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.
To answer the fifth-to-last paragraph, I’d guess it’s that Harvey is overly romanticizing the parts of Das Kapital related to dialectical materialism (in contrast to his perception of ‘sterility’ among AM), and getting out his emotional attachments on a rushed way
Yeah I don’t see why analysis is in conflict with dialectical understandings of power. We would want to know the nature of the two poles with some precision, I would think!
I think by analytic propositions Harvey refers to propositions derived analytically instead of dialectically. In any case, that’s why I prefer reading Marx and not Marxists (the same applies to other philosophers and theorists too, of course). And this is also what I advise my readers to do.
About the empirical data, I would urge anyone before accepting something to test its validity. Otherwise, they will turn what they read into mere ideology.
Those quotes sound really bad, but ... what is the point of reading primary sources? Surely it is to get at information upstream before it has been distilled by later generations. Maybe later generations have better theories, but we also want to learn how to create theories from scratch. We study rough-hewn theories because getting there is the hardest step. Yes, it is dangerously close to bullshit, but that is a measure of its difficulty. If we trust Marx enough to read him, shouldn't we trust his claim that dialectics is important to his method? We must use analysis to decide if his claims are true, but that is not how he generated the claims. If he blurred his eyes and tried to find vague patters like conflicts and he found a thread that he could follow back to precision, then we should try to understand what he did so that we can find more patterns, which we should not trust, but which are the first step towards possible discovery.
Lewontin and Levins give an interesting distinction between the analytical and dialectical approaches to science in The Dialectical Biologist. They are concerned with disputing the claim that by analyzing an organism it is possible to identify all of its constituent parts and then to fully explain the whole in terms of those parts alone. This maybe conflates an analytic approach with a reductionist approach, but they appear to consider these either identical or tightly related concepts. In any case it’s more illuminating than Harvey’s critique
When I was studying Kant, my lecturer remarked that “analytical philosophy” didn’t have any particular agenda and just meant “any philosophical system that isn’t insane”. I suspect he was thinking of Hegelian philosophy. Positivism in relation to Marxism is probably best understood in terms of Popper’s belief that Marx was propounding some kind of inductivist Law of History: “Capitalism observes that it is fed every morning at 6AM. It observes this on every day of the week …”
Are you familiar with the “Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism” (2005)? There are a couple of essays that focus on Analytical Marxism in that book:
“Analytical Marxism,” Christopher Bertram. He’s somewhat of a critic of the school, but it might be worth engaging with (even if for nothing else than a healthy critique of Bertram!).
“New Interpretations of ‘Capital’,” Jacques Bidet. This piece very briefly describes and compares three general philosophical “orientations” of reading Marx’s “Capital:”
1) “The continuation of the Hegelian/dialectical tradition” (“Grundrisse”-style exegesis of “Capital)”
2) “The tradition of historical materialism” (Althusserian current which emphasizes an epistemological break in “Capital” from the more “dialectical resorts” of the earlier works)
3) “The intervention of Analytical Marxism.”
In his conclusion, Bidet makes a case for combining these three orientations (he also cites some of his own efforts to do so in other works).
I’m planning to write a brief essay about Bidet’s piece soon.
Personally, I’m more directly influenced by some players from what Bidet calls the historical materialist current. However, like Bidet, I think there are insights to be gained from all three orientations.
And as you prefaced your essay, I think it’s generally a good thing if more people read Harvey and Harvey helps them get through “Capital”—even though I don’t generally prefer the more “dialectical” reading, and I think reading Marx on his own terms means recognizing that there is a sort of epistemological break between "Capital" and "Grundrisse" reflected in the reduction in dialectical language.
Cohen shares with a certain type of “dialectical materialist” (exemplified by Stalin’s Historical and Dialectical Materialism, but arguably rooted in Engels) two assumptions that Balibar is contesting: (1) the relation between method and content is just that the former is applied to the latter, and, relatedly, (2) there is, at least at some sufficiently high level of abstraction, a single correct scientific method.
Cohen’s position is that the standard methods of “bourgeois” social science are independent of the questions that social science is interested in. Stalin’s position is that a small number of “dialectical” laws can be applied to everything from chemistry to linguistics.
Another view is that the distinction between method and content should not become a dualism. There is no overarching dialectical method because dialectics and science generally require that method and results co-evolve.
To answer the fifth-to-last paragraph, I’d guess it’s that Harvey is overly romanticizing the parts of Das Kapital related to dialectical materialism (in contrast to his perception of ‘sterility’ among AM), and getting out his emotional attachments on a rushed way
Yeah I don’t see why analysis is in conflict with dialectical understandings of power. We would want to know the nature of the two poles with some precision, I would think!
I think by analytic propositions Harvey refers to propositions derived analytically instead of dialectically. In any case, that’s why I prefer reading Marx and not Marxists (the same applies to other philosophers and theorists too, of course). And this is also what I advise my readers to do.
About the empirical data, I would urge anyone before accepting something to test its validity. Otherwise, they will turn what they read into mere ideology.
Those quotes sound really bad, but ... what is the point of reading primary sources? Surely it is to get at information upstream before it has been distilled by later generations. Maybe later generations have better theories, but we also want to learn how to create theories from scratch. We study rough-hewn theories because getting there is the hardest step. Yes, it is dangerously close to bullshit, but that is a measure of its difficulty. If we trust Marx enough to read him, shouldn't we trust his claim that dialectics is important to his method? We must use analysis to decide if his claims are true, but that is not how he generated the claims. If he blurred his eyes and tried to find vague patters like conflicts and he found a thread that he could follow back to precision, then we should try to understand what he did so that we can find more patterns, which we should not trust, but which are the first step towards possible discovery.
Lewontin and Levins give an interesting distinction between the analytical and dialectical approaches to science in The Dialectical Biologist. They are concerned with disputing the claim that by analyzing an organism it is possible to identify all of its constituent parts and then to fully explain the whole in terms of those parts alone. This maybe conflates an analytic approach with a reductionist approach, but they appear to consider these either identical or tightly related concepts. In any case it’s more illuminating than Harvey’s critique
When I was studying Kant, my lecturer remarked that “analytical philosophy” didn’t have any particular agenda and just meant “any philosophical system that isn’t insane”. I suspect he was thinking of Hegelian philosophy. Positivism in relation to Marxism is probably best understood in terms of Popper’s belief that Marx was propounding some kind of inductivist Law of History: “Capitalism observes that it is fed every morning at 6AM. It observes this on every day of the week …”
Ben, I love the essay as usual.
Are you familiar with the “Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism” (2005)? There are a couple of essays that focus on Analytical Marxism in that book:
“Analytical Marxism,” Christopher Bertram. He’s somewhat of a critic of the school, but it might be worth engaging with (even if for nothing else than a healthy critique of Bertram!).
“New Interpretations of ‘Capital’,” Jacques Bidet. This piece very briefly describes and compares three general philosophical “orientations” of reading Marx’s “Capital:”
1) “The continuation of the Hegelian/dialectical tradition” (“Grundrisse”-style exegesis of “Capital)”
2) “The tradition of historical materialism” (Althusserian current which emphasizes an epistemological break in “Capital” from the more “dialectical resorts” of the earlier works)
3) “The intervention of Analytical Marxism.”
In his conclusion, Bidet makes a case for combining these three orientations (he also cites some of his own efforts to do so in other works).
I’m planning to write a brief essay about Bidet’s piece soon.
Personally, I’m more directly influenced by some players from what Bidet calls the historical materialist current. However, like Bidet, I think there are insights to be gained from all three orientations.
And as you prefaced your essay, I think it’s generally a good thing if more people read Harvey and Harvey helps them get through “Capital”—even though I don’t generally prefer the more “dialectical” reading, and I think reading Marx on his own terms means recognizing that there is a sort of epistemological break between "Capital" and "Grundrisse" reflected in the reduction in dialectical language.
Cohen shares with a certain type of “dialectical materialist” (exemplified by Stalin’s Historical and Dialectical Materialism, but arguably rooted in Engels) two assumptions that Balibar is contesting: (1) the relation between method and content is just that the former is applied to the latter, and, relatedly, (2) there is, at least at some sufficiently high level of abstraction, a single correct scientific method.
Cohen’s position is that the standard methods of “bourgeois” social science are independent of the questions that social science is interested in. Stalin’s position is that a small number of “dialectical” laws can be applied to everything from chemistry to linguistics.
Another view is that the distinction between method and content should not become a dualism. There is no overarching dialectical method because dialectics and science generally require that method and results co-evolve.