Analytical Marxism? Causation? Area Studies? Collective Action? Generalization? All in one book?
It’s like a dream come true.
Posts tagged analytical marxism
Posted 1 year ago
Erik Olin Wright | The Tasks of Emancipatory Social Science
Emancipatory social science seeks to generate scientific knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression. To call this a form of social science, rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the importance for this task of systematic scientific knowledge about how the world works. The word emancipatory identifies a central moral purpose in the production of knowledge– the elimination of oppression and the creation of the conditions for human flourishing. And the word social implies the belief that human emancipation depends upon the transformation of the social world, not just the inner life of persons.
To fulfill this mission, any emancipatory social science faces three basic tasks: elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation. In different times and places one or another of these may be more pressing than others, but all are necessary for a comprehensive emancipatory theory.
Posted 1 year ago
Just as there are ground-floor institutional facts that require collective recognition, so there are macro or systematic fallouts of institutional facts that do not require collective recognition in order to exist but simply are consequences of the ground-floor institutional facts.
John Searle, Making the Social World, p. 23
Searle’s social philosophy here goes a long way towards succeeding where the analytical Marxists failed- in explaining the nature of class relations. Previously, many of the analytical Marxists either denied the objective existence of classes (and in so doing gave up a significant amount of the explanatory power of Marxian political economy) or gave inadequate functional explanations of them. But Searle’s conceptual apparatus gives us an excellent framework for explaining class. The class relation (not always collectively recognized) arises out of the relation of private property, ownership of capital, and the wage system (all collectively recognized)- very similar to Marx’s original formulation. Searle’s ideas, however, give this formulation a very robust and well thought-out basis.
Posted 1 year ago
Dialectical logic is based on several propositions which may have a certain inductive appeal, but are far from being rules of inference: that things turn into their opposites, and quantity turns into quality. In Marxian social science, dialectics is often used to justify a lazy kind of teleological reasoning. Developments occur because they must in order for history to be played out as it was intended. Thus state actions are explained by their effect of propping up existing regimes; capitalism foments racism and sexism among the working class because those ideologies weaken working-class power and strengthen capitalist power; schools miseducate working-class children in order to maintain bourgeois power. All of these consequences may be true, but they cannot be demonstrated by appealing to the ‘historical roles’ that must be played by the entities ‘state,’ ‘capitalist class,’ ‘working class,’ ‘capital.’
John Roemer, “‘Rational Choice’ Marxism: Some Issues of Method and Substance,” Analytical Marxism, p. 191.
While obviously remaining highly skeptical of applying the methodology of rational choice theory to Marxian class analysis, I think the critique Roemer makes here is quite good. Causes cannot be explained by reference to effects alone. It’s a grievous logical error to assume that because an event or phenomenon x benefits capital, capital caused x.
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