Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 19:25:26 -0500 (EST) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: Analytical Marxism? Hi, everybody, I'm back! I was visiting a most wonderful person for the last 9 days or so and lost interest in the Marxism lists temporarily. I did manage to take a peek at an interesting book on the plane there and back, and during frequent trips to the bathroom on a day my tummy was upset. This is called "Analytical Marxism: A Critique" by Marcus Roberts. (No, this is not the fabulous blind pianist who plays with Wynton Marsalis occasionally. He is rather a teaching fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Essex.) Now this Analytical Marxism (AM) is an intellectual fad that never really caught on, except with one or two left-leaning professors here and there, including our own very controversial Justin Schwartz. Did you ever lie awake at night wondering where Justin acquired his donnishness and love of abstraction? Well, it's all on account of AM and nothing else. I plan to take this AM stuff apart over the next few weeks or so. I'm going to start with Jon Elster who no longer seems to take to the pulpit on behalf of AM. I won't let him cover up his sordid past, however. I'm taking him to task for ideas that he no longer believes in, namely Rational Choice Marxism, a subspecies of AM. (This Rational Choice business had me confused when I first heard about it. I thought it might of had something to do with Albert Ellis' Institute for Rational Behavior in NYC, a place where you go to get rid of neurotic behavior. I used to go there myself until Prozac made me better.) After I'm done with Elster, I'm going to give G.A. Cohen a good bashing. (Justin calls him Gerry Cohen; I wouldn't be so presumptuous myself. The only Gerald I know is Jerry Levy, who won't call himself Gerry under any circumstances. Karl Carlisle, on the other hand, calls him Gery. Go figure that one out. Two raving maniacs who deserve each other.) Then it's on to the dreadful John Roemer. Oooh, is he in for a tongue- lashing. The nutty thing about AM is that the highly educated professors who invented it seem hardly interested in a mass following. Now you can see the postmodernist influence in mass culture. Just take a look at the Village Voice and the shit hits you in the face nearly every page you turn, especially when you read some recent Yale graduate's write-up of the latest hip-hop band. Where do you go to find AM popularized? Popular Mechanics? Field and Stream? Beats me. I guess you have to matriculate at Oxford or Cambridge to be admitted to this exclusive club. I'm going to draw on Marcus Roberts' book for much of my critique, as well as some promising articles by Ellen Wood and Michael Leibowitz. I also will try to read as much AM as I can without gagging. The problem with Roberts' book is that it started out as a Ph.D. thesis and it shows. It is jargon-ridden and assumes that the reader is familiar with a number of relatively obscure references ("functionalism", etc.). Worst of all, the author is not much of a Marxist himself. In the preface he says, "I am not allied to any alternative version of Marxism judged to be in good order (although I do remain committed to socialism as a political project). Moreover, it would be beyond my powers to provide any clear guidance as to how, if at all, Marxism might be extricated from the Analytical Marxism impasse. In summary, my own (current) view is that the development of this paradigm provides further evidence that Marxism is a degenerating research programme, but this does not rule out a comeback in the future.)" What nerve! A degenerating "research" programme?!? What does this guy think he is dealing with, a branch of the social sciences like anthropology or sociology? Marxism is for making revolution. If that isn't what you're interested in, then go someplace else. I'll do a much better job than Roberts. I promise. I won't use words like "deploy" every other page the way he does. Nobody "presents" arguments in his academic prose, they "deploy" them, like battleships or helicopters. Egad! I embark on this noble and selfless project in order to combat a deviant strand of academic Marxism that nearly nobody takes seriously. I am willing, in that vein, to have a good laugh at their expense. I promise lots of yuks, especially when I get to that horse's ass John Roemer. I don't know if Justin Schwartz will be around for much of this discussion since something tells me he's busy in law school studying torts or something. (Why would anybody want to be a lawyer, I wonder? My friend's sister only wants to date lawyers but me and her find them to be an odious crew all in all. You know who appears to be a really big creep, by the way? The late William Kunstler's partner, an attorney by the name of Ron Kuby who wears a stupid pony-tail. Kunstler's widow is suing to keep Kuby from using Kunstler's name in his practice. I hope she wins.) Oh, yeah. What was I talking about? Soviet History? I forgot... Oh, now I remember: Analytical Marxism. Okay, here's the deal. What AM stems from is a view of society that omits *class*. Society is composed of individuals. It owes more to Hobbes than Marx. Have you ever wondered why Justin Schwartz could come out with such embarrassingly reactionary remarks on the need to force "lazy workers" to produce? It all comes from Hobbes and is filtered through the class prejudices of Anglophone bourgeois professors like John Roemer who like to kid themselves into believing that they are Marxists. That's basically the approach I will be following over the next few weeks. AM, watch out!!! Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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