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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first annual Philosophy and Political Science joint colloquium at the University of Toronto in February 1989, where Gad Horowitz and Kathryn Morgan provided helpful comments. I am also grateful to Dale Aaron, Andrew Kernohan, Wil Kymlicka and Bob Ware for comments on an earlier draft.
1 There are exceptions to this pattern; there has plainly been a shift in emphasis, though. For example, Allen Wood’s Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981) includes a discussion of alienation. G.A. Cohen discusses both commodity fetishism and capital fetishism in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978), and Jon Elster discusses alienation in his Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985). But neither Cohen nor Elster emphasizes Marx’s deeper concern about alienation. Cohen is explicit that the doctrine of fetishism is not among the parts of Marx’s theory he wishes to defend. Elster treats alienation as a problem about work being unrewarding, arguing that more challenging work would lead to failure for many, which wouldn’t make people any happier. Each fails to focus on Marx’s real criticism.
2 ‘Excerpts from Mill’s, JamesElements of Political Economy,’ in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Collected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975) 231Google Scholar
3 Marx, KarlCapital, Vol. I, Fowkes, Ben, trans. (London: Penguin and New Left Books 1976) 280Google Scholar
4 Capital, 759 n.
5 The most accessible version of this argument can be found in Roemer, John, Free to Lose (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1988) 160-71Google Scholar
6 This liberation of rational choice theory helps clarify the status, and limit the pretensions of recent arguments in political philosophy. I discuss it more fully in ‘Gauthier’s Liberal Individual’ forthcoming in Dialogue.
7 The classic formulation of this as a problem for Marx is in Olsen, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1965) 105-6Google Scholar. Olsen’s aside about Marx was brought to the forefront by Buchanan’s, Allen ‘Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, (Fall 1979)Google Scholar.
8 This last suggestion is considered by Michael Taylor in The Possibility of Cooperation. Taylor concedes this type of solution has two significant limitations. First, it works best with repeated interactions, in which agents expect future benefits from cooperating in similar circumstances-a feature which fails to apply to a single collective seizure of power, where the costs of participation in an unsuccessful attempt are likely to be enormous. Second, this type of solution is extraordinarily difficult to implement with large numbers of people, because of information requirements.
9 In so doing, I do not mean to suggest that organizing for political change is a simple matter. If anything, rational choice treatments make the problem too simple; the real difficulties lie elsewhere. Marx put too great an emphasis on class as the specific locus of oppression, ignoring the roles of race and gender. Other factors are also plainly important. Among them I would include the use of naked force by those in power, as well as subtler factors including the role of religion and nationalism in shaping social commitments. Indeed, the power of both religion and nationalism as social forces this century point to a failure of rational choice; they too should face insuperable free-rider problems, as should all social movements that do not already control the coercive apparatus of a state.
10 The costs of voting are not always low, as the recent ‘no’ vote in Chile reminds us.
11 A similar point applies to Elster’s suggestion that people participate in collective action because they suppose that if they are, others must also be. The patently fallacious reasoning involved seems curiously specific in its application.
12 In ‘Rationality, Morality, and Collective Action’ (Ethics 96 [October 1985], 153), Elster discusses the suggestion, which he attributes to Amos Tversky, that collective action problems are sometimes solved by people acting because they want to be a certain type of person. Unfortunately, in his book on Marx, Elster neglects this possibility, and fails to see its centrality to Marx’s thought more generally.
13 See Nagel, Thomas ‘Moral Luck’ in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979) 24-33Google Scholar.
14 In so doing, he also returns to an earlier terminology. Marx describes labor as abstract in his 1844 manuscript ‘Wages of Labor’ (Collected Works, Vol. 3, 237) and in The German Ideology, speaks of ‘abstract individuals robbed of all real life-content’ (Collected Works, Vol. 5, 87).
15 For further discussion, see Colletti, Lucio ‘Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International’ in his From Rousseau to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press 1972) 78-82Google Scholar, and Arthur Ripstein and Peter King ‘Did Marx Hold a Labor Theory of Value?’ (unpublished).
16 Capital, Vol. I, 174
17 It is perhaps worth emphasizing the sense in which this is not simply a matter of feeling some particular way about that activity. It may manifest itself in feeling, just as desire may manifest itself in pining or longing, but it is at root practical rather than sensory. To stand in a special relation to one’s own projects is above all to have them occupy a special place and in one’s life that is (i) not abandoned at the first opportunity to pursue some other end; (ii) not entered into solely on the basis of its expected consequences.
18 Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 1, Emil Burns, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1963)
19 As such the contrast is surely too stark. Marx describes the education of the senses as the task of the entire history of mankind. Enjoying art, or developing a sophisticated palate for wines and foods allow the individual to grow and thereby become better prepared for future consumption. In other cases, consumption precludes realization.
20 See the manuscript ‘Private Property and Communism’ in Collected Works, Vol. 3, 293-4.
21 I obviously cannot give this important point the attention it deserves. For a discussion of the relation between socialism and democracy, see Cunningham, Frank, Democratic Theory and Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987)Google Scholar.
22 Davidson, Donald, ‘Psychology as Philosophy’ in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 237Google Scholar
23 A parallel point applies to questions concerning the scope of formal accounts of rationality. In The Logic of Decision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983), Richard Jeffrey claims that the model of rational choice he offers is perfectly general, and can be extended to any possible set of consistent motivations. Yet Jeffrey’s own examples all focus on cases where an agent must choose between actions based on preferences over outcomes, and he does not consider agents directly concerned with their actions. It remains an open question whether, and how, the formal structure of the theory is supposed to carry over into cases in which the agent seeks to be a particular sort of person. Perhaps there is a way of generalizing rational choice theory; trouble is, ‘rational choice Marxism’ has confined itself to the extant outcome-based interpretation of rational choice.
24 Elster, Jon, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elster develops this point in ‘Self Realization in Work and Politics’ in Frankel Paul, Ellen, Miller, Fred D. Jr., Paul, Jeffrey, and Ahrens, John, eds., Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1986)Google Scholar.
25 Elster also objects that such motivations are self-indulgent. See his discussion of what he calls ‘the moral fallacy of by-products’ in Sour Grapes, Ch. 2, especially his criticisms of Hannah Arendt, and of E.P. Thompson’s claim that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is justified as an exercise in democracy even if it is ultimately unsuccessful. I do not know if Elster would be similarly critical of the participants in the unsuccessful demonstrations for democracy in China.
