The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists. The combination of private ownership of the instruments of production with representative political institutions based on widespread suffrage constitutes a compromise between workers, who consent to the private appropriation of profit by owners of capital, and capitalists, who accept the democratic institutions through which workers can make effective claims for an improvement of their material conditions. This form of societal organization was con

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400186952

The structure of class conflict in democratic capitalist societies

Behavioral models in economic geography, and even in Marxist social science, are increasingly dominated by the postulate of the rational actor. Three parables are intimately associated with the rational choice model: that individual action dictates a social organization of maximum benefit to all individual members of society; that rational choices have rational consequences; and that self-interested individual behavior dominates collective action (the free rider problem). The first parable has been logically negated by Marxian applications of the rational choice model, but the second and third parables are not questioned by Marxist work. If the presumption that the rational actor can be abstracted from his/her geographical context is rejected, however, the second and third parables are also fundamentally challenged. Rational economic choices made in a spatially differentiated but integrated economy can lead to actions that have the unintended consequence of undermining the very intentions those actions were supposed to realize. Rational actions need not have rational consequences in a space economy. The places in which everyday life is constituted provide all the conditions necessary for denying the general validity of the assumptions that legitimize the free rider argument.

Is There a Place for the Rational Actor? A Geographical Critique of the Rational Choice Paradigm

The Microeconomics of Conflict and Hierarchy in Capitalist Production

the 1890s: a deliberate thrust to impose the monopoly of the economic method over all study of society. According to neo-classical economists, everything that happens falls into two categories: economic phenomena and seemingly noneconomic phenomena. The challenge of methodological individualism is not directed specifically to Marxism; it defies equally all that used to be called political science, sociology, anthropology, or social psychology. Karl Marx’s concept &dquo;relations of production&dquo; is exposed to the same challenge as Georg Simmel’s &dquo;shared social a priori,&dquo; Emile Durkheim’s &dquo;collective consciousness,&dquo; and Talcott Parsons’s &dquo;value orientations&dquo;: the challenge to provide microfoundations for social phenomena, specifically, to ground all theory of society in goal-oriented, rational actions,of individuals.1 This offensive has been quite successful. The intellectual influence of social psychology-the queen of social sciences twenty years ago-has vanished almost completely. The functionalist school, both its psychological and structural aspects, has lost its dominance over sociology. The &dquo;public choice&dquo; approach reigns over political science. Even Marxism, which during the 1950s and 1960s used to hide in the

Marxism and Rational Choice

Home ownership and working class unity

(1979). A Note on Collective Action, Marxism, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 751-761.

Matthew Edel

Papers

A Note on Collective Action, Marxism, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma