Defending the New Marxism

Why the new American left is right to focus on understanding and organizing on the basis of material interests.

In a widely shared post for New Left Review’s Sidecar blog last month, Dylan Riley took aim at an approach he derides as “a kind of simplified rational choice or ‘analytic’ Marxism” developed and promoted by thinkers like Erik Olin Wright and Adam Przeworski.

I’ve long found the approach Riley takes on to be the most compelling synthesis of Marxist ideas out there. Analytical Marxism covers a wide range of issues, but I take its political significance to be as follows:

Because of their structural position — their class location — workers have certain material interests in securing and maintaining a job, so that they can make a living and afford food, clothing, shelter, and so on for themselves and their families. (Capitalists by contrast do not have the same material interest, since they do the hiring. If they’re manufacturers, for example, their interest is in extracting the maximum amount of labor time and effort from their employees, minimizing their costs for inputs, and maximizing their return from sales.) Workers also have material interests in individual and collective action that helps them improve their pay and working conditions, that allows them to ameliorate the exploitation and domination they suffer on the job. They have such interests in strategies that allow them to mitigate insecurity and deprivation through other means — through securing income or goods and services through mutual aid societies, say, or through government policies (i.e., the welfare state). Finally, they have interests in the construction of a new type of society, one that does away with the class structure of capitalism that systematically subjects them to economic insecurity and dependence on an unaccountable owning class.

In this way of thinking, the core political task of socialists is to organize workers, both at the level of the workplace and across society, so that they can more effectively pursue those interests. That means building unions and political parties oriented toward the collective promotion of workers’ welfare, with the ultimate aim of building up workers’ capacities and confidence to push for a more fundamental transformation of the economic system.

It is to the credit of the US left today that, I think, much of the above is uncontroversial. The Democratic Socialists of America’s increasing, if still insufficient, focus on labor and workplace organizing and the bread-and-butter economic populist approach of rising socialists like Zohran Mamdani speak to this positive development.

Riley, however, levels two basic, related criticisms of this version of Marxism.

Materialist Metaphysics?

First, Riley charges that analytical Marxism relies on a “metaphysical” understanding of interests. He writes that it is

a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given status — a present state of social being — and the interests supposed to flow from that. For an anthropologically well-grounded politics entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances.

Riley is certainly right to press “rational choice Marxists” on what they mean by material interests, which, I think, is not always clear. But I find Riley’s own argument on this point obscure.

My best attempt at reconstructing what he is saying here goes something like this: If all we know about a person or group of people is their class location, we cannot say much at all about their interests, because interests are always partly about a strategic orientation toward goals. There are many potential strategies associated with, say, the condition of being a US worker in 2025, because there are many potential ways to defend and improve the well-being of myself and those I care about.

I might try to keep my head down and work hard, winning the boss’s approval to slowly climb the ladder at my job; I might organize with my coworkers to demand better pay collectively; I might participate in party politics with the aim of winning universal childcare, or maybe even socializing the economy’s commanding heights. It is not a given which strategies workers will actually adopt.

This much is surely correct. It’s one way of getting at Marx’s distinction between a class in itself — a group of people defined by their location in an objective class structure — and a class for itself — a group of people consciously organized to pursue their interests as a collective. It is only through the process of class struggle, in various forms, that people come to think and act for the sake of more collective and emancipatory goals.

If this is what Riley is getting at, it’s an odd criticism to make of analytical Marxists, who have long been concerned with this sort of question. In his contribution to The Debate on Classes, for instance, Wright says:

To talk about the common material interests of workers is not to make a claim about which of the actual potential choices listed above are “best” for workers as individuals. . . . What is being claimed is that by virtue of being workers (that is, by occupying similar locations with respect to the relations of exploitation) they face broadly similar structures of trade-offs with respect to these kinds of choices.¹

I don’t know of anyone identifying with the analytical Marxist tradition who would claim that which strategies workers can and do pursue follows automatically from their class position; in fact, in the absence of concerted efforts to build cultures of solidarity in workplaces and across society, it is more likely than not that they will choose individualistic strategies of “going along to get along” or one-off acts of resistance rather than sustained collective action, as Vivek Chibber argues in The Class Matrix.

Riley’s criticism of analytical Marxism on this point is substantively unfair, then. But this isn’t merely an academic dispute. As Riley acknowledges in his piece, analytical Marxist thinkers have had a significant influence on the ideas of the new democratic socialism in the United States. It was not foreordained that the new US left would gravitate toward class politics and economic populism. Prior to the left’s rebirth in the middle of the 2010s, the dominant ideas were very different: prefigurative, utopian anarchism; postmodernist and postmaterialist social theories; a disproportionate focus on organizing the most marginalized; and a skepticism of labor and appeals to a working-class political subject. Basic Marxist ideas, clarified and synthesized in the thinking of analytical Marxists, helped provide foundations for this new left.

Constructing the Horizon

Riley’s second criticism of analytic Marxism is that it errs in trying

to develop a critique of capitalism by listing its “harms” — the negative counterpart to interests. But “harms” are only politically relevant if they are linked to historical alternatives. The capitalist harms that Wright lists in the opening pages of Envisioning Real Utopias, for example — inefficiency, a systemic bias toward consumerism, environmental destruction, limiting democracy and so on — do not constitute a critique of capitalism because many could be applied to any form of social production, including socialism.

Riley is correct with his premise here: For capitalism’s flaws to be “politically relevant,” workers must have a conception of a desirable and feasible alternative. Moreover, those who advocate for such an alternative have an obligation to explain, in relatively concrete terms, how their proposed vision of socialism would avoid, or at least mitigate, the harms associated with capitalism. To put it another way: they must explain how socialism, as they envision it, would serve people’s interests better than capitalism does.

But again, this is not something Wright or others in the analytical Marxist tradition would at all disagree with. In fact, the attempt to formulate such alternatives to capitalism was the focus of much of Wright’s later work, including Envisioning Real Utopias.² Attempts to devise such frameworks continue apace. (I’m particularly excited for the forthcoming The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World from Bhaskar Sunkara, Ben Burgis, and Mike Beggs.)

Now, I gather Riley would reply to this that workers cannot meaningfully be said to have an interest in bringing about such theoretical constructions. “Imaginable and viable alternatives” to capitalism, he writes, are “historically constructed through struggles.” There’s something to this — if philosophers’ and economists’ visions of a socialist future are not appreciated and endorsed by workers and incorporated into a realistic political strategy for achieving it, those blueprints are of little use. And what socialism actually looks like will have to be worked out, to a great extent, through widespread debate and experimentation in actually trying to build a new society. In that respect, Marx was not entirely wrong in refusing to write “recipes for the cookshops of the future.”

But that’s no reason to reject the work, here and now, of making arguments about what a more just political-economic order could look like. These arguments aren’t meant to replace the collective deliberation or experimentation that are important parts of struggles to build a new society; rather, they provide us with jumping-off points or guideposts in that endeavor. Polina Whitehouse puts the point well in her Jacobin article “The Left Needs Utopian Thinking.” “It is through making plans and attempting to carry them out that we exercise our constructive agency, collectively as much as individually,” she writes. “While we can never know all the relevant circumstances to perfect our plans, fallible goal-setting exercises are nevertheless valuable.”

Riley actually provides a good argument for why thinking through such real utopias is an important part of “doing” socialist politics. If socialists are to make the case to wider layers of the working class that they should get organized and fight, and if we want to make a case that goes beyond fighting for basic and immediately realizable reforms, we need “real utopias” to show that workers have a reason to fight not just for changes within the system but a change of the system itself.

So, Riley’s criticism of “the new Marxist culture” misfires on both counts. The notion of material interests is an essential foundation for socialist political practice — and for beginning to imagine alternatives to capitalism, which is in turn necessary to orienting class struggle in an emancipatory direction.

1. Erik Olin Wright et al., The Debate on Classes (London: Verso, 1990), p. 287.

2. Riley is of course aware of this, which again makes his criticism here particularly difficult to understand.