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THE STRENGTH OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: A COMMENT
We must be grateful to Wal Suchting (1993) for interrupting the main line of his studies long enough to bring us his energetic critical reflections on Wright, Levine and Sober's Reconstructing Marxism.(1) The main burden of his critique of this work is, roughly speaking, that it is, in whole or in part, incoherent, illogical, irrelevant, slapdash, objectionable, complacent, wobbly, fundamentally flawed, completely intractable, empiricist and essentialist, Gibbonian and pre-Galilean, definitely non-Marxist, and all about history when that's not what a properly conceived theory of history should be all about. The only consolation for the hapless authors is that their approach is Aristotelean. This at least prevents their being, say, pre-Babylonian, which is, I suppose, what Wal Suchting might have thought they might have been.
What, Precisely, is Analytical Marxism?
If Suchting's essay were an athletic performance, he would be getting into his stride in sections 1-3, and accelerating to a good lick in sections 4 through 12, before blowing up and breaking down completely in sections 13ff.
He begins with a telling point directed against Analytical Marxism (hereafter AM), which, he says, defines itself by a series of rather ill-defined methodological interests, while it calls simultaneously for precise definitions in all things, and denies that its ill-defined methodological interests are definitive. Suchting goes a bit far when he implies (in the sentence straddling pp. 135-6) that it would be logically impossible to define AM in the way this is commonly attempted: as the intersection of mainstream methodology with the Marxian agenda. AM thus defined would after all be a distinctive endeavor, distinguished from the rest of the Marxian enterprise by its methodology, and from the rest of mainstream social science by its subject matter, and if its two intersectors were well-defined, so would be their intersection.
He nevertheless may have a point that it is difficult to give either a stipulative or an extensional definition of the methodology(ies) deployed in the relevant library of works, and that the authors of the works are less articulate in this respect than their programmatic claims should lead one to believe.(2) In respect of method, they have more often been Marxists with attitude (MWA) than Marxists with position. Viewed from a sufficient...