1) Jon Elster's Methodological Individualism
"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women,
and there are families."
--Margaret Thatcher, 1987
"There are no societies, only individuals who interact with each other."
--Jon Elster, 1989
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The two big questions of Marxism in the twentieth century are:
--The failure of the working-class in the industrialized nations to act as
a consistently revolutionary force.
--The emergence of Stalinist dictatorship in the former Soviet Union.
This questions have engaged a wide variety of thinkers who are not
officially attached to any Marxist-Leninist party. If you are an
intellectual with membership in such parties, you tend to accept the
orthodoxy that all is well with the world. Either the problems don't exist
or we are here to fix them. Every so often a stubborn individual from such
parties comes along like Gramsci, Althusser or even Louis Godena to speak
their mind and challenge orthodoxy. This is a necessity for revolutionary
parties, by the way. It must allow for the free exchange of ideas, just as
the kind that occurs in this sometimes dysfunctional mailing list.
It is easier to attack these problems if you are not a party member. The
people who have the strongest tendency to examine them are of course the
intelligentsia, particularly college instructors. They are not bound by
any shibboleth. They have another problem, however, and that is their
tendency to not only to remove dogma from Marxism but also to make it
acceptable to academia as a whole. Their message becomes more directed to
their professional peers rather than the working-class. This is most true
of the school called Analytical Marxism.
Today I want to take a look at Jon Elster, an AM'er most closely
identified with Rational Choice theory. I am less interested in the
Rational Choice topic than I am in Elster's absolutely anti-Marxist views
on the subject of class and the class-struggle. One of the reasons it is
worthwhile to examine his views is that it will strengthen our own
understanding as Marxists about the true meaning of class.
Elster's rejection of the Marxist notion of class is tied up with his
rejection of what he calls "methodological holism." Marx mistakenly
believed that "in social life there exists wholes or collectivities."
Elster opposes "methodological individualism" to this. In Chapter 2 of "An
Introduction to Karl Marx", he identifies himself with the view that "all
institutions, behavior patterns, and social processes can in principle be
explained in terms of individuals only: their actions, properties, and
relations."
It is not to difficult to understand where this obsession with
"individualism" comes from. The book was written in 1986 at a time when
Reaganism and Thatcherism was in full bloom. Leaders of the two most
powerful imperialist nations in history had embraced a libertarian
philosophy associated with Hayek, Mises, et al. Alan Greenspan, the head
of the Federal Reserve, was an open admirer of the crank novelist and cult
leader Ayn Rand. Her novel "Atlas Shrugged" is a paean to individualism.
In Chapter 6 of "An Introduction to Karl Marx", Elster's critique of class
follows logically from his methodological individualism. Elster tries to
search for ways to tie Marx's investigations to his own methodological
individualism and the results are problematic. He sees class as a
combination of individuals, who simply raise the stakes of each of their
separate self-interest into one powerful bloc. He says:
"Marx's theory of class begins with a certain set of objectively defined
interests, created by relations of exploitation and domination in
production. Objectively speaking, people have an interest in not being
exploited and dominated. For most of them, this interest can be realized
only by collective action. Individual betterment by upward social mobility
is an option for some but not the great majority. The theory first
addresses, albeit very scantily, the question of why some objective
interests emerge as subjectively felt whereas others do not. It then
investigates, much more extensively, people who have moved up from the
third to the second category and then move further up into the first.
Taken together, these analyses amount to a theory of class consciousness."
This description has nothing to do with Marx's real goal. Marx was
interested in explaining the historical origin of class society,
specifically capitalism. Elster's model brackets out history and treats
classes as collections of individuals trying to sort out mutually
conflicting self-interests. This confrontation is identical to the class
struggle.
The class struggle involves "several organized classes with opposed
interests" who are in "confrontation" with each other. This social
conflict, according to Marx, explains social change. This is a flawed way
of thinking since it claims that only class interests are capable of
congealing into organized interest groups. But, Elster points out, "in the
light of the persisting importance of religious, ethnic, nationalistic,
and linguistic social movements, the claim cannot be defended."
Elster ascribes a crudely reductionist version of Marxism that has little
to do with Marx's own approach to the topic of class struggle. Marx never
tried to deduce some automatic equivalency between a class and its
historic interest. Any review of his journalistic masterpieces will reveal
this on almost any page, especially, for example, in the pages of The
Class Struggles in France where he says:
"In France, the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial
bourgeois would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the
task of the petty bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who accomplishes
that? No one. In France it is not accomplished; in France it is
complained. It is not accomplished anywhere within the national walls; the
class war within French society turns into a world war, in which the
nations confront one another. Accomplishment begins only at the moment
when, through the world war, the proletariat is pushed to the van of the
people that dominates the world market, to the van of England. The
revolution, which finds here not its end, but its organizational beginning
is no short-lived revolution. The present generation is like the Jews whom
Moses let through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer,
it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope
with a new world."
How little this has to do with Elster's pallid and schematic notion of
classes acting as the group manifestation of individual self-interest! In
real class society, things are much more complex and *contradictory*. And
how Elster hates contradiction. On page one of his introduction, he
expresses sympathy with those who are new to Marxism and discover
references to terms such as the "dialectical unity of opposites." Well,
part of the problem is that Marx never used such clumsy formulations.
Because some hack from the University of Moscow did, this is not the fault
of Marx.
Why do classes sometimes not act in their own self-interest? Why did the
working-class go off to fight trench warfare in WWI against their own
class interests? Why did their petty-bourgeois leadership side with the
bourgeoisie in its war aims rather than side with the working class? Why
did a section of the German working class embrace the Swastika? Do all of
these contradictory phenomena disqualify the Marxist concept of class as a
method of understanding history and society?
They would if you were simply an economic determinist and this is
basically the way that Elster and the rest of the AM school regards Marx.
They adopt a schematic understanding of the relationship of base and
superstructure that is at odds with Marx's own understanding. G.A. Cohen
in particular is prone to do this and more about him next week.
Marx's journalistic writings defy an economic determinist approach to the
class struggle. In the 18th Brumaire, he says:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain
of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in
such epochs of crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to
their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in
order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored
disguise and this borrowed language."
Not only does Elster fail to full understand the contradictory and complex
aspects of the revolutionary class, he has a view of the ruling class that
is deeply schematic as well. They, like the workers, act in their own
self-interest in his own peculiar notion of capitalist politics. He
interprets Marx's view of the capitalist state as acting in the
"collective, long-term interests of the capitalist class." This means that
such as state must preempt any revolutionary movement by granting
reformist concessions. Elster is puzzled by this view since the evidence
of history is that the "natural response of ruling classes is to meet
social unrest by repression rather than preemption."
Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is actually true, one
must raise the question of what type of homogeneous capitalist state and
class Elster is speaking of. There has never been such a thing in history.
There are inter-class divisions. There are divisions between industrial
and finance capital. There are differences between various geographical
sectors. There are racial and national differences just as there are in
the working-class. These differences often play out in revolutionary
politics as the socialist movement tries to divide one section of the
ruling class against the other, as they do in turn with respect to the
working class.
The worst aspect of Elster's theory is how deeply apolitical it is. There
is almost no engagement with real politics and the real class struggle.
Since self-interest guides all classes in society, it is folly to expect
that your opponents will ever act irrationally. He says, "Marx sinned
against a main rule of political rationality: Never make your plans
strongly dependent on the assumption that the adversary is less than fully
rational."
"Later communist leaders," Elster continues, "have been victim of the same
hubris, most notably in the sequence of events that led up to the Shanghai
massacre of Chinese communists in 1927. Although the CCP (or the
Komintern) believed they could ally themselves with Chiang Kaishek for a
while and discard him when his usefulness was exhausted, the manipulators
ended up as the manipulated."
What is wrong with this analysis? It does not take into account the
strenuous opposition of the Chinese Communist Party leadership to this
very same policy. To refer to the CCP (or the Komintern) having a "belief"
does violence to Chinese history. Leaving aside the whole question of
whether socialist revolution was feasible at this time or whether Mao's
strategy made more sense, we must pay heed to the clash of interests
between a Marxist party and that of a state power that had begun to
abandon the quest for world revolution. Matters such as this can only be
understood by reading Marxist literature on the subject rather than
Elster's glib and superficial version of events.
Elster has abandoned the whole AM enterprise and has devoted his attention
to the whole question of the psychological motivation of political
activity. Next week I will take a look at G.A. Cohen, whose understanding
of historical materialism, while an advance over Elster's, still has
nothing much to do with Marx's.
Louis Proyect
2) G.A. Cohen's "Stagism"
G.A. Cohen's Marxism is a curious business. He tries to restore Marxism to
its "orthodox" roots but his project ends up as a defense of a "stagist"
conception rather than of anything Marx had in mind. Once he establishes
this rather bogus "orthodoxy", he speculates on the political
consequences. His speculations have very little to do with the actual
history and dynamic of the revolutionary movement.
In "Karl Marx's Theory of History", Cohen singles out a paragraph from
Marx's Critique of Political Economy that serves a guide to the sort of
Marxism that Cohen endorses:
"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which correspond to a definite stage of their development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of their material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development,
the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing relations of production, or -- what is but a legal expression for
the same thing -- with the property relations within which they have been
at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundations the entire immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."
If one attempts to build a Marxism around this rather abstract set of
ideas, it is entirely possible to go off in the wrong direction,
especially on the question of how one stage of development supersedes
another. Is it the case that one stage replaces another when the previous
one is a "fetter" on the means of production?
If Marxists posit a capitalist class that becomes "decadent" in the way
that that the feudal aristocracy had became decadent and an impediment to
further productive growth, then one runs into a big problem when
confronted with the real capitalist world.
For instance, Lenin's "Imperialism--the Latest Stage of Capitalism" which
reflects this "fettering" notion is a poor guide to understanding the
explosive and *dynamic* growth of capitalism over the last 50 years or so.
China's embrace of capitalist property relations and its phenomenal
growth-rate over the last 10 years or so should tell you that the
"fettering" concept does not exactly describe the current stage of
capitalism. What is more is that the whole notion of stages -- feudalism,
capitalism and socialism -- might have to be seen in a more subtle manner.
The 3 stages might not only coexist in the same society, but there is no
ruling out the possibility of going backwards from socialism to
capitalism, or from capitalism to feudalism.
Cohen lacks this type of dialectical insight and goes whole hog into the
embrace of the crudest sort of stagism. This falls within the general
rubric of what he calls the "Development Thesis", namely that productive
or technological forces develop in history and revolutions occur when one
mode of production can not sustain the further growth of productive or
technological forces.
This amounts to a form of teleological progress that is a caricature of
what Marx had in mind. In "History, Labor and Freedom", Cohen defends this
thesis in the following manner:
"In the global presentation of the Development Thesis, there need be no
society which develops the forces from their initial rudiments to the
consummation of abundance. There may, instead, be what Ernest Gellner has
called a 'torch-relay' pattern of development: having brought the forces
up to a certain level, an erstwhile pioneering society retires in favour
of another one, which it has influenced..."
History is not a relay-race. In a relay-race there is a goal: to get to
the finish-line. One is always moving forward. In real history, capitalism
can not be analogized to a relay-race since this assumes that one can
detect the finish-line after a certain number of laps. Looking back in
history, you would be tempted to assign the mid-1700s as the last lap for
feudalism, even if this is arguable. Can one find such a last lap for
capitalism?
By Cohen's own criteria, this would be very difficult indeed. Capitalism
was a very dynamic system in Marx's era and remains so. The problem with
capitalism has never been that it will run out of steam, but rather that
it will destroy the underlying productive forces including labor and
nature before it runs out of steam. Capitalism is not a "fetter" on the
means of production in China today. It is freeing up labor and land and
natural resources in a way that the socialist means of production never
could have. In the process China is turning into a formidable industrial
power while destroying rivers and forests and throwing the countryside
population into chaos and desperation while making some winners. In other
words it is functioning exactly the way it did in the 1800s in Manchester.
Once again when we turn to Marx's writings on the actual class struggle as
opposed to abstract constructions such as the kind that G.A. Cohen
attaches himself to there is little evidence of such crude "stagism". For
example, in the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist
League", Marx and Engels point to the very likely event that feudalism
will be replaced by socialism in Germany, and not by the logical next
stage of capitalism. They have no interest in seeing Germany go through a
prolonged stage of bourgeois-democracy.
"[The workers] must drive the proposals of the democrats, who in any case
will not act in a revolutionary manner but in a merely reformist manner,
to the extreme and transform them into direct attacks upon private
property; thus, for example, if the petty bourgeois propose purchase of
the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways
and factories be simply confiscated by the state without compensation as
being the property of reactionaries...
If the German workers are not able to attain power and achieve their own
class interests without going through a lengthy revolutionary development,
they at least know for a certainty this time that the first act of this
approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of
their own class in France and will be very much accelerated by it.
But they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by
clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up
their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not
allowing themselves to be seduced by a single moment by the hypocritical
phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the
independent organization of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The
Revolution in Permanence."
There is little evidence of a "relay race" conception here. Marx and
Engels did not urge the workers to turn the baton over to the capitalist
class since it was their job to carry it for the next 500 yards or so.
They instead urged the workers to carry the baton themselves and overturn
*both* feudal and capitalist property relations at the same time.
Another example should drive the point home. In the article "On Social
Relations in Russia", Engels the "stagist" who everybody loves to hate
nowadays polemicizes against Pyotr Tkachov who thought that socialism was
precluded in Russia since "we have no urban proletariat" and "we also have
no bourgeoisie". Engels reply is to simply state that socialism might
arise out of *pre-capitalist* formations, the rural communal ownership of
land. He says, "It is clear that communal ownership in Russia is long past
its period of florescence and to all appearances is moving toward its
disintegration. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of raising
this form of society to a higher one, if it should last until
circumstances are ripe for that, and it if shows itself capable of
development in such manner that the peasants no longer cultivate the land
separately, but collectively; of raising it to this higher form without it
being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate
stage of bourgeois small holdings."
The Russian peasants do not have to go through the intermediate stage just
as the German workers did not. There is little engagement in Cohen's
writings with actual history since he is preoccupied with a theory of
history rather than real societies placed in time. This accounts for his
inability to see the contradictory aspects not only of 19th century
Germany and Russia, but contemporary society as well. His work, like
Elster's, is preoccupied with theory rather than the messy details of real
life.
In the twentieth century a "stagist" conception of Marxism drawn from the
same sources that so enchant G. A. Cohen became the common wisdom of the
2nd and 3rd International. Trotsky's conception of Permanent Revolution
was a departure from this and is influenced not only by the political
ideas but even the language of Marx and Engels in this particular article.
Cohen's desire to return Marxism to some sort of "orthodoxy" is a
misbegotten project. It is based first of all on a misunderstanding of
Marx's ideas on history and, worse, it is tied to a particularly odd, if
not outright bugged-out, notion of what it means to be a socialist
revolutionary.
The question of *why* one should be a socialist revolutionary is in
Cohen's eyes a major problem since Marx and Engels said in the Communist
Manifesto that the "fall [of the bourgeoisie] and the victory of the
proletariat are inevitable." Cohen is thrown into a profound political and
spiritual crisis by this conundrum. He raises his eyes to the heavens and
cries out, "But, if the advent of socialism is inevitable, then why should
Marx and Engels, and those who they hoped to activate, strive to achieve
socialism?"
Is this not the silliest question you have ever heard in your life? How in
the world did Cohen get such a first-class reputation among socialists? I
can understand how he might impress a don or two at Oxford but this is
just very dumb. There was nothing "inevitable" about socialism in the eyes
of Marx and Engels.
The direct testimony of Marx and Engels' lives should tell you how little
they believed in "inevitability." Nearly every moment was consumed with
building socialist parties and the First International. In their polemics
with anarchists and utopian socialists, they made it very clear that
politics and correct strategy would ensure success and nothing else. If a
revolutionary socialist party was not at the head of the worker's
movement, then defeat was inevitable.
Cohen is not that interested in politics. The question of revolutionary
politics becomes one of trying to decide what to do with one's life in the
face of the "inevitability" of socialism. Why go out and pass out leaflets
if the revolution is inevitable? You might as well stay at home and wait
for the inevitable. As incredible as it may seem, Cohen is preoccupied
with how to answer this concern. He argues that one has an *obligation* to
be a revolutionary since more revolutionaries than fewer will hasten the
"inevitable".
He comes up with the bright idea that "although it is inevitable that a
socialist revolution will come, it is not inevitable how long it will take
for it to come. It is therefore rational for us to dedicate ourselves to
the revolutionary movement, in order to make socialism come sooner rather
than later. The sooner socialism comes, the smaller will be the amount of
suffering imposed on people by continuing capitalist oppression."
Anybody accustomed to the hard work of building revolutionary parties will
read stuff like this and rub their eyes in disbelief. What in the world is
Cohen talking about? People join revolutionary parties not because these
are *rational choices* but because they are moved by a hatred for
capitalism. Furthermore, we understand that there is nothing "inevitable"
about socialism. If anything the entire evidence of twentieth century
history shows that capitalism has much more inevitability attached to it
than socialism.
The reason that Cohen is speculating on such manners is that he feels the
need to defend the socialist project from the challenge presented by
bourgeois political and ethical philosophy. Liberals like John Rawls and
conservatives like Robert Nozick have written a number of books that
attempt to defend just societies and the forms of political action
necessary to achieve them. They also have a great deal of credence in the
academic circles Cohen travels in.
Cohen wants to make socialism appear as a rational choice in the face of
their challenges but he ends up conceding much too much to them. The worst
concession is that he conceives of political action as the role of the
individual rather than classes. While he does not share Elster's outright
hostility to the notion of classes, the overall tendency in Cohen's work
is to wrestle with issues of the class struggle as they appear in the
guise of moral dilemmas to individuals.
For example, in chapter 12 of "History, Labor and Freedom" he takes up the
question, "Are Disadvantaged Workers who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to
Take Hazardous Jobs." What a peculiar subject for an "orthodox" Marxist to
be tackling. One would think that Cohen would have had much more interest
in class struggle type issues in 1988 when the book was written. Issues
such as the approaching civil war in Yugoslavia do not seem to engage his
interest.
Most of the chapter is an involved with consideration of the choices
before an "imaginary worker in an imaginary situation." He is one of the
7,000 unemployed people in the town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania (population
33,000), to which the Beryllium Corporation came in 1956, offering
hazardous jobs." "Our worker, whom I shall call John, took one. He was
confronted with a choice between employment and health, and he chose the
former. Was he forced to take the health-endangering job? did he, in
taking it, contract freely?"
Of course the question of the "contractual" basis of justice lies at the
heart of John Rawls' liberalism and one could write at length about how
preposterous this notion is and how pointless it is to engage Rawls'
thinking on his own terms.
I will rather conclude with several obvious conclusions. To begin with,
the study of individuals and their moral problems is not the
subject-matter of Marxism. Marxism studies classes. A proper use of a
Marxist's time would be to study *actual* rather than *imaginary* workers
in identical situations. It would be useful to explore how capitalism
tends to threaten the job safety of the working-class even in the
expansionary period of 1956 or 1997 for that matter. It would then
consider how the ruling-class parties share in the creation of a legal
fabric that allows such plants to be kept going. It would conclude with
recommendations about how to abolish such oppressive conditions. This is
not to be found in Cohen's work.
Next week I will wind up with an examination of John Roemer's work. I am
particularly interested to see how his concept of market socialism flows
from his Analytical Marxist preconceptions.
Louis Proyect
