5 - Marxist theories of power and empirical research

Summary

I would like to make two assumptions in this chapter that are, I believe, somewhat unusual in the discussion of the Marxist theory of the organization of power. The first is a positivist assumption, that the principal interesting question about the Marxist approach to power is whether or not it is true. The second is the assumption of arrogance, that what the Marxists need is a course in elementary empirical methods.

Given these assumptions, I want to address three principal questions about how to do Marxist research on the ruling class. The first has to do with variations in the mode of production. My argument will be that, just as the Marxist study of the response of workers (say, worker alienation or the strike rate) depends on an analysis of the mode of production (that mode's political and ideological requirements, its authority system, its property system, and its technical organization), so also rulers derive their ideology from their work life, and different modes of production produce different kinds of rulers. This is, of course, a belief that Marx expressed at great length. My proposal is that we find out whether it is true, instead of mixing up all capitalist thought into a gray dough of ‘monopoly capitalism.’