Vol. 4 No. 5 · 18 March 1982
pages 6-8 | 4289 words
Marxismo
Jon Elster
- Marx’s Politics by Alan Gilbert
Martin Robertson, 326 pp, £16.50, August 1981, ISBN 0 85520 441 9
- The History of Marxism, Vol. 1: Marxism in Marx’s Day edited by Eric Hobsbawm
Harvester, 349 pp, £30.00, January 1982, ISBN 0 7108 0054 1
- Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism by Russell Jacoby
Cambridge, 202 pp, £15.80, January 1982, ISBN 0 521 23915 X
- Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory by John Roemer
Cambridge, 230 pp, £19.50, August 1981, ISBN 0 521 23047 0
- Karl Marx: The Arguments of the Philosophers by Allen Wood
Routledge, 304 pp, £13.50, January 1981, ISBN 0 7100 0672 1
Up to a fairly recent time it was the case that all good books on Marx were hostile, or at most neutral. Correlatively, all the books that espoused Marx’s views did so in a way that could only dissuade the reader who approached Marx with the same canons of scholarship and argument that he would apply to any other writer. What is called for is a blend of charity and scepticism. When choosing between interpretations of equal textual plausibility, priority should be given to the reading that makes best substantive sense or fits best with what Marx writes elsewhere. Yet charity stops here, for once one has arrived at an idea of what Marx was trying to say, his views should be evaluated according to the usual criteria of consistency, fertility and veracity. To extend charity from interpretation to evaluation was, and still largely is, a pervasive defect in writings on Marx by Marxists. It has led to Ptolemaic Marxism of various kinds, embodied in such phrases as ‘determination in the long run’, ‘relative autonomy’, ‘tendential laws’ and the like. To withhold charity even from interpretation has, of course, been the symmetric error of anti-Marxist writings, often perpetrated by ex-Marxist writers such as Karl Wittfogel.
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Letters
Vol. 4 No. 7 · 15 April 1982
From Alex Callinicos
SIR: With friends as faint-hearted as Jon Elster, what need has Marxism of enemies? So much of what he writes (LRB Vol. 4, No 5) is contestable. For example, can the political writings of Trotsky and Gramsci really be regarded as displaying the ‘boringly predictable’, ‘conspiratorial-cum-functionalist attitude’ that we are told is characteristic of Marxian social analysis?
I wish, however, to concentrate on the assertion (quoted approvingly from A. J. Ayer) that ‘there is no such thing’ as ‘Marxist philosophy’. Elster does make an exception of ‘analytically-trained philosophers’ such as G. A. Cohen, but since he goes on to criticise, in my view correctly, Cohen’s penchant for functional explanations, this concession would seem to have little focus. Ayer’s remark might be pardoned as coming from one evidently ignorant of the work of Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser – to name only the most outstanding Marxist philosophers of the century. But Elster should know better. It is true that these thinkers write in an idiom unfamiliar to those reared in the analytical tradition. But to dismiss them therefore, as Elster seems to, at a time when some Anglo-Saxon philosophers are shrugging off their parochial disdain for other intellectual traditions (I am thinking, for example, of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) is surely to take a highly retrograde step.
I am strongly in favour of a genuine interchange between analytical philosophy, which has given such striking proof of its continued vitality over the past decade or so, and the various schools of Western and classical Marxism. But this would be a very different enterprise from the absurd project which Elster espouses of grafting onto the little he leaves of Marxism some of the more dubious elements of mainstream social thought – for example, methodological individualism and games theory. Whatever emerged from this search for ‘microfoundations’ would bear no resemblance to any brand of Marxism.
Alex Callinicos
Department of Politics, University of York
