David Harvey's Critique of Analytical Marxism (UNLOCKED)

Everyone should read David Harvey's "A Companion to Marx's Capital." But despite the book's many very real virtues, Harvey's critique of analytical Marxism is a train wreck.

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital is a valuable book. It’s accessible, vividly written, and has helped an immense number of readers get through Capital. As someone who’s always trying to get people to read Capital, that’s no small thing to me. While I don’t agree with all of Harvey’s “takes” on the source material, there are (really) any number of points on which I find the Companion helpful and insightful, and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it.

But.

Early in the book, he says something that makes me very mad—even though, at first glance, this might seem like an odd reaction. He does a good job of making it sound innocuous, and I suspect most of his readers over the years have nodded along without thinking much of it.

He writes:

[G]etting to know and appreciate the dialectical method of Capital is essential to understanding Marx on his own terms. Quite a lot of people, including some Marxists, would disagree. The so-called analytical Marxists—people like G.A. Cohen, John Roemer and Robert Brenner—dismiss dialectics. They actually like to call themselves no-bullshit Marxists. They prefer to convert Marx’s argument into a series of analytic propositions. Others convert his argument into a causal model of the world. There is even a positivist way of representing Marx that allows his theory to be tested against empirical data. In each of these cases, dialectics gets stripped away.

He adds something immediately after which at first glance softens the critique, but which, in my view, actually makes things worse. We’ll get to that.

But first let’s talk about what “analytical Marxists” are actually saying.

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As far as I know, a good comprehensive history of the AM school hasn’t been written. If you know of one, gentle reader, I’d love to hear about it, but the closest thing I can think of is G.A. Cohen’s introduction to the 2000 edition of his Karl Marx’s Theory of History—which may be where Harvey is pulling that phrase about “no-bullshit” Marxists.

A couple years ago, I wrote an article about Cohen for Jacobin where I opened with a story about his interaction with the American philosopher Isaac Levi and how that interaction pushed him to make his Marxism less bullshitty and more “analytical.” You can read my article here if you’re curious—or just read that introduction to KMTH, since that’s what I was quoting.

I’ve always loved that story because of what it conveys about the spirit animating analytical Marxism, but I’ll grant you that it doesn’t tell us much of anything about what analytical Marxists believe about the methodology that should underlie Marxist theory that’s different from what non-”analytical” Marxists might think.¹ It’s all very well to talk about “clarity” and “rigor” but that only takes us so far. While it’s true enough that (a) these values were prized to a great degree by Cohen and the other figures Harvey lists off above and that (b) there are many ways of writing about Marxist theory where clarity and rigor are pretty manifestly given a much lower priority, I’ll grant that it’s hard to find anyone willing to stand up and say, “I’m against being clear about what we’re saying and rigorous in how we argue for it.”

Where things get more controversial—and this takes us back to Harvey’s critique—is the part of Cohen’s introduction where he says “analytical Marxists do not think that Marxism possesses a distinctive and valuable method.” (“Others, he notes, “believe that it has such a method, which they call 'dialectical'.”) If anything really defines AM, it’s that—the belief that Marxism doesn’t have any special way of discovering the truth unavailable to bourgeois theoreticians, but that Marxism is simply a different set of conclusions about what is true.

So far, I know it sounds like I’m agreeing with Harvey’s characterization. The analytical Marxists “dismiss dialectics.” In fact, the first couple times I read that Cohen introduction, I more or less read it that way. But I wasn’t reading carefully enough.

Here’s what Cohen actually says:

[W]e believe that, although the word 'dialectical' has not always been used without clear meaning, it has never been used with clear meaning to denote a method rival to the analytical one: there is no such thing as a dialectical form of reasoning that can challenge analytical reasoning. Belief in dialectic as a rival to analysis thrives only in an atmosphere of unclear thought.

The footnote after “a method rival to the analytical one” takes you to this:

I do not think that the following, to take a recent example, describes such a method: 'This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.' (Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx\ p. 97.) If you read a sentence like that quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly.

Indeed! Note carefully, though, that being skeptical about a dialectical “method” that’s credible as a “rival to” more conventional kinds of logical analysis isn’t at all the same thing as “dismissing dialectics.” It’s just “dismissing dialectics as a rival to analysis.” Cohen goes out of his way to leave open the door to dialectics-not-understood-this-way.

What other way might there be to understand “dialectical” claims?

Well, let’s put aside Cohen for a moment and take a look at a later entry in the AM canon—Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliot Sober’s Reconstructing Marxism. (I wrote about that book here and here.) There, WLS ease that door open a little further.

It’s worth quoting what they say there at length:

Consider, for example, the idea that Marxist theory, in contrast to its rivals, is dialectical. It is notoriously unclear what this widely reported claim means. The additional assurance that Marx somehow set the dialectic “on its feet” hardly helps; and neither do the other characterizations that commentators have proffered. Aficionados can, of course, identify and produce dialectical explanations. Arguably, Marx himself did precisely that. Moreover, it does seem that the skillful use of dialectical metaphors can serve worthwhile heuristic purposes. But it is one thing to be fluent in a suggestive idiom, something else to deploy a distinctive methodology.

This is not to say that all of the specific elements traditionally subsumed under the expression "Marxist method" should be reiected out of hand. The point is that in order to be useful, such elements have to be translated into a language of causes, mechanisms and effects, rather than left as elusive philosophical principles. Take the notion of "contradiction", a key element of the purported dialectical method. One way of explicating this concept in conventional causal language is to treat a contradiction as a situation in which there are multiple conditions for the reproduction of a system which cannot all be simultaneously satisfied. Alternatively, a contradiction can be viewed as a situation in which the unintended consequences of a strategy subvert the accomplishment of its intended goals. Or finally, a contradiction can be viewed as an underlying social antagonism that produces conflicts: if a social relation has certain properties, which have an intrinsic tendency to generate conflict, one might say that the conflict is generated by a contradiction. There may be advantages or disadvantages to each of these formulations. In all of these cases, however, "contradiction" is not treated as a philosophically driven way of interpreting the essence of a process, but as a way of explicating the interactions among a set of causal mechanisms. This kind of translation of an element of Marxist method into a language of causal mechanisms is essential if the explanations generated using the element are to be scientifically intelligible.

This is only the barest sketch of a translation program. There’s clearly more work to be done. In broad strokes, though, the WLS approach seems exactly right to me.

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So far, you might be thinking, “OK, so Harvey was overstating the case a bit when he said analytical Marxists ‘dismiss dialectics,’ but I don’t see why you’re ‘very mad’ about that. Different theoreticians misunderstand each other’s views all the time, and in the greater scheme of things, this one seems like a pretty trivial mischaracterization. If you’re ‘very mad’ about this, you must approach philosophy and Marxist theory like Bruce Banner in the first Avengers movie—‘always angry.’”

To which I’d say:

The mischaracterization isn’t even part that makes me angry!

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Run back the tape on the last part of that Harvey quote:

They prefer to convert Marx’s argument into a series of analytic propositions. Others convert his argument into a causal model of the world. There is even a positivist way of representing Marx that allows his theory to be tested against empirical data. In each of these cases, dialectics gets stripped away.

If you can tell me what a “series of analytic propositions” is, I’d be fascinated to hear it. As far as I know, a “proposition” is the content of an assertion. So, like, the English “Snow is white” and the German “Schnee ist weiß” are two different sentences, but they “express the same proposition.” This feels weird to even have to spell out in so many words, but Capital is indeed a 1,000-page “series of propositions.” That’s literally the only thing it could be. Harvey himself refers to what Marx is doing as making an “argument.” Well, an argument is just a series of propositions where some of them (premises) are supposed to add up to reasons to accept others (conclusions).

But maybe Harvey thinks Capital isn’t a series of “analytic” propositions.

Next question:

What the hell is an “analytic proposition”? A proposition that would make an analytic philosopher happy?

I’m fairly sure he doesn’t mean “analytic” as opposed to “synthetic”—i.e. that’s true simply by virtue of it’s meaning (like “All bachelors are unmarried”) rather than true by virtue of facts about the world (like “Approximately 37% of marriages end in divorce”) because obviously no analytical Marxist has ever thought or will ever think that most of the propositions in Capital are like that. Take one of the basic claims of one of the longest and most important chapters of the book, which is, “Capitalists have a far greater built-in structural incentive than their counterparts in earlier modes of production did to try to increase the length of the working day.” Does anyone anywhere think the truth of that sentence is logically entailed by the meaning of the words?

If I wanted to be unkind, I’d suggest that an “analytic proposition” is just a proposition that’s made clear and unambiguous by the careful wording with which it’s expressed. But honestly, I do think that would be too unkind, because Harvey’s Companion contains many, many sentences which are “analytic” in that sense. I really meant what I said above about the book having many virtues.

My honest suspicion here is that Harvey himself does’t quite know what he means by “analytic propositions.” He knows that “analytic” types—analytical Marxists and analytic philosophers²—talk a lot about “propositions,” so he’s just gesturing vaguely in the direction of those guys trying to covert Marx’s argument into their sort of thing.

If so, that’s sloppy and annoying. But the next sentence is even worse.

Others convert his argument into a causal model of the world.

My God. What kind of monsters would take a set of theoretical claims about history and economics and try to figure out exactly what’s being claimed on the level of cause and effect?

Sometimes Harvey seems to imply—in some of the sentences of the Companion that feel the least like “analytic propositions” in the sense of “propositions expressed very clearly”—the key dialectical insight is that, rather than one thing causing another thing, it’s often true that two things equally cause one another (or at least have very significant effects on one another). When he’s in his “dialectical” mode a lot of Harvey’s illustrations tend to involve circles.

For the moment, let’s put aside the vexed question of whether there’s any way to make sense of this claim that would simultaneously make it (a) controversial and (b) true and just note that this is a “causal model of the world” if anything is. What could “causal model of the world” mean such that whatever Harvey’s trying to suggest with his circles doesn’t count?

And finally:

There is even a positivist way of representing Marx that allows his theory to be tested against empirical data.

What Harvey means by “positivism” is anyone’s guess, but in his defense, lots of people in the humanities and social sciences use that word in a strange and unclear way and it would be unfair to single out Harvey. Let’s give him a pass on the p-word and move on to the rest of the sentence. I would think that if your project was to figure out, first, what Marx is saying, and, second, whether what he’s saying is true, what you’d want to do is precisely to sort of what premises are supposed to support various Marxist conclusions, and then, for the empirical premises—the premises, for example, about what actually goes on in capitalist economies—test them against the empirical data.

Apparently…Harvey disagrees?

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Why do “dialectics” get “stripped away” when we parse Marx’s argument into “analytic propositions,” we try to sort out what those propositions entail about matters of cause and effect, and—worst of all, perhaps—we test the resulting claims against the available evidence?

Your guess is as good as mine. But any way of understanding what “dialectics” means that makes doing these things “undialectical” pretty clearly isn’t beating Cohen’s charge of thriving “only in an atmosphere of unclear thought.”

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The passage we just went over is deeply unclear at best and abjectly nonsensical at worst. But what really makes me mad is actually the part where Harvey seems to soften his critique:

Now, I am not in principle arguing that the analytical Marxists are wrong, that those who turn Marx into a positivist model-builder are deluded. Maybe they are right; but I do insist that Marx’s own terms are dialectical, and we are therefore obliged to grapple in the first instance with a dialectical reading of Capital.

I genuinely think this is the worst possible advice you could give anyone setting out to read Capital.

What Harvey seems to be saying here is:

Don’t try to explain what Marx is saying in Capital in terms of propositions laid out in a manner that would please those terrible “analytic” types. Don’t break down claims expressed in Hegel-ese into clear claims about causes, effects, and mechanisms. Don’t think about whether these claims match our best empirical evidence.

You can, if you’d really like, do all that at some later date. But during however many weeks or months you spend reading the 1,000+ pages of Capital—some of which are extremely dense!—resist the temptation to do any of these things. Just keep your understanding of what’s going on at a vague “dialectical” level.

Friends. Comrades.

Let’s not mince words here.

This is an endorsement of bullshit.

And everything—and I mean literally everything—that’s good about Harvey’s Companion comes from his frequent failure to heed his own advice.

1. The reason I talk about “methodology” here, not substantive claims, is that there’s simply no consensus within this group on Marxism-as-a-set-of-substantive-claims. If “the analytical Marxists” means the original “September group” of Cohen, John Roemer, (at one time) Jon Elster, Erik Olin Wright, and various lesser-known figures who got together once a year to hang out, read on another’s papers, and tear them to shreds in discussion, those guys disagreed among themselves on large and small points arising in just about every area of Marxist theory. If we mean "analytical Marxism” more expansively, such that e.g. someone like Vivek Chibber might count as an “analytical Marxist,” this is even more true.

2. Note that the first of these categories isn’t just a subcategory of the second. Some “analytical Marxists” have been sociologists, economists, and so on. In the introduction, Cohen talks broadly about analytical Marxism being all about deploying “mainstream methodology” for Marxist and socialist ends, where such methodology is understood in terms of “intellectual techniques that were shaped within several currents of non-Marxist Western (and mainly anglophone) social science and philosophy.”