In defence of bullshit Marxism

What dialectics are and why they're central to Marx's thought.

There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by

Joseph Heath

’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

nescio13

agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast

Ben Burgis

, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

If you haven’t already made this connection: what’s playing out here is really a Marxist spin on the biggest divide in modern academic philosophy, between analytic and “continental” philosophy. Marx himself is usually and rightly classified as a “continental” thinker – alongside Hegel, “that mighty thinker” to whom Marx acknowledged his biggest intellectual debt throughout his life. As I understand it, analytical Marxism is all about trying to make Marx’s thought respectable on the analytic side of the fence, and “bullshit” here is really a less kind word for “continental” (which was never a great term in its own right). Thus the “bullshit” they are trying to remove from Marx, as I understand it, is above all anything Hegelian – which is usually the part I like best.

Why do this? One of the reasons the analytic/continental divide has endured so long is a division over what constitues good philosophy – right down to how you evaluate student papers. That makes the two approaches different paradigms, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense: what’s different is not just the conclusions but the standards by which you evaluate those conclusions. The analytical movement in philosophy, which began with the 20th century and came to dominate most English-speaking departments, valued precision above all. (They also speak of “clarity” and “rigour”, but these too come down fundamentally to precision.) The normal way ordinary people use words, where they have multiple meanings and resonances, is vague, and vagueness is bad. For every word (or multi-word concept) that you use, you need to pin down exactly one (1) thing that it means, through a stipulative definition that excludes some of its other meanings, or by dividing its multiple meanings up with additional qualifiers (like, say, specifying a distinction between “empirical adaptationism”, “explanatory adaptationism” and “methodological adaptationism”).

That’s the analytical approach. It is not how a dialectical approach – the approach Marx describes himself as taking – operates. Brendan Larvor, in his splendid little book on Imre Lakatos, points to the roots of Hegel’s dialectical method in Plato’s Republic. Larvor reminds us that “‘justice’ means something different at the end of the Republic than it did at the beginning” – and that this difference is necessary to the whole project. If you just stipulated the definition of justice found at the end of the Republic without going through the whole project of getting there, you’d miss what Plato is trying to do. The point is to start with an ordinary commonsense appearance of the concept, and to develop that commonsense version in a way that gets you a more adequate connection to what the concept really represents, while still remaining connected to its original commonsense meaning – transcending and including it. Stipulative definitions, since they’re picked arbitrarily according to the individual task of the definer, are antithetical to that task. As Larvor puts it:

Non-dialectical logic (induction as well as deduction) concerns itself with relations of inference between propositions, whereas dialectical logic studies the development of concepts. Thus, for example, Plato’s Republic shows a dialectical pattern, for in that work the concept of justice progresses from very simple beginnings to a rich and sophisticated final form. (9)

What Hegel then adds to Plato’s dialectic is history: the history of the concepts as they’ve developed throughout human history. That history is the reason why those concepts now mean what they mean, with their multiple meanings, in ordinary language. Hegel aims to develop concepts that reflect the multiplicity of meanings in words as we have actually used them in real human language – which does not pin them down with any precision. Because Hegel’s thought aims at that depth rather than at precision, it therefore does not have the “clarity” and “rigour” that analytic philosophers value, because they define those terms in ways that depend on precision. For Hegelians, including Marx himself, that is a feature and not a bug. It is in this sense that, contra Burgis, dialectic is indeed a rival to analysis. (Hegel is certainly also unclear in the everyday sense of being hard to understand – but pick up any journal of analytic epistemology and you’ll quickly find the same thing applies to them.)

Soviet postage stamp featuring Marx. Adobe stock image.

Now this all gets more complicated because in the end Marx’s dialectic is not Hegel’s dialectic: Hegel, like Plato, is trying to dialectically develop concepts. But for Marx, a historical dialectic exists in material social relations as well. Marx begins Capital with the commodity as commonly understood, just as Plato begins the Republic’s discussion with justice as commonly understood. But what he is then trying to do is get a deeper understanding not merely of the idea of the commodity, but of what commodities are in social life: unpacking the “fetishism” that falsely makes commodities appear as given entities, rather than the labour that underlies them. It is once you understand that, Marx argues, that you will see how the capitalist mode of production is based on internal contradictions that will eventually undermine it as people come to realize them. How that connection works doesn’t lend itself to an easy summary, but that’s kind of the point: you’re supposed to be realizing the whole situation in its complexity.

Does Marx succeed in making that case? I’m not even going to begin trying to evaluate here whether the dialectical project of Capital succeeds. There are certainly significant problems with it, and I can see why the analytical Marxists would have wanted to reject it in its entirety. But it does seem to me that once you have rejected it in its entirety, and especially once you treat dialectical reasoning as “bullshit” and instead want to reduce everything to precise analytical categories, what you’ve got is a project that is not only entirely different from Marx’s – but also less interesting, less compelling as an interpretation of the social whole in which we live. It’s not really a surprise to me that the analytical Marxists would have ended up as Rawlsians, for better or for worse: it seems to me that Rawls may be all they’ve got left.

I’m no expert on analytical Marxism, and I freely admit to having read very little of their work. Maybe there’s something of value in it that I haven’t found. I’ll also say I haven’t seen much reason to try. If an analytical justification of a radically egalitarian politics is what you’re looking for, why not just drop Marx and read Rawls?