Analytic Marxism’s indispensable contribution: A response to Anthony Monteiro
Tom Canel
Platypus Review 161 | November 2023
ANTHONY MONTEIRO’S ARTICLE “Logic, methodology, rational choice Marxism, and the fate of bourgeois Marxism” provides bracing criticism of analytic Marxism.[1] It is an interesting and important piece that merits serious attention. The heyday of analytic Marxism was in the 1980s, just as I came of age. Even then, the sense that Marxism was in crisis, not only politically but intellectually as well, was pervasive. Although Soviet Communism was not to collapse until the end of the decade, the question of whether Marxism as a doctrine as well as a politics had been invalidated by history was widely posed, even if those who raised the question were sometimes denounced as backsliders.
In Britain, the esteemed historian Hobsbawm had, in his article “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” (1978),[2] challenged Marxist complacency about the industrial working class fulfilling the role that the Marxist philosophy of history ascribed to it. The defeat of the miners’ strike in Britain and the breaking of PATCO[3] in the U.S. presaged a period of profound reversal and damaging defeat for the organized working class; this was ostensibly at odds with orthodox Marxist expectations. Imminent deindustrialization raised doubts about whether the industrial working class would remain sufficiently numerous or economically central to be capable of revolutionary impact. On the European continent, the neo-Marxist André Gorz wrote a book whose title actually said goodbye to the industrial working class![4]
The defeat of American imperialism in Indochina culminated not in the revolutionary idyll some New Leftists had anticipated, but a harsh regime in Vietnam that drove many of the ethnic Chinese minority to risk their lives by fleeing from Vietnam in ramshackle boats (the so-called “Boat People”) and an auto-genocidal catastrophe conducted by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. The latter led to Vietnamese forces overthrowing the Pol Pot regime and a subsequent military conflict between “liberated-from-imperialism” Vietnam and the “anti-imperialist” People’s Republic of China. This was war between two ostensibly anti-imperialist forces, when the responsibility for war was supposed, according to much Marxist doxa, to lie squarely with imperialism and its minions.
The loss of the emancipatory élan of the Soviet Union and the alleged loss of the Western industrial proletariat’s revolutionary potential shattered the intellectual shibboleths of much of the Old Left, while the messy denouement of struggles in Indochina and the failure of other third-world inspirations for gauchistes around the world (such as the guerilla strategies of Che Guevara and his followers[5]) shattered many a New Leftist assumption and platitude. Admittedly, the Marxist Left could, for a few years, still seek revolutionary inspiration in Central America (particularly in Nicaragua and El Salvador), the Caribbean (Grenada and Cuba), and Africa (Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.) However, the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. was thought, even at the time, to illustrate that the decade was to be one of overwhelming reversal, if not outright defeat, for the Left. The world seemed to be developing in a manner divergent from that which orthodox-received Marxism, at least, had led us to expect. Lenin had said that Marxist theory, conducted through dialectical materialist categories, was all-powerful because it was true. Marxism no longer seemed all-powerful.
The apparent disconfirmation of Marxist analyses prompted a diverse array of Marxists to challenge orthodox and received categorization and methodology. Political movements, it could be argued, generally eschew self-reflection, fearing that, at best, it distracts militants from ongoing struggles, or, at worst, generates a potentially fatal demoralization. Nevertheless, the reversals of the 1980s forced some on the Left to reconsider the basic methodological assumptions of received Marxism. Analytic Marxism was just one form that this questioning of basic Marxist tenets took. (For the lovers of theoretical extravagance, the Althusserian school provided another option. Marxist Hegelianism also opened space for Marxist auto-critique.) Monteiro persuasively demonstrates why analytic Marxist sensibilities grated against many on the Left. These problematic aspects notwithstanding, analytic Marxism’s putative contribution to the reconstitution of Marxism is nevertheless, I mean to argue, indispensable for that project. If one wants to reconstitute Marxism (though if the Left were indeed dead, as Platypus argues, we may not be able to assume that a reconstitution of Marxism is even possible), analytic Marxism’s potential contribution to that project must be acknowledged and engaged. While it would be unwise to mechanically accept all of analytic Marxism’s tenets and findings (especially since they vary between thinkers and over time), a constructive engagement with it is warranted.
Aside from seeing Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978)[6] in local college bookstores and on the shelves of student radical activists (Monteiro acknowledges that Cohen’s work should not be lumped in with that of other analytic Marxists), my first encounter with analytic Marxism was when I traipsed along, as an undergraduate student, to an American Philosophical Association meeting with two friends, a graduate student and his then girlfriend, who was about to go on the job market as an academic philosopher. I went to one session, which addressed the new trend known as analytic Marxism. One presenter argued that for at least one of these theorists — I think it was Jon Elster — it was the need to make sense of military conflict between ostensibly socialist nations, China and Vietnam, that prompted confronting ostensible methodological shibboleths of Marxism with the alleged logical rigor of analytic philosophy, rational choice theory, and the like.
Orthodox Marxism regarded itself as the product of a fusion of British political economy, German philosophy, and French socialism, while Gramsci saw Marxism as the application of Hegel to Ricardo. Philosophical concepts are deeply implicated in Marxism’s etiology; so, it is perhaps understandable that, as Perry Anderson wrote in a small book on the subject,[7] Western Marxism responded to political failure in the mid-20th century by retreating into philosophy, placing Marxism in the context of German Idealism. Of course, different strands of Marxist theory valued the Hegelian aspects of their intellectual heritage differently (the Frankfurt School lionized it, while their Althusserian counterparts excoriated it). The Hegelian dialectic and its Marxist derivatives were anathema to much analytical philosophy, since dialectics ostensibly violate the assumption that logical contradictions cannot be incarnated in the real world. For their part, whatever their views on the dialectic and the Hegelian legacy, both philosophically and practically-oriented Marxists seemed to dismiss analytic philosophy as “bourgeois.” Platypus Review readers should remember that at the time, no one had yet heard of the Platypus pedagogy; we tended to see “bourgeois” as a purely negative epithet. Frankfurt School theorists saw analytic philosophy as the legitimator of the administrative state, while Althusserians, regarding philosophy as class struggle in the realm of theory, viewed analytical philosophy as one representative of the bourgeoisie in philosophy. For many Marxists, analytic Marxism was one of several ideological assaults on Marxism that had disguised themselves as good-faith attempts to salvage it.
What is it about analytic philosophy that makes it anathema to so many Marxists? Analytic philosophers often follow the lead of natural and empirical social sciences, including economics, in evaluating philosophical claims. According to many analytic philosophers, this allows for a conceptual clarity that eschews the obscurity and obfuscation that, they feel, mar speculative thought, including that emanating from Hegelian and post-Hegelian quarters. (It should be noted that one recent development within academic philosophy is to integrate analytic methods with Hegelian claims. I am personally unfamiliar with this work and therefore totally unqualified to evaluate its merits or failings.) The speculative move that has frequently estranged analytic philosophers from Hegelian theory and its ilk is the latter’s invocation of speculative dialectics. Dialectical thinking, its advocates state, enables one to acknowledge the genuine contradictions within material reality to which the analytic philosopher, refusing to accept the physical (or even social) instantiation of logical contradiction, must, according to many dialectical materialists, remain oblivious. Inevitably therefore, Marxists may come to see analytic philosophy as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than a resource that could enable intellectual edification.
Historically, analytic philosophers have paid attention to the notion of “facts.” They have debated whether facts themselves, along with physical objects, constitute part of the furniture of the world. Dialectical thinkers, such as Lukács and Adorno, see this preoccupation as reflective of a reification of facts. It is an error, Lukács and Adorno would claim, to see facts as literally existing and self-subsistent objects. For Lukács and many other dialectical materialists, there are not really self-subsistent objects at all; there is nothing to the world outside the dynamic processes that constitute the totality.[8] Analytic philosophy’s alleged reification of facts allegedly posits ahistorical static objects and thereby condemns its doctrines to being obfuscatory.[9] For Adorno, the reification of facts parallels the fetishism of commodities that Marx saw as integral to capitalism.[10] Analytic philosophers, committed to emulating the rigor of the natural sciences, Adorno would argue, find it difficult to recognize that subjectivity is a genuine aspect of the objective world (cf. the way analytic philosophers wrestle with the notion of free will[11]). Admittedly, Marxist theory cannot help but be in tension with analytic philosophy. I would hold, however, that it behooves Marxists to recognize — its tension with dialectical thought notwithstanding — that the methods of analytic philosophy are valid within certain parameters, and that to ignore this validity would be intellectually and politically deleterious for Marxism.
Let us examine further the areas of contention between analytic Marxism and dialectically informed forms of Marxism. Like all analytic philosophers, analytic Marxists find it important that discourse be clear and explicit. If a statement is meaningful, one should, it is felt, be able to explicate it in unambiguous terms. The logical validity of an argument can be determined by analyzing what assumptions are made and the rules of inference invoked. It is assumed that if one applies correct rules of inference to true assumptions, one’s conclusions will always be justified. False assumptions and/or fallacious reasoning undercut justification for reaching any conclusions; fallaciousness is not necessarily grounds for reaching opposite conclusions. The time indicated on a stopped watch does not justify the claim that it is actually that time, but we cannot conclude that it is necessarily not that time; after all, while there are only two times in the whole day that a stopped clock is accurate, we may by chance be at one of those two times. Contradictions within material reality aside, logical consistency and valid inference often remain a good heuristic for evaluating the force of different arguments. Marxists need to explain the current political conjuncture, if they are to intervene in it effectively. It is a human failing to repetitively invoke resonant language to cover up flaws in one’s argument. In the 1980s, and arguably still, some Marxists attempted to defuse theoretical crisis by the repetition of hallowed terminology, such as “dialectical,” “praxis,” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” relying on the aura of their terminology, rather than their conceptual content to drive home their case. (To be clear, Monteiro does not do this. All the times that I have heard him speak at Platypus events or read what he has written, his arguments have been clear and rational, as well as interesting and important.)
It would be arrogant and false for analytic Marxists to claim that only they understand the need for conceptual rigor. What they could reasonably claim, though, is that they provide a valuable service by examining the logical validity of arguments, and that their methodology provides a valuable heuristic for the conceptual reconstitution of Marxism. That a thesis cannot be established logically, is not proof that it is false, but it makes its automatic avowal inherently dogmatic and uncritical, unless a rigorous alternative justification is provided. Mere repetition of hallowed phrases is clearly no such thing. The natural sciences generate models representing natural processes. The accuracy of a model depends on the assumptions it invokes and the way elements thereof can interact. To provide an explanation of social reality, analytic Marxists want to be able to model it in a way similar to how natural scientists model the physical world. Several analytic Marxists — Jon Elster and John Roehmer come to mind — rely on a methodological individualism, at times invoking game and rational choice theory, beloved of mainstream economics, to build their models. This can offend Marxists, especially like Lukács and Adorno, who feel that it is precisely administrative and/or capitalist society that forces people to evaluate and pursue their interests the way game theoretical models would suggest.[12] It may be an indictment of capitalism and its administrative state that under contemporary conditions people are motivated in this way, but it does not undercut the possibility that a game-theoretical approach is often useful for describing actual behavior. I would further argue that, if one cannot generate a plausible methodologically individualist model to explain social behavior, you must show specifically why such a model does not apply to the relevant instance. It is unclear that methodological individualism should necessarily be inapplicable to even revolutionary situations. Revolutionary situations may cause individuals to be motivated differently, but there should still be some explanation of their behavior that works at the individual level. Game theory’s model of individual motivations may have to be adapted to capture extraordinary moments in history, but presumably one should, in principle at least, be able to develop models of individual behavior that facilitates understanding of even exceptional situations.
Monteiro critiques the resort of some analytic Marxists to modal logic. (Modal logic is a formal logic that incorporates necessity and possibility. Some fascinating analytic philosophy has focused on its epistemological and metaphysical implications.[13]) Suspicious of formalized thought in general, seeing it as rigid and undialectical, Marxists understandably may be averse to modal logic in particular. Again, that would be a mistake. Marxists argue that proletarian emancipation is historically necessary, not just ethically desirable. On the other hand, Adorno and others have argued that the opportunity for proletarian revolution was missed post-1917 with the containment and degeneration of the Bolsheviks’ project.[14] This suggests that proletarian emancipation may not occur as envisioned. If the revolution could possibly not happen, could it still be historically necessary? Could something never occur despite being historically necessary? What relationship is there between historical necessity and occurrence within history? Can we infer the latter, even if delayed, from the former? This raises the question of whether historical necessity implies historical — if only in the future — actuality. Although this may be pitched at a more abstract level than Marxists would like, it is nevertheless a question that the conjuncture of Marxist traditions and historical experience behoove them to confront. The proletariat is regarded as potentially revolutionary by most Marxists in a way that the petty bourgeoisie and other disaffected social layers are not. But what does “potentially revolutionary” actually mean? Is it just an empirical claim about the future or is there something immanent to different social layers being discerned? How are logical and historical potentialities and possibilities differentiated? These are not purely academic questions for Marxists who base their interventions on the basis of social potentiality; arguably, a theoretical reconstitution of Marxism as a political as well as intellectual force requires resolving them. The clarification of notions such as possibility, potentiality, and necessity are inextricably intertwined with modal logic. Since Marxists cannot ignore these puzzles, they should not eschew modal logic either.
Marxists, from Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács to Chris Cutrone, have critiqued analytic philosophers for projecting an ahistorical understanding of truth. If cognition is a social process, and if truths are produced by cognition, the truths that are cognized would surely change as the social processes generating truths themselves change. To put it in terms amenable to the analytic philosopher, the categories by means of which we formulate historical facts, are themselves historical and in flux, so the facts themselves must be historically fluid too. Facts seem to be historical, so truth, according to many an analytic philosopher rigidly associated with facts, must be understood historically too. This historicization of truth rubs many analytic philosophers the wrong way. Bertrand Russell, for example, came to regard a fact as anything that existed independently of our thinking about it.[15] Whether the proverbial cat is indeed on the mat is surely independent of whether anyone perceives it. Whether William the Conqueror’s cat, presuming there was one, did make itself comfortable on a mat during the Battle of Hastings in 1066, should not be affected by the historical insight that that battle enabled the emergence of feudalism in England. On the other hand, whether we agree with official Egyptian state objections to the depiction on Netflix of Cleopatra as a black woman should surely be affected by the way the concept of “blackness” emerged historically. To parse this out will, I suspect, take both historical analysis, to which Marxists are indispensable, and the fastidious logic-chopping in which analytic philosophers excel. Analytical Marxism as a bridge between traditions may have a special role to play in resolving these paradoxes.
Surprising previous generations, many Millennial Leftists have rediscovered an ostensibly orthodox Marxism. For example, it is noticeable how much avowedly Marxist rhetoric informed the internal debates of the — at least until recently — ballooning Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Surprisingly large numbers of Millennial and Gen Z Leftists, both inside and outside DSA, refuse to distance themselves from mainstream association with 20th-century Stalinism by describing themselves as “communists,” fully owning the historical connotations. Reportedly, the until-recently moribund Communist Party USA (CPUSA) has experienced an influx of young recruits. (It will be interesting to see how this works out; in recent years the CPUSA’s politics have hearkened back to the Popular Front period, while younger “communists” seem to identify with a decidedly ultra-Left politics. Incomprehensibly, to me at least, Maoism seems to have renewed appeal to some younger Marxists.) For better or worse, accurately or inaccurately, today’s young Marxists, outside the Platypus Affiliated Society at least, do not see the current decade as putting Marxist tenets and methodology into doubt the way their predecessors, at least those influenced by the experience of the 1980s Left, do. There is therefore very little appetite for the kind of methodological and theoretical introspection modeled by analytic Marxism. Is this a mistake?
Marx famously wrote that man makes history, but not in the circumstances of his own choosing. Emancipatory aspirations must therefore be grounded on the historical reality in which one is immersed. Marxists seek to provide a critique of current conditions. In the 1980s, some began to wonder whether Marxist categories were still adequate for the comprehension of then-prevailing conditions. Today’s young Marxists arguably feel secure that their own Marxist categories are up to the task. I want to challenge their self-assurance. If one of the flaws of my generation was to undercut the centrality of questions of (working-) class politics to the emancipatory project, it is surely to the younger generation’s credit that class politics are now re-emphasized. This laudable orientation is undercut by ambiguity in what one talks about, when one refers to the working class and class in general. Mainstream sociological thinking has tended to emphasize educational attainment as an important factor in determining class identity. This seems un-Marxist and enables the counterintuitive claim, for example, that the disproportionate appeal of Trumpism to many white voters without a college degree suggests that MAGA politics are, in part at least, working-class politics. We do need to grapple with the way that educational level has become so operative in contemporary American politics. A Marxist analysis should analyze the complications of correlating Marxist understandings of class with educational level. This requires, I would claim, a clearer definition of what defines the working class in particular, and social class in general, according to Marxism. Many analytic philosophers are all about definitions. Analytic Marxists could be of help here.
A mainstream notion that has had more traction for Marxists in the past is that factory workers epitomize the working class. One orthodox Marxist argument is that one epitomizes being working class if one works in industry, does not own any of the means of production, works for a wage, and produces surplus value to be appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Some Marxists have dropped the requirement of working in industry and focused on the exploitation relationship alone to update class categories in an apparently more post-industrial era. However, there is arguably no clear relationship between producing surplus value and being impoverished. For example, highly paid computer engineers produce surplus value for their employers but are not regarded as working class, while sanitation workers produce little if any surplus value, but surely are workers nevertheless. At Platypus events, Monteiro has identified the need to reconstitute an American Marxism through, in part, an examination of the way that African Americans have historically played the historical role of a proletariat in the U.S. This would also involve recasting orthodox Marxist conceptualization of class. Since Occupy, sections of the Left seem to focus on wealth distribution rather than exploitation as the decisive factor in determining class position (counterposing the richest 1% to the remaining 99%). Whatever its merits, such a view contradicts the traditional Marxist emphasis on exploitation rather than unjust distribution. Platypus itself engages in the project of defining class by de-emphasizing demographic considerations and advocates thinking of the proletariat and other classes in historical terms. This is intriguing but requires, I feel, a further clarification of what, if we are to avoid philosophical idealism, distinguishes historical and demographic categories. The 1980s saw the beginning of deindustrialization in advanced capitalist economies, prompting analytic Marxists and others to clarify conceptions of the working class and class generally.[16] This project remains unfinished, but, analytic-Marxist-style fastidiousness about concepts and modes of inference can make an important contribution to its completion.
The recent emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an economic superpower will, one way or another, have profound implications for global capitalism and human history generally. A snapshot view of China’s economy would suggest that the PRC is nothing more than an emergent capitalist, and therefore possibly imperialist, actor. However, the PRC is self-avowedly communist and has roots in one of the great 20th-century communist revolutions. Considering this historical context, some Marxists have argued that China’s apparently capitalist development is being managed by the Chinese Communist Party so as to facilitate the eventual development of socialism; the regime is actually proto-socialist.[17] The political stakes of this argument are clear, at least for Marxists. To evaluate these claims, one would have to establish the credibility of a model of transition to socialism along these putative lines, as well as a clearer understanding of what would actually constitute socialism. Can one provide a plausible account of how communist management of an ostensibly capitalist economy in China would be such as to provide a more or less smooth transition to socialism? Doing that would seem to require plausible models of how that might actually happen. Rational choice theory should not be ignored in these discussions; analytic Marxism’s methodologies may be instructive.
I remember the days when it was argued that the Marxist (Lenin’s) concept of “Imperialism” was outdated. (I remember a British SWP (UK)[18] member — he left the party soon thereafter for unrelated reasons — informing me in the 1980s that anyone who invoked it uncritically should “have their knuckles rapped”!) However, today the term is aggressively invoked to buttress opposing political positions. Take the case of the war in Ukraine. There is a current on the Left that, while recognizing that inter-imperialist competition is a very present factor, avers that the Ukrainians themselves are engaged in a genuine national liberation struggle. While some who hold this view may still be wary of endorsing NATO and Western assistance to Ukraine, Leftist support for the national liberation struggle is still thought to be essential. Other Marxists argue that given the hegemony of the U.S. within the global imperialist system and the U.S.’s allegiances in the matter, the Ukrainian struggle actually fosters imperialism rather than national liberation. If anything, these Leftists incline to support Russia. There are also Marxists who deemphasize anti-imperialism and national liberation, seeing both sides as capitalist and therefore unworthy of Marxist sympathy.[19] No intellectual resolution of these debates is possible unless participants can develop a common understanding of what one precisely means by such terms as “imperialism” and “national liberation.” It is not clear that contemporary Marxist understandings around imperialism correspond to Lenin’s notion of the fusion of financial and industrial capital and the subordination of the national state to its blocs of capital. Nor is it clear that a single coherent alternative understanding of imperialism is being deployed. The Marxist intellectual trying to make up her mind about Ukraine must clarify terms such as imperialism and national liberation. An examination of their meaning and inferential implications will be essential. Adopting the sensibilities of Analytic Marxism would again be helpful.
I suspect that Monteiro (and many members of the Platypus Affiliated Society) will feel that I have missed the point. They are not against conceptual clarity. (After all, why would they be?) Their opposition to analytic Marxism is political, not epistemological; it is based on a recognition of the link between methodologies inherent in analytic Marxism and the liberal technocratic politics that define progressivism in an administered society. My critics might, always in a kind way to be sure, point out that since my own politics are arguably close to those that analytic Marxism is accused of, my views only validate their negative diagnosis. It is certainly true that analytic Marxists seem to be drawn toward inevitably technocratic models of market socialism. (John Roehmer is a prime case in point.[20]) I acknowledge that there may be a link between the acceptance of the principles of analytic philosophy and acceptance of the need, in technologically advanced and complex societies at least, for an administrative state of some kind. (I would want to work for one that is as democratic, respectful of civil liberties, and economically egalitarian as possible.) Formal logic allows one to see the implications of certain things being logically mutually exclusive of each other. Social regulation is required when unregulated social behavior would vitiate the possibility of meeting vital human needs. One example: regardless of the predominant mode of production, activities increasing carbon emissions need to be regulated if the planet is to be saved. The reality that certain outcomes are mutually exclusive both validates the application of formal logic of analytic philosophy in some cases, and also suggests the need for some kind of administrative state in modern and technologically complex societies. (Simpler and technologically primitive communities can regulate themselves through tradition and custom, but dynamic and differentiated technologically advanced societies require a state to regulate production. The reality that some things are indeed mutually exclusive of each other legitimates both the application of formal logic where appropriate, and the existence of the least authoritarian administrative state possible.)
My defense of analytic philosophy and analytic Marxism is not meant to undercut dialectical thinking as such, even if much analytic Marxism seems so disposed. While formal logic and mathematical methodology are indispensable, there are aspects of the world with which they seem to have trouble. While reality often takes an objective form for which analytic philosophy and mathematical representation are well fitted, there seem to be multiple instances of subjectivity that are irreducible to the objective, and therefore essentially problematic for analytical philosophy. Politics, psychoanalysis, and art have irreducibly subjective elements that make them difficult for methodologies lionized by the analytic philosopher to handle adequately. In discussing politics, art, psychoanalysis and the like, dialectical thought that recognizes the contradictory co-presence of the subjective and the objective is productive. We should recognize, I claim, that while dialectical thinkers and analytic philosophers are right to see their respective methodologies as being in serious tension, neither should dismiss or reject the other’s in toto. Maybe, as both Lukács and Adorno intimate, this tension between objectivity and subjectivity would dissipate in an emancipated society, but I tend to doubt it. |P
[1] In this issue. An earlier version of Monteiro’s article appeared as “A Dialectical-Materialist Critique of Analytical Marxism,” Nature, Society, and Thought 3, no. 2 (1990): 197–223, available online at <http://the-trusteeship.com/docs/nst032.pdf>.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?,” Marxism Today (September 1978): 279–86, available online at <https://banmarchive.org.uk/marxism-today/september-1978/the-forward-march-of-labour-halted/>.
[3] Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.
[4] André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (London: Pluto Press, 1982).
[5] See Joseph Hansen, The Leninist Strategy of Party Building: The Debate on Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979).
[6] G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
[7] Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism(London: New Left Books, 1976).
[8] Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 199–200.
[9] Ibid., 182–83.
[10] See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. ed. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978).
[11] John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
[12] Lukács, “Reification,” 197.
[13] See Timothy Williamson, Modal Logic as Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[14] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 3.
[15] Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1948), 159–60.
[16] See Erik Olin Wright, et al., The Debate On Classes (London: Verso, 1998).
[17] See Ben Burgis and Conrad B. Hamilton, “DEBATE: Should The Left Embrace China?” (2020), The Serf Times, available online at <https://youtu.be/DFkEXvYBwTg>.
[18] Socialist Workers Party (United Kingdom).
[19] See Chris Cutrone, “Ukraine: More of the same,” Platypus Review 145 (April 2022), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2022/04/01/ukraine-more-of-the-same/>.
[20] See John E. Roehmer, A Future for Socialism(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
