Behavioral Marxism I: Collective Action

Conßict is of course central to Marxian economics. Consistent with Marx and Engels’ (1848, 3) belief that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” most, but not all, of the conßict described involves classes, either “fundamental” or “subsumed” (Resnick and Wolff 1982). Some of it involves individuals, however, on one or both sides, often in different “class positions” but sometimes not. That is, the capitalists and workers who animate Marx’s economics can, and do, pursue both individual and collective interests. The individual worker is sometimes in conßict with other workers, sometimes with individual capitalists and sometimes, either alone or with other workers, with capitalists as a class. There is of course nothing wrong with this per se. As even staunch critics (Olson 1965), for example) acknowledge, common interests do, from time to time, produce common action: strikes sometimes succeed, and revolutions sometimes occur. If there is an “agency problem” (Matthews 2000a) in Marxian economics, it is a contextual, rather than universal, one. Furthermore, the co-existence of individual and collective actors, assumed or otherwise, was once not unusual, even outside the Marxian tradition. Rosner (1998) reminds us, for example, that this was also a feature of the “historical school” and, on this basis, identiÞes Marx as a German, rather than British, economist. There are also antecedents in the British classical tradition, however: Ricardians, for example, tended to rationalize the maintenance, until 1846, of the Corn Laws as an expression of landowners’ collective interest. As an historical matter, then, Olson (1965, 102) related claim that the Marxian model