Tags
Ben Burgis, Brendan Larvor, Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Joseph Heath, Karl Marx, nescio13, Plato, Thomas Kuhn
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.)
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?
It seems they all have answers;
Do they have any solutions?
I’m no expert in analytic Marxism, either, but what I thought they were most critical of in Marx was not vagueness. Perhaps it was the dialectic. But even more – I thought – it was substantive commitments on the part of Marx (which they thought he had gotten from Hegel): namely, functionalism and teleology. If I remember Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx, these were among his main targets. Does your defense of bullshit Marxism extend to these ideas?
Your/Larvor’s point about Plato was interesting. It reminded me of the argument in what I consider an excellent analysis of Marx’s thought, including its weaknesses: Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason. I think Megill, surprisingly, found it hard to identify the *Hegelian* roots of Marx’s dialectic reasoning, but instead traced it ultimately back to Aristotle.
There is a lot of Aristotelianism in Marx, for sure. Scott Meikle’s underrated Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx demonstrates that wonderfully. That said, while I haven’t read Megill, it does seem a little weird to deny the Hegelian roots of Marx’s dialectic, considering a) the many times Marx explicitly acknowledges Hegel’s influence and b) the strongly historical dimension to Marx’s dialectic. Aristotle isn’t very concerned with history.
As for functionalism and teleology, that’s a really interesting question. There, I think we probably need to get into the details of what’s being meant by those terms. Meikle has a wonderful anti-reductionist argument which could be viewed as teleological: you can’t understand what a $100 bill is without reference to the function it serves in society. If your conception of a $100 bill is simply the paper and ink that make it up and their component parts, you are misunderstanding what it is: it is an entirely different entity from an identically sized object made up of the same paper and ink, because of the role that it plays in society (and society not simply reducible to the state or individual social actors, but necessarily composed of the interactions between them). I think Marx absolutely buys functionalism and teleology, and is right to do so, in at least that sense. There may be stronger senses of teleology that Elster is objecting to, though.
My first thought upon reading this post was that the bullshit versus no-bullshit (and contentinental versus analytic) distinction is terribly unsatisfactory as a summary of philosophical options, for many reasons, but it’s enough to mention philosophical pragmatisms, which include analytic pragmatists such as C.S. Peirce and Nicholas Rescher, who are as comfortable with dialectics as with formal logical systems.
Rescher, in his book Dialectics: A Classical Approach to Inquiry (2007), criticized Popper’s 1937 essay “What is Dialectic?” (which was later revised and published in Popper’s book Conjectures and Refutations, 1962) wherein Popper had rejected dialectic for its willingness to “put up with contradictions” in theories, because, Popper supposed, it would create a situation in which “all criticism (which consists in pointing out contradictions) would lose its force”, a situation which Popper supposed could be avoided by using Frege–Russell logic in which the law of noncontradiction and the principle of explosion never “accept contradictions”. Rescher said that Popper’s argument was quite ridiculous (p. 5):
As I would summarize his position, Rescher showed how in any kind of systematic theory development it is impossible to avoid something like dialectics, because in the process of systematizing the elements of the theory (elements which could be presented by different agents in a conversation, as in the classical context of dialectic as disputation), contradictions or inconsistencies will occur that need to be resolved. Conceptual dialectics on a historical scale is just theory development as it occurs over multiple human generations: philosophy as systematic intergenerational conversation. (By the way, Rescher is also known for developing a system of paraconsistent logic, which is a kind of logic that does not follow the principle of explosion that Popper used to reject dialectic.)
So even if you consider yourself to be doing analytic philosophy, you still need something like dialectics. In the original post above, Amod contrasted the analytical approach and dialectical approach to philosophy, but we can see how inadequate that distinction is in light of Rescher’s argument. You can be as analytical/rigorous/exact as you want to be, and you’ll still need to use some kind of dialectics, but if you’ve been unduly influenced by Popper’s view of dialectic or perhaps by no-bullshit Marxists, you won’t like the word “dialectics” so you’ll call it something else: like Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium”, which is rather like a new name for conceptual dialectics. Thus you get philosophy papers like Georg Bruns’s “Conceptual re-engineering: from explication to reflective equilibrium” (2020) and “Re-engineering contested concepts: a reflective-equilibrium approach” (2022). Smells dialectical!
That quote from Brendan Larvor’s Lakatos: An Introduction (1998) in the original post above said: “Non-dialectical logic (induction as well as deduction) concerns itself with relations of inference between propositions, whereas dialectical logic studies the development of concepts.” I don’t find this distinction to be satisfactory either, because Rescher has shown that relations between propositions can also be dialectical, and because people generally use propositions to develop concepts, so dialectics, propositions, and concepts are all interrelated aspects of systematic theory development. (To his credit, Larvor goes on to make the same point several sentences later, but he phrases the point differently than I did.) What is more interesting about that Larvor quote in the context of everything I just said in this comment is that Larvor wrote that sentence right after a few paragraphs summarizing “the anti-dialectical, anti-Hegelian mood of the Popperian school” and Popperian criticism of Lakatos. So “non-dialectical logic” in Lavor’s quote can be interpreted to mean Frege–Russell logic as understood by Popper. But as I understand it, “non-dialectical logic” refers to nothing more than a mistake: if you want to do systematic theory development, you will want logic and dialectic, whether you call them by those names or not.
After writing my previous comment, I clicked on the link in the original post to “An interview with Erik Olin Wright” by Mark Kirby, and I saw that there is no mention of the word dialectic in it, and Wright’s description of no-bullshit Marxism on page 19 makes no reference to dialectics but basically just describes “no-bullshit” as the application of what I would take to be pretty universal intellectual virtues. This would seem to indicate that no-bullshit Marxism need not entail rejection of dialectics.
Also, I noticed that on the Substack version of this post, Naomi Kanakia commented and questioned, like Popper, the usefulness of dialectics for predicting the future. That part of Popper’s critique of Marxism has held up much better than the part about “putting up with contradictions” and is not the target of Rescher’s rebuttal.
Ben Burgis’s defence of analytical Marxism does what a lot of analytic philosophers do and tries to claim that it is just following “pretty universal intellectual virtues” – specifically, so-called “clarity” and “rigour”. What I’ve tried to do here is demonstrate that the analytical concern for “clarity” and “rigour” actually smuggles in a focus on single-meaning precision which is not in fact universal; it is opposed to the multivalent meanings that are at the heart of dialectic. Burgis also claims not to reject dialectic – but in practice he does, because he doesn’t understand it.
I don’t know pragmatism well. I think it is possible to harmonize the concerns of analytic philosophy and dialectic, and I’m quite open to the possibility that Peirce and/or Rescher may have succeeded at it. But I am confident that anyone who makes a claim of the form that the precise analytic method is “just good philosophy” (or “universal intellectual virtue”) has not.
I think you’ve failed to “demonstrate that the analytical concern for ‘clarity’ and ‘rigour’ actually smuggles in a focus on single-meaning precision”. What you tried to demonstrate might hit the mark if you narrowed your target so that it’s not universal/generalizing but based on specific cases. It may be true of Burgis, whom I haven’t read. That it need not be true is shown by the existence of analytical dialecticians like Rescher; others that come to mind are Arne Naess (at least in some mid-career work), Ian Hacking, Stephen Toulmin. As I recall, these thinkers don’t reject multivalence; perhaps they just want to understand that multivalence clearly, and what’s wrong with that? How much any particular thinker will explore any history of conceptual dialectics will depend in part, I expect, on how relevant or important that history is to whatever problems they are working on and how much time they have to work on it.
Similarly, perhaps I should walk back my claim that the opposites of Wright’s three sins of bullshit—obfuscation, intellectual dishonesty, and dogmatic use of theory—are “pretty universal intellectual virtues”, but please note that the “focus on single-meaning precision” that you seem to despise is not among those virtues—Wright is against “arguments and analyses that are obscure, confusing and vague”, but he says nothing against multivalence, which can be analyzed in a non-obfuscatory way. (And when he says “vague”, I take him to mean only the vagueness produced by obfuscation, not anything at all that is vague—after all, there are analytic theories of vagueness!)
I am just curious as to why emphasis and highlights of C.S. Pierce studies are not more explicitly expressed in a discussion/community like this one?
To me, Pierce is the deductive analysis, debate logic genius of our time.
Does his material hurt too many genius’ feelings because of it’s sterling superiority status?
Why else is his material sitting in a prominent university’s dusty bookshelf vaults and not widely produced as higher education studies to the relevant, curious learning body collective?
Peirce is long dead, so he’s not our contemporary any more than any other dead philosopher is. I won’t go into the reasons that may have kept Peirce from becoming popular, but I can’t resist sharing this passage that I read earlier this year from Brandon Bloch’s book review in the Boston Review of Habermas’s recent book Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too a History of Philosophy), which gave me a very hearty chuckle:
Pierce’s truth lives on in contemporaneous times.
In certain pockets of demographics, Marx, Stalin and et al’s legacy lives on as well.
The only reason Pierce’s legacy does not live on contemporaneously, is because the relevant inteligencia is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
I assume you wouldn’t include Habermas among the “morally and intellectually bankrupt” intelligentsia, given Habermas’s high praise for Peirce as “the true successor to the Young Hegelians”, as Brandon Bloch said in the previous quote!
I can only speak for the bankrupt idiots that would leave what is arguably the best deductive analysis and logical reasoning materials to collect dust in a prominent university, a vessel of higher learning that pretends to otherwise be interested in debating intelligently.
The Plato example for the difference between analytic and ‘dialectical’ philosophy is well-chosen. There was an analytic paper published around the 60’s by (I think) a fellow named Sachs, which points out that justice at the end of the Republic is very different from what it was at the beginning, as if this was a real problem for Plato – thus missing the point entirely. That paper is still held up in analytic circles as a penetrating critique.
Didn’t know about that paper – yikes. But yeah, when I read Larvor on Plato a few years ago I was like “that’s brilliant!” It was just a paragraph or so, but it was the best explanation of dialectic I’d yet seen.