How I Realized, By Way of Marxism, That I’m No Longer a Marxist: A Reply to Ben Burgis

Originally published at: https://benburgis.substack.com/p/guest-post-on-marxism-by-tibor-rutar

I’m very thankful for Ben’s engagement with my Areo piece and for offering me his platform to be able to respond. I think the best way of going about it is to give you a brief background on my Marxist roots and then move on to explain why I decided to shed the Marxist label. In the process, I will be saying much more about Marx’s theory of history, as prompted by Ben’s observations that I was too brief on that topic, while also touching upon exploitation.

I started identifying as a Marxist immediately after feverishly reading the first 80 or so pages of the Slovene translation of Capital, vol. 1. I don’t think I understood it all, but simultaneously watching the engrossing Cooney’s YouTube videos (going by Kapitalism101 back then) on the law of value, commodity fetishism, and abstract labor helped, of course, as did Harvey’s Reading Marx’s Capital video series.

So, it was the spring of 2012, and I became a full-fledged Marxist. I spent the summer delving deeper into Marx’s value theory by reading up on the relevant secondary literature. Kliman’s The Failure of Capitalist Production and Reclaiming Marx’s Capital specifically made a deep impression, as did Heinrich’s Introduction to the Three Volumes and Carchedi’s Frontiers of Political Economy and Behind the Crisis. You can probably imagine how surreal it was to meet all three in person between 2013 and 2015, when they came to Slovenia on the invitation of me and my colleagues.[1]

It was soon after I had read those books that I decided to write my Master’s thesis on Marxist political economy, while the idea to write a PhD on the validity of the broader Marxist research program (encompassing its theory of history and social forms, not just the theory of value) popped into my head a year later, after I had discovered Analytical and Political Marxism.

My Three Reasons for Having Been a Marxist

As I was writing my PhD, I realized I had three general sets of reasons for defending Marxism. All of them, by the way, are epistemic in nature, not normative, as I think is the correct way of going about it. As Wright elegantly put it in a debate with Burawoy, “I would abandon Marxism if I came to believe that it was false relative to a rival theory that attempted to explain the same things.” Marxism is a scientific theory, and so one should remain loyal to it solely on scientific grounds, not normative commitments to socialism.

First, it was my strong belief that the best scientific paradigm to adopt is one that is not afraid of reductionism. Science is by definition reductive in the sense that we use it to confront the unfathomable complexity of reality by abstracting away from parts of it, and by explaining complex phenomena or entities in terms of simpler events and constituent parts. Good science should say something less trivial than simply “everything is important for everything else”.

It seemed to me that Weberian sociology (the main rival to Marxism) is caught in this trap of “everythingism” as it doesn’t commit itself to any notion of causal or explanatory primacy. It merely says that there are always three sources of power in society, three social dimensions (the economic, political/military, and ideological/cultural), which combine in different ways to produce social phenomena. We cannot say in advance, Weberians insist, which is more important in general or how the interrelation between them is typically ordered.

Now, Marxism is a different beast altogether. What is theoretically distinctive of Marxism in the social sciences is its commitment to the causal or explanatory primacy of relations of production (i.e., the economic aspect of society). Of course, Marxist explanations needn’t be completely economically determinist or reductionist; but to remain distinctively Marxist, they need somehow to accord primacy to exploitative class relations in devising explanations of major social phenomena. As Chibber pithily puts it: “[I]n the Marxist framework, the economic domain functions with a dynamic all its own, and limits the range of operation of the other three.” If you’re interested in reading more about the idea of explanatory primacy, see Wright and colleagues’ Reconstructing Marxism, Callinicos’ Making History, Creaven’s Marxism and Realism and Emergentist Marxism, and the review article by Lapointe and Dufour.

I thought that Weberianism fails at the reductionist mission of science from the start, and that Marxism is on the right path merely by trying to do what science is ostensibly supposed to do.

The second reason for having been a Marxist was that I though Marxism not only tries to do what science is supposed to do, but actually succeeds in meeting the challenge. In short, it seemed to me that the Marxist theory of history and social forms are both approximately correct.

The canonical Marxist theory of history can roughly be broken down into two theses (curtesy of Cohen’s brilliant rendition). The development thesis holds that there is an enduring tendency for the forces of production (i.e., technology and productive capacity) to develop through history. The primacy thesis holds that the economic structure of society at each stage of history (i.e., relations of production) is the way it is because of its beneficial consequences for the development of forces of production. Note the functionalist nature of the theory. It states that an event (i.e., the form of the economy and the transition from one form to the other, such as from feudalism to capitalism) can be explained not by citing preceding causes of the event but by reference to the event’s beneficial consequences for something else. This is akin in logic to Darwinian evolutionary biology, where the existence and spread of a phenotype (say, the long necks of giraffes) is explained by its beneficial consequences for survival and reproduction of the organism, and it’s very interesting.

The Marxist theory of social forms is harder to present schematically, other than saying that it’s committed to the explanatory primacy of relations of production, which vaguely means that class exploitation should be thought of as typically the biggest (though not the only) factor in causing and explaining any important macrosocial phenomenon. The most convincing example to me of what the theory of social forms amounts to has always been, as per Balibar and Wood, the distinction between the overall social dynamic in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies.

The idea is that capitalism, in contrast to feudalism, plays out so differently precisely because of its radically different economic structure. In pre-capitalism, wars of territorial conquest were a constant, interpersonal violence was endemic, democracy was absent, legal equality before the law did not exist, demography followed a Malthusian curve, and so on. In capitalism, society is radically different: virtually all of the most capitalist societies in the world are democratic and enjoy the rule of law (where democracy is still absent, the statistical likelihood of becoming democratic is now much higher than before due to the modernizing powers of capitalism), great-power wars have virtually vanished, interpersonal violence is incomparably small in comparison to the levels seen under feudalism, the Malthusian curse has been broken, and so on.

Why the difference? For Marxists, the radically different nature of production relations under capitalism is the answer. In pre-capitalism, the immediate producers had access to their means of subsistence (the farms) and so if the ruling class was to exploit them, it had to take surplus through physical, political violence, unequal treatment under the law, and destruction of any kind of democracy. Otherwise, namely if they had been politically free, peasants wouldn’t have had an incentive to work for a feudal lord and be sucked dry of their product. Moreover, because of the peculiar economic structure of pre-capitalist societies, productivity and investment stagnated, which meant that everyone — but the lords — was dirt-poor. This had two general social consequences. First, the need for the ruling class to try and territorially expand (because growth through higher productivity was impossible) and grab more land and peasants for themselves, which explains all the constant warring and imperialism of the pre-capitalist period. Second, the ordinary masses were so poor that they were more likely to engage in interpersonal violence themselves.

In capitalism, the social dynamic is completely different because the immediate producers are propertyless, and so have an incentive to voluntarily seek out employment and get exploited. No physical force or unequal laws required. At the same time, the propertied are able to engage in intensive, not extensive growth, which virtually abolishes the Malthusian trap and unleashes modernization and democratic peace. Due to space considerations, I won’t develop the argument further here. You can glean bits of it from my Areo piece or get the fuller treatment in Chapter 2 of my book Capitalism for Realists. Or you can go read Wood and Brenner (and Teschke and Lacher)!

The third and last reason for wanting to be a Marxist was my perception that workers are obviously exploited under capitalism. I was convinced that all other, “bourgeois” social theories (say, Weberian sociology or neoclassical economics) are methodologically blind to this fact and that one can recognize capitalist exploitation only by being a Marxist.

How It All, or Almost All, Came Crashing Down

Probing further into Marxism (alongside rereading Weberian literature in a less hostile way and discovering new institutional economics) made me realize (1) some of what I just described is plain wrong, (2) some of it is correct as a description but probably wrong as an explanation, and (3) the rest of it is approximately correct but in no way distinctively Marxist. Over time, that drove me away from identifying as a Marxist.

Mixing up the order set above a bit, let me start with Marx’s theory of history. I learned from Marxists, like Wright, Callinicos, Chibber, Brenner, Wood, Elster, and Carling, that Cohen’s defense of Marx simply doesn’t work. For the theory to work, you’d need to specify a mechanism acting as a causal feedback loop. Merely claiming that subsequent modes of production emerge because of the beneficial consequences they have on furthering the development of technology doesn’t work. You have to show how the beneficial consequences resolve themselves back into causing the emergence or spread of that very same mode of production. By analogy, it isn’t enough to merely claim that long necks have benefits for the reproduction of giraffes. You need to show how those benefits translate back into the emergence or spread of long necks through the population.

Cohen admits not knowing any such mechanism. But he defends his theory in two ways. First, he says that one doesn’t need a mechanism if one is convinced that there exists a “consequence law” tying the two phenomena together. However, this is unsatisfactory, as both Marxists like Elster and Wright and non-Marxists like Giddens have convincingly argued. The second escape route for Cohen is to nevertheless try and adduce a mechanism. He does so, but in doing so he surrenders the functionalist underpinnings of the theory, which he otherwise argues are “unrevisibly” central to the theory. He proposes an intentionalist mechanism, invoking human nature, but again Marxists like Wright, Chibber, Carling, and Cohen (no relation) have shown that the crucial part of the mechanism doesn’t empirically work.

There are two other ways of trying to rescue the theory. The first is to go back to functionalism and try to find the requisite mechanism for the logic of the theory to go through. This is what Alan Carling did in a series of publications. He proposed the “competitive primacy”, an additional set of assumptions which, if correct, would reignite the logical motor of Cohen’s rendition of Marxism. And, indeed, Carling logically succeeds. He proposes geopolitical competition between modes of production with varying degrees of technological sophistication as a selection mechanism capable of translating the beneficial effects of a given economic structure (for the development of forces of production) back into the causal conditions for the spread of a given mode of production. However, as Marxists have taught me, and as Carling himself was afraid of, the mechanism doesn’t work empirically, at least not in the vast majority of recorded human history, i.e., before the emergence of capitalism. As I show in my book, the mechanism works perfectly if restricted to the period after the first emergence of capitalism, which is an achievement, but it doesn’t rescue canonical historical materialism as a general theory.

What remains of Marxism after the defeat of its theory of history is the theory of social forms. But with respect to that, I had come to two realizations. First, the theory appropriately describes the differences between capitalism and pre-capitalism but not the ultimate causes of the differences. The Marxist claim is that relations of production (or the economic structure) in the last instance determine the fact that war and violence pervade feudalism, while in capitalism relative peace and mute economic laws prevail. But are production relations really determinative here? Isn’t it, in the last instance, political power that itself explains the very differences in economic structure that are supposed to be the bedrock explanation in Marxism? That is, isn’t the political capacity of peasants to resist expropriation and to draw on custom and traditional forms of organizing to achieve de facto (if not de jure) possession of their plots what explains the economic necessity of feudal lords to extract surplus via violence and conquest? Isn’t the political incapacity of workers to resist being propertyless in capitalism the reason that capitalists can rely on the “mute compulsion of economic relations” — instead of direct personal violence — to extract surplus? If so, then the “economic” is not at all determinative in the last instance. Politics is.

Now, I don’t know how far I’m willing to take this argument, but it did convince me that my insistence that the principle of explanatory primacy of production relations isn’t as well grounded in historical sociology as I had thought. Relations of production and relations of political power are so causally interlinked that singling out one or the other for “primacy” is probably a fool’s errand. (Not unsurprisingly, Wood and her Political Marxism — for which she and Brenner understandably caught quite a lot of flak among the more orthodox Marxists, Guy de Bois being the foremost example — prompted me to start thinking this way.)

Second, go read Weber and the Weberians (or Acemoglu and North). They say virtually the same thing about the differences between capitalism and pre-capitalism. There is no disagreement between them and the Marxists at the descriptive level. (Which, by the way, was quite deflationary with regards to my previous pretensions that non-Marxist theories are blind to certain crucial social truths.) The disagreement comes at the level of explanation: are production relations, in particular, responsible for the difference? For Weberians and institutional economists, they are not. Instead, they say that a combination of political, ideological, and economic reasons was determinative, and I can’t think of an argument against that. It is not for nothing that the doyen of Western Marxism, Perry Anderson, said in a review of a contemporary Weberian tome: “With the publication of Michael Mann’s historical sociology of power, it was immediately clear that there now existed a developed analytic theory of the pattern of human development, exceeding in explanatory ambition and empirical detail any Marxist account.”[2]

Last point, exploitation. I agree with Ben that value-theory is not needed for a Marxist to establish the fact of worker exploitation (Wright and Chibber had convinced me of that long ago). I also agree that, even without the presence of government failure, workers are likely still exploited (the former is a sufficient, though not necessary, cause of exploitation). However, it is precisely contemporary Marxists like Wright and Chibber, who instead of relying on value-theory to theoretically ground exploitation opt for a plain-vanilla explanation that simply invokes rationality, game theory, and disparities in bargaining power, that moved me away from Marxism on this point. Sure, the argument is correct both logically and empirically. But the fact that Weber and even neoclassical economists using the imperfect-competition models of the labor market, which assumes lopsided market power between workers and capitalists, say the same thing diminished my belief in the social-scientific supremacy of Marxism to which I had once held. For me, as a Marxist, there was and is a big difference between rooting exploitation in value-theory (which is distinctive of Marxism and inaccessible to non-Marxists) versus tying it to plain game-theoretic verbal or mathematical models about bargaining power.

Final Thoughts

There’s so much more I’d like to say. Alas, space limitations prevent that. But you’re probably wondering, “Okay, perhaps Marxism as a grand paradigm really is over, but why not instead remain a Marxist in the weaker sense that you still draw on some concepts and mechanisms from the Marxist tradition, even if you add to those a variety of non-Marxist ideas?” This is indeed the route Wright opted for after the first two or three decades of his work in the Marxist tradition, calling it “pragmatist realism” (as opposed to the “Grand Battle of Paradigms”, as he had once seen it). He goes on to say, “I no longer feel that the most useful way of thinking about Marxism is as a comprehensive paradigm that is incommensurate with ‘bourgeois’ sociology.”

I’m okay with that way of thinking, though like I said with regards to exploitation, I’m not even sure how specifically Marxist some of these concepts we traditionally associate with Marxism in fact are, given that Weberians and even neoclassical economists have no issue in using them. My suspicion, however, is that most Marxists aren’t willing to give up on it as a grand paradigm just yet. This, then, remains our disagreement.

[1] You can watch their Slovene lectures here, here, and here. We also invited over, and hung out with, McNally, Lebowitz, Perelman, Choonara, Roberts, Teschke, Chibber, and many others.

[2] But isn’t it still true that Weberians are insufficiently scientific insofar they refuse reductionism? I don’t think so; they most definitely engage in abstraction and reduction, just not class abstraction and reduction.