Reductionism in Marxian Approach and its Critique

• In Event: 121 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Marxist Research

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of reductionism in Marxism and its critique. Reductionism has been discussed and challenged previously in the 1960–70’s return to Marx, when the economic and class reductionism turned into an explicit issue in Marxian approaches. Althusserian structural Marxism and Gramscian Marxist humanism were breaks with ‘reductionism downward,’ that is economism, where society conceived of totality expressing structural causes and economic mechanisms. At the same time, however, they conflated actors with structure in such a manner that the working class achieved a universal status in a struggle for hegemony. In a fully articulated system of differences such as in society portrayed as an articulated whole, there was no open discursive space for the articulations of the social, according to the adversaries of Althusserians such as political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As a replacement of the structural-Marxist metaphor of “base-and-superstructure,” post-Marxist discourse theory builds on flat ontology, where the hierarchical notions of ‘society’ and ‘the social’ are getting rid of, which has given way to various antagonisms other than class contradictions. At the same time, post-Marxism takes account of agency and hegemonic struggles for social change considering new social movements by means of emphasizing the actions of individuals instead of social structures. If the imagery, where society is seen to operate like language becomes literal in such a manner that it loses its metaphorical character, society reduces to a mere discussion about it, which is ‘reductionism downward’.

Author

• Matti Kortesoja, University of Tampere