Marxism without Micro-Foundations

Abstract

Two anomalies confront Marxism as its refutation: the durability of capitalism and the passivity of its working class. Successive encounters with these anomalies — encounters stimulated by different political and economic circumstances — have shaped many incarnations of Western Marxism. Classical Marxism, for example, which included such disparate thinkers as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Jaurès, Adler, Bauer and Hilferding, emerged out of Marxism’s golden age. Europe’s historical circumstances between 1890 and 1920 could be interpreted as vindicating Marx’s scientific investigations. During this period economic forces did appear to be propelling Europe toward a major international crisis and class struggle did appear to be escalating. The events warranted optimism and anomalies could be passed off as temporary aberrations.

Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and the political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.

—from Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

An early version of this chapter was delivered at a workshop on the Politics of Production held at the University of Chicago, 13–14 November 1987. I am grateful to Adam Przeworski, Erik Wright and Carol Hatch for reading and commenting on subsequent versions.