Re: Rational Choice/Analytical M. (Was Nazi racial ...

[Justin Schwartz <jschwart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox recommends Ellen Wood's piece on rational choice Marxism in
NLR. Louis will probably like this polemic. I thought that it did not
engage the serious claims of the writers she critiques, and encourage
Louis and others interested in AM to put off reading the piece until they
have grappled some with the work of AMs themselves, so they can decide
whther Wood's charcterization was fair or reasonable. In general I think
Wood is something of a fundamentalist whose procedure tends to be to note
differences between the writings of various modern scholars and Marx, and
display these as evidence of intellectual irresponsible or class perfidy.
I don't regard this as a useful modus operandi, although some of Wood's
critical comments strike home here and there.

One area where Wood falls down is to treat analytical Marxism as
coextensive with rational choice Marxism, where that is the sort
exemplified by Roemer and Carling and to some extent Elster, which uses
the arsenal of modelling techniques of rational choice theory, game
theory, and neoclassical economics to reconstruct Marxist insights. I
think this is a useful thing to do, even where I disagree with some of the
particular results,a s with Roemer's critique of exploitation theory. But
there is a great deal more to AM than that. G.A. Cohen is the original AM,
and he appears quite innocent to rational choice theory. He is, or was, a
philosopher of history, and given the attention that historical
materialism has been paid by AM (quite disproportionate, in my view,
actually, I do not understand how anyone can dismiss AM as ahistorical.

Look at the AM's own work. You wouldn't accept a hostile study of Marx or
Lenin, etc. without looking at the originals first.

--Justin

On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Carrol Cox wrote:

>     Louis wonders if he will have to read Roemer or go back to A.J. Ayer. A
> good place to start is with with Ellen Meiksins Wood,  "Rational Choice
> Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?" NLR 177 (Sept/Oct 1989), 41-88. It
> is an extremely powerful article. See also criticisms by Alan Carling and
> Alex Callinicos with Wood's reply, in NLR 184 (Nov/Dec '90). Not only do
> Roemer, Elster, etc. not succeed in "going beyond Marx"; they throw away
> all of Marx's gains and make history unintelligible.
>
>     Incidentally, Wood is also superb in this article in exploding the
> young Marx's silliness aphoristic remarks on the relations of production
> becoming a "fetter" on the forces of production--which she shows forms
> no part of Marx's developed theory, and which lead to technological deter-
> minism and metaphysics when taken seriously.
>
>     Carrol
>
>
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