Instrumental Marxism

Short description: Marxist theory

"Elite model" redirects here. For the agency, see Elite Model.

Part of a series on

Marxism

Theoretical works

* Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844

* Theses on Feuerbach
* The German Ideology
* Wage Labour and Capital
* The Communist Manifesto
* The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon

* Grundrisse der Kritik
der Politischen Ökonomie

* A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy

* Das Kapital
* Critique of the Gotha Program
* Dialectics of Nature
* The State and Revolution

Philosophy

* Economic determinism
* Historical materialism
* Marx's dialectic
* Marx's method
* Philosophy of nature

Economics

* Capital (accumulation)
* Crisis theory
* Commodity
* Exploitation
* Factors of production
* Means of labor
* Means of production
* Mode of production
* Asiatic
* Capitalist
* Socialist
* Law of value
* Productive forces
* Scientific socialism
* Surplus product
* Surplus value
* Value-form
* Wage labor

Sociology

* Alienation
* Base and superstructure
* Bourgeoisie
* Class
* Class consciousness
* Class struggle
* Classless society
* Commodity fetishism
* Communist society
* Cultural hegemony
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Exploitation
* Free association
* General intellect
* Human nature
* Ideology
* Immiseration
* Lumpenproletariat
* Metabolic rift
* Proletariat
* Private property
* Relations of production
* Reification
* State Theory
* Social metabolism
* Working class

History

* Anarchism and Marxism
* Philosophy in the Soviet Union
* Primitive accumulation
* Proletarian revolution
* Proletarian internationalism
* World revolution
* Young Marx

Aspects

* Aesthetics
* Archaeology
* Criminology
* Feminism
* Film theory
* Geography
* Historiography
* Literary criticism
* Marxism and religion

Variants

* Analytical
* Austro
* Budapest School
* Classical
* Democratic socialism
* Eurocommunism
* Frankfurt School
* Freudian
* Hegelian
* Humanist
* Impossibilism
* Instrumental
* Libertarian
* Autonomism
* Council communism
* De Leonism
* Left communism
* Bordigism
* Leninism
* Marxism–Leninism
* Maoism
* Trotskyism
* Neo-Gramscianism
* Neo-
* Neue Marx-Lektüre
* Open
* Orthodox
* Political
* Post-
* Revisionist
* Praxis School
* Social democracy
* Structural
* Western

People

* Karl Marx
* Engels
* Bebel
* Bernstein
* De Leon
* Kautsky
* Eleanor Marx
* Debs
* Hardie
* Plekhanov
* Zetkin
* Gorky
* Connolly
* Lenin
* Luxemburg
* Liebknecht
* Kollontai
* Pannekoek
* Stalin
* Trotsky
* Borochov
* Lukács
* Korsch
* Gramsci
* Benjamin
* Mao
* Horkheimer
* Ibárruri
* Reich
* Aragon
* Brecht
* Marcuse
* Fromm
* Lefebvre
* Adorno
* Sartre
* Rubel
* Beauvoir
* Allende
* Dunayevskaya
* Mills
* Hobsbawm
* Althusser
* Pasolini
* Zinn
* Miliband
* Parenti
* Bauman
* Guevara
* Castro
* Debord
* Fanon
* Harvey
* Wolff
* Sankara
* Žižek
* Varoufakis
* Ho

Related topics

* Critical theory
* Criticism of Marxism
* Communism
* History of communism
* Left-wing politics
* Old Left
* New Left
* Social anarchism
* Anarcho-communism
* Socialism
* Libertarian
* Revolutionary
* Utopian

Related categories

Category Karl Marx not found

*   *   *

* v
* t
* e

Instrumental Marxism, also elite analysis[1] or elite model,[2] is a theory which reasons that policy makers in government and positions of power tend to "share a common business or class background, and that their decisions will reflect their business or class interests".[3] It perceives the role of the state as more personal than impersonal, where actions such as nepotism and favoritism are common among those in power, and as a result of this, the shared backgrounds between the economic elite and the state elite are discernible.

## Overview

The theory argues that due to the high concentration of wealth within the State that the actions of State actors seek to secure and increase their wealth by passing policies that benefit the economically superior class. It is also noted that businessmen-become-politicians who have a say in policy making “are not very likely, all the same, to find much merit in policies which appear to run counter to what they conceive to be in the interests of business.”[4] Instrumental Marxism tends to view the state and law as ultimately an instrument or tool for individuals of the economically dominant class to use for their own purposes, particularly maintaining economic exploitation while promoting ideological assent to their hegemony.[citation needed]

Instrumental Marxism is contrasted with structural Marxism, which views the class background of policymakers and so on as purely incidental to the "bourgeois" nature of the modern state, which is seen instead as a result of the position of the state and law in the objective structure of capitalist society and their objective (i.e. consciousness-independent) function of reproducing the relations of production and private property regardless of the class background of the individuals involved in the administration thereof.[5] For example, whereas for instrumentalist Marxists the formal equality of contract law in capitalist societies is a kind of ideological shell or mystification used by the elite to conceal the real kernel of exploitation, for structural Marxists that formal legal equality is itself the real normative basis for properly capitalist exploitation, whether or not elites understand it as such as it allows labour-power to be traded at its real exchange-value (though not the value of its product), thus making regularity and rational allocation in labour markets possible.[6] However, Miliband acknowledges that "there are ‘structural constraints which no government, whatever its complexion, wishes, and promises, can ignore or evade."

In the framework of the structure and agency debate in sociology, Instrumental Marxism is an agent-centred view emphasizing the decisions of policymakers, where the relevant agents are either individual elites, a section of the ruling class, or the class as a whole whereas structural Marxism is a structural view in which individuals are no more than the bearers of certain objective structural relations.[citation needed]

The British sociologist and Marxist author Ralph Miliband is often considered the main proponent of this theory, however some dispute this.[7][8] Miliband's proposal of a Marxist theory of the State, in his book The State in Capitalist Society was famously criticised by Nicos Poulantzas which led to the Miliband–Poulantzas debate: a debate between instrumental Marxism and structural Marxism.[9] Karl Kautsky is also an instrumental, orthodox marxist.

## See also

* Classical Marxism
* Elite theory
* Miliband–Poulantzas debate

## References

1. ↑ Joshua S. Goldstein, Sandra Whitworth, International Relations, Pearson Longman, 2005, p. 147.
2. ↑ , p. .
3. ↑ Goldstein, Joshua S. (2004). Whitworth, Sandra. ed. International Relations (Canadian ed.). Toronto: Pearson Education. p. 147.
4. ↑ Miliband, Ralph (1969). The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books. https://b-ok.cc/book/2494827/c8677c. Retrieved 2021-02-01.
5. ↑ Poulantzas, Nicos (November–December 1969). "The Problem of the Capitalist State". New Left Review 1 (58).
6. ↑ Poulantzas, Nicos (2008). "Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the Alternative". in Martin, James. The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State. London: Verso.
7. ↑ Schulman, Jason (August 2019). "Miliband and the State" (in en-US). https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/leo-panitch-ralph-miliband-the-state-in-capitalist-society-socialism.
8. ↑ Barrow, Clyde W. (2008), Wetherly, Paul; Barrow, Clyde W.; Burnham, Peter, eds., "Ralph Miliband and the Instrumentalist Theory of the State: The (Mis)Construction of an Analytic Concept" (in en), Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph Miliband (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK): pp. 84–108, doi:10.1057/9780230592704_5, ISBN 978-0-230-59270-4
9. ↑ Encyclopedia of power. Keith M. Dowding. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. 2011. pp. 416–417. ISBN 978-1-4522-6641-1. OCLC 710790954.

0.00

(0 votes)

|

Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Social:Instrumental_Marxism&oldid=4185669"
*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template