Class struggle, capitalist democracy and rational choice: Przeworski's analytical theses

(2017) - Robert Looker

Journal: Social Class and Marxism
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Tags:: #paper #SocialClass #RAT
Cite Key:: [@Looker2017]

Abstract

Notes

• with the broad flow of analytical Marxism (AM) rational choice Marxist (RCM) stood out as a more sharply defined concept
• rational choice Marxists reject the classical Marxist view that class is a system of exploitation whereby capital extracts surplus value from labour in the process of production
  • Roemer in 1982 gave an account of class exploitation as a process of unequal exchange arising from the unequal distribution of property relations. Capitalist exploitation is thus equated with the distributional inequalities which flow from the unequal distirbution of wealth intrinsic to an economic order based on private ownership of wealth. Exploitation is established by reference to comparisons between existing distributional arrangements and hypothetical but feasible alternative sets of socialist property relations
• Przewarski amends Roemer on two accounts: he shifts the focus away from an emphasis on property and wealth to income distribution, and second, he rejects Roemer's view that the possibility for income distirbution are severely constrained by capitalist property relationships and adopts a view which prespecifies the constraints to allow for a much wider range of redistributed outcomes within capitalism
• the working classes are as much involved in making themselves as being made by objective conditions
  • 'classes must thus be viewed as effects of struggles structured by objective conditions that are simultaneously economic, political, and ideology 'Capitalism p.47
• the working class is as much the product of, as the precondition for, class struggle
• given that class interests are primarily concerned with matters of income distribution, there is in fact considerable space for redistribution within the constraint by the requirements of maintaining the capitalist economic system
  • interest-optimising strategies of capitalists and workers will lead them to negotiate settlements which work within those constraints
  • 'crises of capitalist are in no ones material interest' Capitalism p164
• 'democracy is the modern Bonaparte' Capitalism p143. Democracy provides the central institutional framework with which class compromises are negotiated, legitimised, executed, and enforced
• Capitalist democracy simultaneously creates conflicts over material issues and reduces conflicts to such issues Capitalism p202
• Economic theories are rationalisations of the political interests of conflicting classes and groups
  • democratic control over the level of unemployment and the distribution of income became the terms of compromise that made democratic capitalist possible p206
• reforms would lead to socialism if and only if they were 1) irreversible, 2) cumulative in effects, 3) conducive to new reforms, and 4) directed towards socialism... so far at least they have not
• even if some feasible socialist alternatives were available workers would be rational to reject them; the transition to socialism would threaten the economic gains they had achieved within the class compromises achieved by democratic capitalism
• people choose to act the way they do, not because they are externally compelled or internally socialised so to do but because, given their situation, it is the most rational course of action open to them
  • a historically sensitive analysis of human rationality needs to get beyond the utilitarian dualisms of personally chosen and ultimately arbitrary ends and 'interest-optimising' means to also embrace criterion of morality