What Happened When Marxists Declared War on Bullshit?
The secret club that hated nonsense
It began with a joke. In 1979, a handful of academics met in London to talk about exploitation, a core Marxist idea. They soon started an annual workshop and gave themselves a rude nickname: the “Non-Bullshit Marxism Group.” They even made a fake coat of arms with a Latin motto: Marxism without the shit of the bull.
The three founders—G.A. Cohen (1941–2009), Jon Elster (born 1940), and John Roemer (born 1945)—wanted to rescue Marxism from what they saw as a swamp of impressive-sounding but empty words. Their movement became known as Analytical Marxism.
These thinkers didn’t reject Marx’s big concerns—exploitation, class, history, and the flaws of capitalism. But they did reject what they called bullshit Marxism: writing that promised deep insights but was so vague you couldn’t pin it down, test it, or even figure out what it meant.
Cohen had a vivid memory from his student days. He had tried hard to read the French Marxist Louis Althusser and his followers. The texts seemed important, but they were impossibly murky. Whenever Cohen finally pulled a reasonable idea out of the fog, he felt it must be brilliant—because he had worked so hard to get it. Later he realized he’d been tricked: the writing was obscure, not profound. His response was a “fierce intolerance” of unclarifiable talk.
That intolerance became the soul of Analytical Marxism. They would use whatever tools worked—logic, math, mainstream economics, careful argument—to examine Marxism piece by piece, keeping what was sound and tossing what was bull.
Marxism with a cleanup crew
Analytical Marxists made a simple but bold separation. They took their methods—the tools for thinking—from non-Marxist traditions: the sharp logic of Anglo-American philosophy, the mathematical models of neoclassical economics, and the rational‑choice theories of political science. The substance—the big topics they cared about—came straight from Marx: class, historical change, exploitation, and the hope for a better society.
This broke with traditional Marxism in an important way. Many older Marxists believed there was a special “Marxist method” (often called dialectic) that was unique, valuable, and unavailable to non‑Marxists. The analytics said no. They claimed that rejecting mainstream methods had only hurt Marxism’s ability to understand its own ideas.
Cohen, for instance, applied the careful, word‑by‑word style of philosophy to Marx’s theory of history. Elster brought decision theory and the study of individual choices. Roemer rebuilt Marxist economics using the very general‑equilibrium models that mainstream economists use.
They all agreed on one thing: there is no secret Marxist way of thinking that outsiders can’t learn. If a method is good, anyone can use it.
Inside the group, disagreements were fierce. They fought over whether large‑scale social explanations could be boiled down to the actions of individuals (methodological individualism), and whether it was okay to explain something by the way it functions in a system (functional explanation). But those fights were themselves a sign of the analytical spirit: you argue clearly, demand reasons, and don’t hide behind jargon.
The puzzle of historical dominoes
Marx believed that human history is driven by the growth of our productive power—tools, skills, technology, and knowledge. Societies rise and fall depending on whether their economic structures help that growth or hold it back. In Cohen’s famous book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), he reconstructed this theory with painstaking clarity.
Cohen said that Marx’s explanation uses functional explanation. In biology, we say “birds have hollow bones because hollow bones help flight.” The fact that something has a helpful effect explains why it exists. Cohen argued that Marx explained economic structures in the same way: feudalism lasted as long as it helped develop the productive forces; when it started blocking progress, it was replaced by capitalism.
Elster strongly disagreed. He insisted that functional explanations are only acceptable if you can show the actual mechanism—the cogs and wheels—that makes the effect happen. Without that, he said, you have a black box that looks like an explanation but isn’t really one.
Cohen replied that Darwin’s theory of hollow bones was already a good explanation long before scientists understood the genetic details. Marx’s theory, he suggested, might be at a similarly early stage. The debate was never fully settled, but it shows something crucial: the analytical Marxists refused to let big claims go unchecked.
When is taking advantage wrong?
Exploitation is a central charge in Marxism: under capitalism, workers create value, but capitalists take part of it. Analytical Marxists wanted to know exactly what makes exploitation wrong, and whether you even need Marx’s complicated labour theory of value to prove it.
Cohen offered the Plain Argument. Workers create the product (the thing that has value). Capitalists take some of that value. Workers get back less than they create. That, Cohen said, is what really bugs people—the labour theory of value is just a detour.
But why is that taking wrong? Roemer built a mathematical model using game theory. Imagine a society where workers could leave with their fair share of all property. In Roemer’s test, if the workers would be better off and the capitalists worse off, then the workers are exploited. But Roemer said exploitation isn’t automatically unjust—it depends on whether the original distribution of property was fair. If a capitalism started from a perfectly just starting point, some exploitation might be okay. Many found that conclusion startling and too weak.
Another approach uses a famous thought experiment: the pit case. A person falls into a pit. You can pull them out easily, but you demand a million dollars or a sweatshop labor contract in return. Most people feel that is wrongfully exploitative, even if you don’t know how the person ended up in the pit. The wrongness seems to be about taking advantage of someone’s vulnerability—and, some add, using power over them in a way that dominates them.
Analytical Marxists didn’t all agree which account was best. But they transformed exploitation from a slogan into a precise debate about fairness, vulnerability, and power.
Coupon socialism and cash for everyone
Analytical Marxists didn’t just criticize capitalism; they tried to design realistic alternatives. Roemer created a model called coupon socialism. Every citizen receives an equal pile of coupons that can only be used to buy shares in public companies. Those shares pay dividends in real dollars. You can’t sell coupons for cash or pass them on as inheritance. The result is a stock market without a capitalist class—profits go to everyone.
Around the same time, Philippe Van Parijs (born 1951) championed the idea of a basic income: a regular cash payment to every individual, with no strings attached, whether you work or not. He argued it wasn’t just fair but a path toward “real freedom”—the genuine ability to live life on your own terms without being crushed by poverty or joblessness.
He even sketched a “capitalist road to communism”: if basic income slowly rose over time, we might reach Marx’s ideal of distributing according to need without ever having a state takeover of all industry. The debate over that idea was heated. Could we really skip the whole socialist stage? Would people still work enough? The discussions forced everyone to think hard about what a good society really requires.
Why fighting bullshit still matters
The analytical Marxists didn’t “win” in any simple way. Some members drifted away from Marxism entirely. Elster eventually said that once the bullshit was removed, not much Marxism was left. Others kept refining their theories, working on racism and inequality, and building bridges to other radical traditions.
But the movement left a lasting lesson. It showed that you can care deeply about justice, equality, and changing the world—and still demand that every claim be crystal clear. You can love big ideas and still break them apart to see if they hold up.
That’s a habit worth keeping, whether you’re reading a political pamphlet, a friend’s grand theory of the universe, or a video with a very fancy voice. When someone says something that sounds profound but you can’t quite catch its meaning, you’re allowed to ask: “Can you say that again in simpler words?” If it can’t be clarified, it might just be bullshit.
Think about it
- If a friend gave you a long, confusing explanation for why they deserve the larger half of a shared cookie, would you ask them to explain it more clearly? What if they said, “It’s too complex to put simply”?
- Could an economic system be fair if everyone started with the same share of company ownership, even if some people work harder than others?
- When you hear a fancy, complicated idea, how can you tell whether it’s genuinely deep or just sounds deep?
