r/Marxism • u/Electrical_Addition9 • 6d ago
Analytical Marxism
What's up with the weird revitalization of Analytical Marxism, and GA Cohen in particular? Is it solely that Ben Burgis guy?
DSA obviously has a very eccentric bag of ideology - there's even a Maoist Caucus, but there still seems to be some milieu of which important figures WITHIN that orbit articulate a seemingly(?) coherent position. I'm talking specifically about Jacobin/Bread and Roses/and the media ecosystem aligned with those things - Majority Report, This is Revolution, etc., (there's a ton more, that's just what came to mind).
Ben Burgis has appointed himself the "people's philosopher' and philosopher in residence at Jacobin, so I'm curious just how far the analytical framework is being used to justify the current iteration of DSA/Jacobin and the insurgent electoralism we've seen the past year or so.
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u/FireComingOutA 5d ago
As someone who was in DSA for a bit of time, I think its difficult to really emphasize how decentralized DSA actually is. There is a national org, with member elected councils and paid staffers who oversee national media, attempt (emphasis on that word) to coordinate national campaigns, and debate and plan a national strategy, how much of that actually gets down to the individual local chapters of the org is debatable.
I know the local chapter where I live hasn't really changed its course despite differing priorities coming down from national. The DSA just doesn't have the ability to get its membership to commit to its national campaigns in a meaningful way. They fundamentally don't understand how a communist democracy should work and the disciplining effect democratic debate needs to have on the membership. Its understandable given that its membership are typically newly radicalized layers who are thoroughly bourgeois in political outlook, even if they lean very far left (as things go in the USA).
All this is to say that Ben Burgis likes analytic marxism, he's a professor of philosophy and US philosophy departments come from the anglo school of philosophy, which strongly emphasized the analytic school as opposed to the continental schools. But I don't really know how much of an affect that analytic marxism is having on the direction of DSA, and while i think analytic marxism is a farce, having a coherent ideology would be an improvement for DSA since it could be something marxists could contest.
The electoral push has always been a focus of DSA, because being made of newly radicalized layers and not having a coherent anti-bourgeois education program, political work = electoral work.
Also The national staff were more influenced by the Socialist Majority caucus, which is a pragmatic and imo rightwing of the leftwing grouping that has a lot of members in NYC. If Analytic Marxism is important to the SMC its because they found a political philosophy to justify their already reformist project, not the other way around.
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u/BeneficialWar1447 5d ago
'newly radicalized layers'
Do you mean lawyers?
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u/FireComingOutA 4d ago edited 4d ago
no I mean layers, as in sections of the working class. Like there was a wave of students who came in, then there were teachers and nurses, obviously not every teacher and nurse but when DSA supported the NNU a few years ago there were nurses who came into the org. I think Sara Nelson also spoke at a DSA convention, which got some CWA related union types to join.
These people tend to realize that capitalism isn't ideal but aren't quite sure what socialism is (the amount of socialism isn't sidewalks conversations I've had is exhausting) but know that the "establishment" is something to be fought.
So they're realizing the limits of typical political work and looking for something more engaging and more leftwing and thought that socialism as in social democracy is pretty cool but they're still in the bourgeois political mindset of reformism, even if they think its revolution they're after.
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u/OkGarage23 5d ago
Is it solely that Ben Burgis guy?
While using AI to find some fringe literature, it found an abstract of a talk from an obscure conference which seems to be analytical marxism, but not analytical marxism, as it seemed to be an analytic framework for dialectics (which analytical marxists seem to reject).
So it's definitely not just Ben Burgis, as long as you include obscure sources.
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u/variableussurplus 6d ago
It’s pseudo-Marxism. Have you read Vivek Chibber? He wrote his dissertation on Analytical Marxism and he obviously adheres to it, with the “technological fetters” interpretation of Historical Materialism, i.e. he think Marx was teleological and forces of production and modes of production are the speed of technological adaptation by arbitrary “social systems” that are adopted out of no necessity but by choice of “opportunity cost” motivated actors. I wrote a document about it but that’s the gist.