Can Marxism be rescued?

Alan Ryan

  • An Introduction to Karl Marx by Jon Elster
    Cambridge, 220 pp, £17.50, October 1986, ISBN 0 521 32922 1
  • Making sense of Marx by Jon Elster
    Cambridge, 556 pp, £32.50, May 1985, ISBN 0 521 22896 4
  • Analytical Marxism edited by John Roemer
    Cambridge, 321 pp, £27.50, March 1986, ISBN 0 521 30025 8

The relationship between philosophy and Marxism has always been an awkward one. ‘Philosophy stands to the study of the real world in the same relationship as masturbation stands to real sexual love,’ said Marx himself. Was this a dismissal of all forms of philosophy, or only of the overblown Idealism of Hegel? Would he have been equally dismissive of pragmatism or empiricism; would Pierce or Mill have received the same short shrift? Marx was unwilling to waste time on such questions. The philosophical and methodological remarks scattered through his major works are scrappy, undeveloped and not entirely consistent; they take a poor second place to what he conceived of as an empirical inquiry into the logic of capitalist society and the sociology and politics of its supersession, and they leave wide open the question of what positive role he saw for philosophy.

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[1] Oxford, 1978.

[2] Steven Lukes’s Marxism and Morality (1985) is much the best brief discussion of this paradox.

[3] The first and most comprehensive of these was A General Theory of Exploitation and Class by John Roemer (1982).

[4] Since this raises the question of what, if anything, I think better, I ought to mention Richard Miller’s Analysing Marx (1985).