, because Elster, who is by far the most erudite and wide-ranging of the diree, employs in his work all three sets of techniques, because Roemer is a game theorist as well as an economist, and because Cohen's work is not wholly inno- cent of game-theoretical devices in their simple pre-mathematical form. But the suggested tripartite division does represent an approxi- mate truth. (2) The September Group Each of the aforementioned three scholars learned his Marxism independently of learning analytical methods, since there was, per- force, no analytical Marxism for them to learn before they had INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION xix founded the school.1 Each put analysis and Marxism together before he had met the other two. The three came to know one another over the period 1979 to 1981, and one could say that analytical Marxism was truly in business by September 1981, when the trio met with some eight or nine others of similar mind, in London. Since then there has been an annual three-day meeting each September, usually in London,2 of about ten analytical Marxists, from four or five countries. The prehistory of (what is now called) 'the September Group' was as follows. With Cohen's assistance, Elster convened a weekend meeting in London in September 1979, of about a dozen scholars, of Marxist or quasi-Marxist stripe, from several European countries, all of whom were working on the concept of exploitation. We found our exchanges congenial and stimulating, so a similar meeting, again on exploitation, with roughly the same cast, occurred in London in September of 1980. At the close of that meeting it was decided to meet annually, but to remove the restriction of discussion to exploitation. The personnel, as of 1981, were the most dedicated who had attended in 1979 and/or 1980, together with one or two new invitees. Since 1981, membership in the Group has been remarkably stable. As I write, we consist of Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley), Samuel Bowles (Amherst), Robert Brenner (Los Angeles), G. A. Cohen (Oxford), Joshua Cohen (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Philippe van Parijs (Louvain-la Neuve), John Roemer (Yale), Hillel Steiner (Manchester), Robert Van der Veen (Amsterdam), and Erik Wright (Madison). Since 1982, when Bardhan joined, there have been two departures and two fresh adhesions. Jon Elster and Adam Przeworski left in 1993, in reaction, so they said, to what they considered to be unsatisfactory aspects of the intellectual character that the group had evolved: others of us thought that their farewells had more to do with the demise of European communism. Bowles joined in 1987, and Joshua Cohen in 1996. 1 Each of the three had a political commitment to Marxism, or to something close to Marxism, before his academic induction into the techniques that I have described. Cohen and Roemer were raised in North America, in pro-Soviet, pro-People's Republic homes, by politically active parents. Elster's background was not communist, but he participated in a once robust left socialist Norwegian movement which was friendly to Marxism. 2 We met in Paris in 1982, in Chicago in 1991, in New York in 1996, in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1998, and in Oxford in 1999. xx INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION (3) My Path to Analytical Marxism It is extremely difficult to adopt and pursue an intellectual method simply as a result of coming across its use in a book or an article and finding it attractive. Practice of the methods that I have described requires a training in them, an apprenticeship. And I shall now explain why peculiarities of my own background made me receptive to the required training at a time when other Marxists in my cohort were not. (Similarly differentiating stories could no doubt be told about Elster and Roemer, but it is not for me to tell them.) My initial ingestion of Marxism took place in a peculiar milieu. My parents were Jewish communist factory workers in Montreal who met in the course of struggles to build unionism in the garment trade, in the face of brutal boss and police repression. When I was four years old, in 1945, my parents enrolled me in the Morris Winchewsky Yiddish School, which was run by a communist Jewish organization. It was the only school that I attended until I was eleven, when raids by the 'Red Squad' of the Province of Quebec Police on the premises of the organization, and on the school itself, made it impossible for the school to continue. (This was in 1952, and the raids were part of the local contribution to the McCarthyite persecution then still pro- ceeding in North America. The Quebecois version of McCarthyism was less insidious than the real article occurring south of the border, but it was also more brutal, and, especially for a child, more imme- diately frightening.) My upbringing induced in me a love of and belief in Marxist ideas, and, by the time I reached McGill University to study for my first degree, I had read, with imperfect understanding, a number of the classics of Marxism. I was certain, at seventeen, that Frederick Engels's Anti-Duhring contained all the important philosophical truth that there was. I came to see its limitations as an undergraduate, and I concluded that its philosophical sections, by contrast with those on society and history, were naive. But my commitment to historical materialism was more durable, and I long intended to expound and defend it as best I could, and eventually, in 1978, I published (the first edition of) the present book, in fulfilment of that long-standing intention. The book owes its methodological character to the circumstance that I moved in 1961 from McGill to Oxford, where, under the benign guidance of Gilbert Ryle, I learned British analytical philosophy. INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION xxi Almost all politically committed students were, at that time, and throughout the 1960s, hostile to that philosophy.