A Useful Way to Read a Classical Theorist

Reading Marx is complicated by the fact that Marx is a political symbol before he is a reading assignment. For some students he arrives wrapped in the moral authority of a critic of injustice; for others he arrives wrapped in the historical record of twentieth-century regimes that invoked his name. Neither framing is a good starting point for analytical work. The purpose of this topic is to step back from both and ask a narrower question: which specific claims in the Marxian framework have held up against subsequent evidence, which have been modified, and which have clearly failed?

To make that question tractable it helps to separate three distinct kinds of claim that coexist in Marx's writing, often in the same paragraph (Elster 1985, pp. 3-10).

The first is descriptive and analytical: propositions about how capitalist economies are structured, how classes form, how the labor process works, how ideology is generated, how crises propagate. These are, in principle, empirical claims. They can be tested against data and against competing theoretical frameworks.

The second is historical and predictive: propositions about the trajectory of capitalist societies. The sequence of modes of production, the expected path of working-class immiseration, the inevitability of socialist revolution in the most advanced industrial societies, the withering of the state. These are also, in principle, empirical — but they are predictions about long-run historical sequences, and adjudicating them requires comparing Marx's expected path to what has actually happened over a century and a half.

The third is normative: commitments about what is wrong with capitalism and what would be preferable. Alienation under the wage relation, the domination of workers by capital, the moral case for collective ownership of the means of production. These claims are not empirical in the same sense; they are arguments about value, and they can be agreed with or disagreed with on philosophical grounds without settling the empirical questions at all (Cohen 1978, pp. 1-15).

The three kinds of claim can come apart. A person can accept a good share of Marx's analytical framework — that class shapes life chances, that capitalism has distinctive dynamics, that ideology is systemically produced — while rejecting his predicted historical sequence, and either accepting or rejecting his normative commitments. Conversely a person can agree with the normative critique of capitalism while regarding specific analytical claims as wrong. What is unhelpful is to take the three as a package and evaluate them together, because they obscure each other. If one rejects the normative side one may be tempted to dismiss the analytical tools; if one accepts the normative side one may be tempted to defend discredited predictions.

This topic commits to the narrower empirical question: for each specific analytical and historical claim, what does the subsequent record say? We will work through the framework in four passes. First, the analytical tools that have stuck — elements that are used in mainstream sociology today, often without attribution to Marx. Second, the claims that have been significantly modified by subsequent work. Third, the predictions that have clearly failed against the historical record. Fourth, the claims that, perhaps surprisingly, have been vindicated by recent empirical work. A final page draws the fair-minded takeaway.

A word on register. The test we will apply is whether a student sympathetic to Marx and a student hostile to Marx can both find the assessment credible. If a sentence reads as an apology for Marx, it should be rewritten. If a sentence reads as a dismissal, it should be rewritten. The standard is the standard for any classical theorist: specific claims evaluated against evidence, with attention to the difference between what the author wrote and what later defenders or critics have said he meant (Marx 1867, preface to the first edition; Marx and Engels 1848, pp. 14-20). This is the genre of reading that sociology — as a discipline — has developed for engaging with Marx, and it is the genre we will practice here.