Reconstructing Marxism, by Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliot Sober. Verso: London and New York. 202 + xii pp. 1992.

These essays communicate a careful and sober rethinking of Marxist method in the social sciences by three well-informed Marxist scholars. They believe that the «crisis of Marxism» is a moment of renewal for Marxist theory, an opportunity to rid Marxism of excess doctrinal baggage it has accumulated over years of polarized political polemics, and to rediscover the «rational core» of Marxist social thought. Their foils are «analytical Marxism», particularly the work of Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, which seeks to apply the techniques and dogmas of analytical philosophy to Marxist discourse, and the work of Anthony Giddens on the relation between economic evolution and political change, with some nods in the direction of the Althusserian school.

Most of the discussion concerns two issues: the problem of «historical materialism» as a theory of the historical sequence of modes of production from primitive communism through feudalism and capitalism to socialist communism based on an economic determinism understood as the primacy of the «forces of production»; and the methodological problem of forms of explanation social and historical phenomena The authors decide, after a lengthy grapple with Cohen and Giddens, to reject «strong» historical materialism, which claims a necessary causal sequence of modes of production, arising from an independent and controlling tendency for the forces of production to develop and to shape social relations of production as well as the «superstructure» for a «weak» historical materialism that asserts only a shaping, not determining, role for the level of development of the forces of production in historical change.

The first of two chapters on the theory of historical explanation cautiously criticizes Elster’s dogma of «methodological individualism» from an «anti-reductionist» position that affirms the importance of relations between individuals in explaining social phenomena. The second uses models from biology and statistics to explore the question of «primacy» or «asymmetry» in explanations, concluding that, there being no distinctive Marxist explanatory method, the problem of relative importance of causes is purely quantitative. The conclusions reached in these essays are on the whole mild, sensible and, as the options are presented, persuasive.

The authors’ addiction to philosophic and sociological jargon, extreme caution in the formulation of hypotheses, involuted prose, and painfully slow movement toward minimally exciting conclusions, however, made it hard for me to read the book with real pleasure.

The spectacle suggests to me that the attempt to understand Marxism through the glasses of nineteenth century British rational empiricism, and its theocratic successor, analytic philosophy, wanders far off the track. The rational empiricist/analytical philosophy tradition gives itself undeserved and unchallenged methodological credit for the successes of modern physical and social scientific investigation, thereby disguising its own sterility and substantial irrelevance to the problems of scientific discovery. The version of Marxism that the analytical Marxists subject to their critical scalpels is more the product of misreadings, misunderstandings, and confusion over levels of abstraction than of a sympathetic understanding of Marx’s intellectual project and contribution. As a result the discourse of analytical Marxism consists too much of shadow-boxing and fogsculpting to make much of a contribution to our understanding of society and history.

Reconstructing Marxism Review