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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Professor Jon Elster advances the proposal that Marx – and Marxists–really stand for ‘methodological individualism,’ as opposed to ‘methodological collectivism.’ He defines ‘methodological individualism’ in the following terms:
Social science explanations are seen as three-tiered. First, there is a causal explanation of mental states, such as desires and beliefs … Next, there is intentional explanation of individual action in terms of the underlying beliefs and desires … Finally, there is causal explanation of aggregated phenomena in terms of the individual actions that go into them. The last form is the specifically Marxist contribution to the methodology of the social sciences.1
1 Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), 4
2 See my article ‘The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two,’ New Left Review 157 (May/June 1986) 61-77.
3 This is a near-farcical throwback to a Rothschild anecdote of the nineteenth century, in which the old rascal is supposed to have silenced a critic by offering him 1/30 millionth of his fortune, as that was supposed to be redistributed among all the inhabitants of France by equal shares.
4 I cannot take up here all the criticisms of Marx’s economic theory dispersed throughout Jon Elster’s book. Let me mention in passing that the criticism of the solution of the so-called ‘transformation problem’ advanced by the neoRichardians, which Elster considers definitive, has in turn been submitted to harsh criticism by ‘orthodox’ Marxists (see Mandel, and Freedman, A., eds., Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa [London: Verso 1985]Google Scholar), to which any reply by neoRicardians is still lacking.
5 Organizationally, this passage from the micro-economic to the macro-economic ’motivation’ is expressed among other phenomena by the setting up of employer’s associations, which by no means consistently acted in favour of increasing wages.
6 Elster also doesn’t understand Marx’s view that capital can very well be initially accumulated in the circulation process-through appropriation of part of the surplus product produced under non-capitalist relations of productionbefore it is systematically produced in the capitalist production process itself.
7 The idea that the lords ‘exchange’ these unpaid labour services for the protection they offer the serfs from potential robbers is of course a joke. It has nothing to do with exchange in the economic sense of the word and is quite similar to the arguments used by gangsters organizing a so-called protection racket-as Elster himself correctly points out.
8 And what about the political disasters ‘inspired’ by pragmatic moralists À Ia Max Weber, supporting colonial adventures and imperialist wars, or by ‘nonutopian’ Realpoliticians of the Kissinger-Nixon type, ordering the bombing and defoliation of Cambodia?
9 Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1976) Vol. 1, 638
10 , Marx and , Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975) 292Google Scholar
11 , Marx and , Engels, Collected Works (New York: International 1975) Vol. 3, 182Google Scholar
12 Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, 23 February 1860. In , Marx and , Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41, 57Google Scholar.
13 , Marx and , Engels, Selected Correspondence, 173Google Scholar
14 Quoting the novelist Wassily Grossman, Elster asks another rhetorical question: what harm would anyone do to people if he would open a private snackbar ’under socialism’? Obviously none whatsoever! (517)
But carried away by his preference for ‘market socialism,’ he forgets to pose the relevant question: if by pandering to minority demand for luxury consumer goods (including imported ones) you undermine planned self-management, let market laws rule the distribution of productive forces among various branches of output according to wildly fluctuating ‘effective demand,’ unequally divided among households, and thereby force millions of producers to work 42 hours a week (instead of 35 or even 30 hours, as they would prefer), then in addition force hundreds of thousands of producers periodically out of work altogether, don’t you then do great harm to a great number of people? I believe you do. Does Elster believe the same?
I believe that a society of associated producers, who themselves determine what they produce, how they produce it, where they work, and how long they work, by democratic decision-making processes, is a more just society than the one in which ‘market forces’ decide these things behind the backs of the majority of the producers. Doesn’t Elster think the same?
I have already answered his argument that a society of plenty as conceived by Marx is a complete utopia (526) in my article ‘In Defence of Socialist Planning’ (New Left Review 159 [September-October 1986)).
15 Elster is right to point out the ‘risks’ of revolutionary victories under materially unfavourable conditions. But what about the dilemma implied in the concomitant risk of counter-revolutionary victories? Trotsky pointed out these dangers as early as 1905-6 and offered a real answer with his theory of permanent revolution: the gradual international spread of revolution, as conditions ripen for it in country after country, both as a result of successive crises in bourgeois society and of the gradual maturing of adequate revolutionary leadership, capable of winning the majority of the toilers for the conquest of power by the proletariat.
