Anonymous askedHi, Nich. Thanks for your compliments, and sorry about the extreme delay in response.
I share a great deal of Marxist intuitions, but I, like you, sometimes have considerable doubt about the conclusions that many Marxist writers reach with them. I think the lack of rigor you point to in analysis refers to the tendency towards sloppy functional explanation, a point that John Roemer quite accurately describes. Though I’m not familiar with the field of international relations, I can imagine the critiques made of Marxist variants of it: that state actions are too readily described in terms of actions that benefit capitalists without making anything more than a cursory attempt to understand the reasons given by people in charge of the state. I think this is a good point, and I think many Marxists make the mistake of reading a functional/economic explanation into a given situation without adequately researching the causal factors that led to it. Perhaps there have been Marxist replies to these critiques- I cannot do much more than speculate about them, given my unfamiliarity with international relations.
As far as recommended writers, I would say probably pretty much any of the Marxist geographers: David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and J.K. Gibson-Graham are all very good at what they do. Harvey’s The Limits to Capital in particular is a very important work, and I think you’ll find that it certainly doesn’t lack for rigor. You might also want to look at the work of the analytical Marxists: G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, and Robert Brenner are all good examples. Though watch out for any of the game-theoretic analyses that came out of that tradition- they rely on rational choice theory, which I find highly suspect. In particular, you might want to look at Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, which is a robust reconstruction of Marx’s analysis of productive forces and economic development. I hope this helps.
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