Reviews for Marxist sociology revisited

The average rating for Marxist sociology revisited based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-09 00:00:00 Tariq Adl Bey Sadly, this is not the book to read if you want to "make sense" of Marx. The tl;dr version of this post is that you'll probably be better served by taking David Harvey's advice and trying to approach Marx on his own terms, and Harvey's "Companion" to Capital would be a better place to start for some guidance on doing that. Elster's book is instead an attempt to approach Marx through the frame of modern economic theory with a desire to sift out what is "true" from what is "false" in Marx's work. Elster is clear from the start that his intellectual starting point is methodological individualism with an emphasis on individual preference formation as part of a rational-choice model. I can't help thinking that anyone coming at Marx with these building blocks is going to struggle to "make sense" of him. For example dialectics are dismissed in a short section in the first chapter, and don't feature in the index. It is unlikely that someone coming to Marx from such a starting point is going to have much sympathy for dialectics, but to dismiss such a foundational part of Marx's thought so readily in a book suggesting it will "make sense" of his work seems like a significant gap to me. With his orthodox frame of reference, it makes sense  that Elster opens (after an introductory summary) with a discussion of Marx's understanding of "human nature" under both capitalism and communism. This is odd though because it is clearly not Marx's starting point, and in particular Marx makes only very sparse references to what life under communism will be like. But if your starting point is a rational-choice model, then "human nature" is going to be pretty significant. What Elster demonstrates in fact is not what is "true" and what is "false", but the extent to which Marx is consistent with his own initial assumptions. Elster quotes Marx extensively but selectively, across the full range from the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" to Grundrisse and the various volumes of Capital. Chunks are taken from a number of works to support the case that Elster is trying to make without adding context and without considering the development of Marx's thought over time from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 through to the "Notes on Adolph Wagner" of 1883. For example in the section on Marx's philosophy of history Elster draws out a variety of quotes to "prove" that Marx's view of history was profoundly teleological. Where he identifies quotes that might challenge this assessment (from the German Ideology) he assigns them - without much justification - to the influence of Engels. Elster doesn't differentiate the more 'Hegelian' approach of the earlier work, or touch on Marx's later statement that as his thinking developed he "stood Hegel on his head".  Instead Hegel's philosophy is mentioned very simply as an influence on Marx and dismissed as "nonsense". It all just goes to prove that with sufficiently selective quoting you can 'prove' that Marx thought just about anything. Once again, this is not the writing of someone who has critically engaged with Marx or is likely to help the reader to "make sense" of his thought in any way. The section on Marx's economics rehearses a number of well known objections, including a short treatment of the "transformation problem" leading to a rejection of the labour theory of value. Elster's view that the labour theory of value has been comprehensively proven to be false by modern economics is perhaps not as clear cut as he seems to think (at least in the view of Chris Dillow, a far more qualified critic than I am). At the end of the day, all Elster really demonstrates in this section is that Marxist economics is not consistent with modern orthodox economics, something we could probably have worked out without Elster's help although there is some value in having those differences drawn out. The influence of the orthodox economics approach is also clear in the section on exploitation which ends in the the frankly bizarre argument that exploitation may not exist because an individual worker could hypothetically "withdraw their means of production" from the capitalist system and operate on their own. The potential for distortions driven by a bottom-up 'rational choice' approach which ignores the system as a whole was never more clear. It is odd then that Elster often criticises Marx for (in his view) developing theories that don't bear any relation to reality, and yet often uses similarly extreme models (for example the idea of the worker unilaterally withdrawing from capitalism, or full automation where production requires no human labour at all) as part of his refutation. The use of rational-choice and game theory is more interesting in the section on class, class consciousness, and class struggle. Elster uses this approach to build up a theory of what a class is, how it comes to be formed, and how it might come to collective action through the lens of collected individual actions. This is interesting, but doesn't help us to understand how Marx thought about class, or engage with subsequent Marxist thinking on class consciousness from Lukacs to Gramsci, and ends in statements that feel very much like the derided Marxist 'false consciousness' with Elster trying to explain why individual actors might not be observed to act in the way his theories suggest they ought to. Throughout the book Elster treats as self-evident statements that are hugely problematic, from Marx's point of view at least. In the section on class for example: "the capitalists have an interest in the survival and reproduction of the workers, and the latter an interest in high profits that will ensure economic growth and future wage gains." (Elster 1985, p.377) I'm not at all certain that it requires no further justification that economic growth will deliver future wage gains (the last 10 years at least have not demonstrated that) or that the workers will therefore collectively commit to high profits for the capitalists. In Elster's sections on Marx's theories of history I've written elsewhere about how Elster's analysis feels too 'static'. It is here that his dismissal of dialectics is most obvious. In his search to pin down the exact nature of Marx's theory Elster takes little account of complexity, seeking rather to simplify and identify a theoretical root cause. I suspect that Marx is taking the opposite tack looking first at one and then at another angle of a complex system and drawing out where there are contradictory forces tugging in different directions. Dialectics is the key toolset Marx uses to do this. Furthermore Elster separates out his analysis of class struggle from his analysis of the changing modes of production, neatly removing one of the factors which Marx uses to resolve this tension between differing forces and placing it into a separate section. This separation of Marx's thought into separate boxes to be analysed in isolation is I think a key failure. At the end of the day, what this boils down to is that Elster's theoretical starting point is different to Marx's. There is some value to be had in having the differences between Marx and modern microeconomics demonstrated quite so clearly, but I think that the attempt to establish what Marx "really thought" and where he was "right" and "wrong" is fundamentally misguided from the start. As I said at the start of this review, if you really want to "make sense" of Marx then - as David Harvey suggests - try reading him on his own terms, inconsistencies included. This review can also be found on my blog here: Along with a further post looking at Elster's view of Marx's method:

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-13 00:00:00 Line Shink hi, my first semester college book.