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97-572: Analytical Marxism is an academic school of Marxist theory which emerged in the late 1970s, largely prompted by G. A. Cohen 's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978). In this book, Cohen drew on the Anglo–American tradition of analytic philosophy in an attempt to raise the standards of clarity and rigor within Marxist theory, which led to his distancing of Marxism from continental European philosophy . Analytical Marxism rejects much of

194-408: A " God's eye view " as a purely neutral judge. The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in 1996 that "there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before." So even the existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer depends on what is meant by "philosophy"). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of

291-535: A "society of transparence", "without contradiction" nor ideology. Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser enjoined the most sober definition of communism, exposed by Marx in The German Ideology : Communism is "not a state of the future, but the real movement which destroys the existing state of being.". In 1938, Trotsky had written “Their Morals and Ours” which consisted of ethical polemics in response to criticisms around his actions concerning

388-401: A 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... Marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic") only insofar as it was the theory of the tendency towards communism, and in view of its realization. The criteria of acceptance or rejection of a 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in

485-423: A bourgeois ideological construct designed to justify exploitation by reference to reciprocity in the wage contract. The analytical Marxists, however, largely rejected this point of view. Led by G. A. Cohen (a moral philosopher by training), they argued that a Marxist theory of justice had to focus on egalitarianism . For Cohen, this meant an engagement with moral and political philosophy in order to demonstrate

582-428: A convincing and fruitful mode of inquiry, and that rational choice and game theory were far from being universally accepted as sound or useful ways of modelling social institutions and processes. Cohen's defence of a technological determinist interpretation of historical materialism was, in turn, quite widely criticized, even by analytical Marxists. Together with Andrew Levine, Wright argued that in attributing primacy to

679-459: A critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn. Marx builds on four contributions Hegel makes to our philosophical understanding. They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, (2)

776-402: A higher level of human consciousness of freedom. Each stage also has its own principle or law according to which it develops and lives in accordance with this freedom. Yet the law is not free-standing. It is delivered by means of the actions of men which spring from their needs, passions, and interests. Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed to the efficient causation provided by passion; on

873-472: A natural thing like a tree is a process that by and large points back toward itself: every step of the process takes place in order to reproduce the genus. In the historical process, however, what exists, what is actual, is imperfect. It is inimical to the potential. What is trying to come into existence - freedom - inherently negates everything preceding it and everything existing, since no actual existing human institution can possibly embody pure human freedom. So

970-656: A necessary starting principle. It draws heavily upon assumptions of neoclassical economics , where social behavior is explained in terms of rational actors whose choices are constrained by prices and incomes, and where individuals' subjective preferences are treated as a given. Economist Mark Blaug has criticized over-reliance on methodological individualism in economics, saying that "it is helpful to note what methodological individualism strictly interpreted [...] would imply for economics. In effect, it would rule out all macroeconomic propositions that cannot be reduced to microeconomic ones [...] this amounts to saying goodbye to almost

1067-399: A place amongst the 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness . Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political . According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital (including

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1164-428: A sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and effective transformation of the world through praxis , which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy ; Louis Althusser, founder of " Structural Marxism " in

1261-402: A set of discrete theses that stand or fall on the basis of their logical consistency and empirical validity. Critics also raised methodological objections. Against Elster and the rational choice Marxists, Terrell Carver argued that methodological individualism was not the only form of valid explanation in the social sciences, that functionalism in the absence of micro-foundations could remain

1358-416: A simplistic empiricism or economism , crippling it in practice and making it comically simplistic at the level of theory. Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Marxist and Marx-influenced 20th century theory, such as (to name a few random examples) the critical theory of

1455-422: A simplistic model of state power rather than hegemony . So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of a descent into theoreticism or the temptations of idealism . Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser : Althusser proposed

1552-475: A theory of justice; others question analytical Marxists' identification of justice with rights. The question of justice cannot be seen in isolation from questions of power, or from the balance of class forces in any specific conjuncture. Non-Marxists may employ a similar criticism in their critique of liberal theories of justice in the Rawlsian tradition. They argue that the theories fail to address problems about

1649-412: A thing is revealed in the entire, typical process of development of that thing. Looked at purely formally, human society has a natural line of development in accordance with its essence just like any other living thing. This process of development appears as a succession of stages of world history. (2) Stages of world history Human history passes through several stages, in each of which is materialized

1746-399: A variety of leftist political sympathies, ranging from communism to reformist social democracy . Through the 1980s, most of them began to believe that Marxism as a theory capable of explaining revolution in terms of the economic dynamics of capitalism and the class interests of the proletariat had been seriously compromised. They were largely in agreement that the transformation of capitalism

1843-401: Is a system wherein "autonomy" is infringed, and which results in a distribution of benefits and burdens that is unfair. In the traditional Marxist account, exploitation and injustice occur because non-workers appropriate the value produced by the labour of workers. This would be overcome in a socialist society where no class would own the means of production and be in a position to appropriate

1940-458: Is an oversimplification , it still has some measure of truth. On the other hand, Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus , 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty ; Jean-Jacques Rousseau , from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy ; Adam Smith , from whom came

2037-404: Is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel

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2134-435: Is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life

2231-528: Is in fact the practical continuation of the philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy is still politically irrelevant. Many critics , both non-Marxist and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this is too quick a dismissal of the post-Marxian philosophical tradition. Much sophisticated and important thought has taken place after the writing of Marx and Engels ; much or perhaps even all of it has been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism. Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry might condemn Marxism to

2328-457: Is its "dialectical" character. The process of natural development occurs in a relatively straight line from the germ to the fully realized being and back to the germ again. Some accident from the outside might come along to interrupt this process of development, but if left to its own devices, it proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner. Society's historical development is internally more complex. The transaction from potentiality to actuality

2425-429: Is mediated by consciousness and will. The essence realized in the development of human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely that ability to negate the smooth line of development and go off in novel, hitherto unforeseen directions. As humankind's essence reveals itself, that revelation is at the same time the subversion of itself. Spirit is constantly at war with itself. This appears as the contradictions constituting

2522-466: Is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject , as did classic philosophy, including contractualism ( Hobbes , John Locke and Rousseau ) but also political economy , Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism

2619-440: Is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in

2716-578: Is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment 's universalism and humanist project on behalf of the right of tradition , as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears both as

2813-472: Is often contrasted with methodological holism , a top-down macro-level approach, and methodological pluralism . This framework was introduced as a foundational assumption within the social sciences by Max Weber , and discussed in his book Economy and Society . Within later schools of economic thought, such as the Austrian School , strict adherence to methodological individualism is considered

2910-405: Is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production , produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with

3007-526: Is theft! ", in The Poverty of Philosophy (1845). Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, stood Hegel on his feet, in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx

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3104-446: Is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which

3201-576: The Chartist movement in the United Kingdom , he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, The Holy Family (1845), and The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner 's The Ego and Its Own (1844), considered one of

3298-535: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would later arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism , exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, and several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School , would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that

3395-554: The Hegelian and dialectical tradition associated with Marx's thought. The school is associated with the "September Group", which included Jon Elster , John Roemer , Adam Przeworski and Erik Olin Wright . Its theorists emphasize methodology and utilize analytical philosophy, and some of them favor rational choice theory , and methodological individualism (the doctrine that all social phenomena can only be explained in terms of

3492-430: The libertarianism of Robert Nozick . However, much as Cohen criticizes Rawls for treating people's personal powers as just another external resource for which no individual can claim desert, so does he charge Nozick with moving beyond the concept of self-ownership to his own right-wing thesis of self-ownership. In Cohen's view, Nozick's mistake is to endow people's claims to legitimately acquire external resources with

3589-412: The " epistemological break " between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society. In 1844–1845, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up

3686-526: The 1871 Civil War in France which concerned the Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first " dictatorship of the proletariat ", etc.) Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement , such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto , written with Engels (who

3783-505: The 1960s, would define it as " class struggle in theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the Revolutions of 1848 , Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto , which

3880-475: The Aristotlean position that law or principle is something implicit in a thing, a potentiality which is not actual but which is in the process of becoming actual. This means that if we want to know the principle governing something, we have to observe its typical life-process and figure out its characteristic behavior. Observing an acorn on its own, we can never deduce that it is an oak tree. To figure out what

3977-484: The Frankfurt School , the political writing of Antonio Gramsci , and the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson , must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account, but many such thinkers also feel a strong need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems with orthodox Marxism . Such problems might include a too-simple economic determinism , an untenable theory of ideology as " false consciousness ," or

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4074-575: The Kronstadt rebellion and wider questions posed around the perceived, “amoral” methods of the Bolsheviks. Critics believed these methods seemed to emulate the Jesuit maxim that the “ ends justifies the means ”. Trotsky argued that Marxism situated the foundation of morality as a product of society to serve social interests rather than “eternal moral truths” proclaimed by institutional religions. On

4171-409: The acorn is - and also what the oak tree is - we have to observe the line of development from one to the other. (c) The phenomena of history arise from a whole with an essence which undergoes transformation of form and which has an end or telos. For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom, and the telos of that essence is the actualization of that freedom. Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence of

4268-429: The act of rendering intelligible a communist policy , or not." ( Ecrits pour Althusser , 1991, p.98). However, "Althusser never ceased to put in question the images of communism that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself." Althusser thus criticized the evolutionist image which made of communism an ultimate stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic images which made it

4365-441: The actions and beliefs of individual subjects). Cohen's book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), in which he attempts to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defence of Marx's materialist conception of history , is generally regarded as having started the analytical Marxist approach. For Cohen, Marx's historical materialism is a technologically deterministic theory, in which

4462-406: The actual is both itself and its opposite (as potential). And this potential (freedom) is never inert but constantly exerts an impulse toward change. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer , a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and

4559-416: The alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man ( menschliche Wesen , human nature). But the essence of man

4656-448: The capitalist class and the working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it

4753-438: The cause of change in the mode of production as due to being inequitable rather than inefficient is also the source of criticism. One such criticism is that his argument relies on the legal ownership of production which is only present in later forms of class society rather than the social relations of production. Some Marxists argue, against analytical Marxist theories of justice, that it is mistaken to suppose that Marxism offers

4850-411: The change mostly in mechanical terms using principles of genetics and natural selection. The historical process, however, never attempts to preserve an essence in the first place. Rather, it develops an essence through successive forms. This means that at any moment on the path of historical change, there is a contradiction between what exists and what is in the process of coming-to-be. The realization of

4947-462: The character of the economic base. Finally, Cohen's anthropology was judged dubious: whether human beings adopt new and more productive technology is not a function of an ahistorical rationality, but depends on the extent to which these forms of technology are compatible with pre-existing beliefs and social practices. Cohen recognized and accepted some, though not all, of these criticisms in his History, Labour, and Freedom (1988). Roemer's version of

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5044-404: The claim that humankind itself can adapt society to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves to it. Natural and historical change, according to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences. Organic natural entities develop through a straightforward process, relatively simple to comprehend at least in outline. Historical development, however, is a more complex process. Its specific difference

5141-421: The communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality (" collectivism " ), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor,

5238-509: The configuration of power relations in the contemporary world, and by so doing appear as little more than exercises in logic. "Justice", on this view, is whatever is produced by the assumptions of the theory. It has little to do with the actual distribution of power and resources in the world. Marxist theory Marxist theorist Louis Althusser , for example, defined the philosophy as " class struggle in theory", thus radically separating himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt

5335-550: The contrary, the latter is the vehicle realizing the former. Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion than on the more historically specifiable interests of men. Marx will reverse this priority. (3) Difference between natural and historical change Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between the application of organic, essentialist categories to the realm of human history and the realm of organic nature. According to Hegel, human history strives toward perfectibility, but nature does not. Marx deepens and expands this idea into

5432-415: The critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the " Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation ), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and

5529-769: The development and primarily the class struggle but this did not mean all means are permissible. There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a " young Marx " (in particular the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ) and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" ( Das Kapital , 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" ( The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ,

5626-422: The development of a market for labour. Roemer would go on to reject the necessity of the labour theory of value to explain exploitation and class. Value was in principle capable of being explained in terms of any class of commodity inputs, such as oil, wheat, etc., rather than being exclusively explained by embodied labour power. Roemer was led to the conclusion that exploitation and class were thus generated not in

5723-424: The economic relations of production are functionally explained by the material forces of production , and in which the political and legal institutions (the "superstructure") are functionally explained by the relations of production (the "base"). The transition from one mode of production to another is driven by the tendency of the productive forces to develop. Cohen's accounts for this tendency by reference to

5820-438: The essence of Spirit. (4) Contradiction In the development of a natural thing, there is by and large no contradiction between the process of development and the way that development must appear. So the transition from an acorn, to an oak, to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted flow of the acorn back to itself again. When change in the essence takes place, as it does in the process of evolution, we can understand

5917-444: The final line of Karl Marx's 11 Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it". If this claim (which Marx originally intended as a criticism of German Idealism and the more moderate Young Hegelians ) is still more or less the case in the 21st century, as many Marxists would claim, then Marxist theory

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6014-488: The first period of European colonialism ) and then through the globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the Industrial Revolution : thus, in

6111-417: The forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (this term

6208-596: The founding book of individualist anarchism . Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating , and that replacing God with Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation , or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon , who had become famous with his cry " Property

6305-468: The idea that the grounds of property is labour ; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . "Vulgar Marxism" (or codified dialectical materialism ) was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism , with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure . Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of

6402-420: The idea that world history progresses through stages, (3) the difference between natural and historical (dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that dialectical change proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself. (1) Aristotelian organicism and essentialism (a) Hegel adopts the position that chance is not the basis of phenomena and that events are governed by laws. Some have falsely attributed to Hegel

6499-477: The imprint of Cambridge University Press's series Studies in Marxism and Social Theory, including Jon Elster 's Making Sense of Marx (1985) and Adam Przeworski 's Capitalism and Social Democracy (1985). Among the most methodologically controversial were these two authors, and Roemer, due to their use of rational-actor models. Not all analytical Marxists are rational-choice Marxists, however. Elster's account

6596-514: The inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely

6693-488: The injustice of market exchange, and the construction of an appropriate egalitarian metric. This argument is pursued in Cohen's books, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (1995) and If You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich? (2000b). Cohen departs from previous Marxists by arguing that capitalism is a system characterized by unjust exploitation not because the labour of workers is "stolen" by employers, but because it

6790-485: The labour theory of value and, going further, virtually all of Marxian economics . The "dialectical" method is rejected as a form of Hegelian obscurantism . The theory of ideology and revolution continued to be useful to a certain degree, but only once they had been purged of their tendencies to holism and functionalism and established on the basis of an individualist methodology and a causal or intentional explanation. The analytical (and rational choice) Marxists held

6887-452: The language in which exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake ". Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest Magna Charta of a day work limited by law": The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between

6984-452: The other hand, he regarded it as farcical to assert that an end could justify any criminal means and viewed this to be a distorted representation of the Jesuit maxim. Instead, Trotsky believed that the means and ends frequently “exchanged places” as when democracy is sought by the working class as an instrument to actualize socialism. He also viewed revolution to be deducible from the laws of

7081-489: The passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo! [How changed from what he/it was!]" But

7178-471: The position that phenomena are governed by transcendent, supersensible ideas that ground them. On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic unity between universal and particular. Particulars are not mere token types of universals; rather, they relate to each other as a part relates to a whole. This latter has import for Marx's own conception of law and necessity. (b) In rejecting the idea that laws merely describe or independently ground phenomena, Hegel revives

7275-420: The productive forces (the development thesis), Cohen overlooked the role played by class actors in the transition between modes of production. For the authors, it was forms of class relations (the relations of production) that had primacy in terms of how the productive forces were employed and the extent to which they developed. It was not evident, they claimed, that the relations of production become "fetters" once

7372-428: The productive forces are capable of sustaining a different set of production relations. Likewise, the political philosopher Richard W. Miller , while sympathetic with Cohen's analytical approach to Marxism, rejected Cohen's technological interpretation of historical materialism, to which he counterpoised with what he called a "mode of production" interpretation which placed greater emphasis on the role of class struggle in

7469-636: The rational character of the human species: where there is the opportunity to adopt a more productive technology and thus reduce the burden of labour, human beings will tend to take it. At the same time as Cohen was working on Karl Marx's Theory of History , the American economist John Roemer was employing neoclassical economics to defend the Marxist concepts of exploitation and class . In his A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), Roemer employed rational choice and game theory to demonstrate how exploitation and class relations may arise in

7566-542: The reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology (1846): In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That

7663-521: The rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the Prussian university and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism ( Kant , Fichte , Schelling and Hegel). Along with Engels, who observed

7760-400: The rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham 's utilitarianism . Alongside Freud , Nietzsche , and Durkheim , Marx thus takes

7857-510: The same moral quality that belongs to people's ownership of themselves. In other words, propertarianism allows inequalities to arise from differences in talent and differences in external resources, but it does so because it assumes that the world is "up for grabs", that it can be justly appropriated as private property, with virtually no restriction(s). Analytical Marxism received criticism from different quarters, Marxist and non-Marxist. Some critics argued that analytical Marxism proceeded from

7954-477: The same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities , the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus . Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique by Edmund Burke , who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it

8051-399: The sphere of production but of market exchange. Significantly, as a purely technical category, exploitation did not always imply a moral wrong (see § Justice below). By the mid-1980s, "analytical Marxism" was being recognized as a " paradigm ". The September Group had been meeting for several years, and a succession of texts by its members were published. Several of these appeared under

8148-461: The study of political economy . He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in

8245-439: The transition from one mode of production to another. The Greek philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis generalized Miller's critique, pointing out that Cohen's distinction between the material and social properties of society cannot be drawn as sharply as Cohen's materialism requires. Non-Marxist critics argued that Cohen, in line with the Marxist tradition, underestimated the role played by the legal and political superstructure in shaping

8342-403: The value produced by labourers. Cohen argues that underpinning this account is the assumption that workers have "rights of self-ownership " over themselves and thus, should "own" what is produced by their labour. Because the worker is paid a wage less than the value they create through work, the capitalist is said to extract a surplus-value from the worker's labour, and thus to steal part of what

8439-517: The whole of received macroeconomics. There must be something wrong with a methodological principle that has such devastating implications". Similarly, the economist Alan Kirman has critiqued general equilibrium theory and modern economics for its "fundamentally individualistic approach to constructing economic models", and showed that an individualist competitive equilibrium is not necessarily stable or unique. However, stability and uniqueness can be achieved if aggregate variables are added, and as

8536-428: The worker produces, the time of the worker and the worker's powers. Cohen argues that the concept of self-ownership is favourable to Rawls's difference principle as it ensures "each person's rights over his being and powers" – i.e., that one is treated as an end always and never as a means  – but also highlights that its centrality provides for an area of common ground between the Marxist account of justice and

8633-436: The world concerned with human praxis . According to this view, analytical Marxism wrongly characterizes intellectual activity as occurring in isolation from the struggles constitutive of its social and political conjuncture , and at the same time does little to intervene in that conjuncture. For dialectical Marxists, analytical Marxism eviscerated Marxism, turning it from a systematic doctrine of revolutionary transformation into

8730-411: The wrong methodological and epistemological premises. While the analytical Marxists dismissed "dialectically oriented" Marxism as "bullshit", others maintain that the distinctive character of Marxist philosophy is lost if it is understood "non-dialectically". The crucial feature of Marxist philosophy is that it is not a reflection in thought of the world, a crude materialism, but rather an intervention in

8827-496: Was an ethical project. During the 1980s, a debate had developed within Anglophone academia about whether Marxism could accommodate a theory of justice. This debate was clearly linked to the revival of normative political philosophy after the publication of John Rawls 's A Theory of Justice (1971). Some commentators remained hostile to the idea of a Marxist theory of justice, arguing that Marx saw "justice" as little more than

8924-438: Was an exhaustive examination of Marx's texts in order to ascertain what could be salvaged out of Marxism employing the tools of rational choice theory and methodological individualism (which Elster defended as the only form of explanation appropriate to the social sciences). His conclusion was that – contra Cohen – no general theory of history as the development of the productive forces could be saved. Like Roemer, he also rejected

9021-853: Was coined by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov ), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy : Methodological individualism In the social sciences , methodological individualism is a method for explaining social phenomena strictly in terms of the decisions of individuals, each being moved by their own personal motivations. In contrast, explanations of social phenomena which assume that cause and effect acts upon whole classes or groups are deemed illusory, and thus rejected according to this approach. Or to put it another way, only group dynamics which can be explained in terms of individual subjective motivations are considered valid. With its bottom-up micro-level approach, methodological individualism

9118-586: Was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation , developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the " human nature "). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that

9215-554: Was observing the Chartist movement ) a year before the Revolutions of 1848 . Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself. Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy , French republicanism and radicalism , and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model

9312-547: Was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: " Proletarians of all countries, unite! ". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte 's December 2, 1851 coup , which put an end to the French Second Republic and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War . Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in

9409-589: Was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will . In the same way, following Babeuf , considered one of the founders of communism during the French Revolution , he criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of

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