A Japanese Contribution to the Critique of Rational Choice Marxism
Author(s)
Westra, Richard
Abstract
Rational Choice Marxism (RCM) has staked out what appears to be an innovative research territory in a field of recent reconstitutive endeavors in Marxist theory. Engaging neoclassical economics with its attendant “tool-box,” and committed to what are supposed to be widely accepted (“bourgeois”) norms of scientific inquiry, RCM is bent on radically updating Marxism for late twentieth-century academic consumption. Precisely because of the means it deploys in its mission, however, RCM has been the subject of a series of scathing critiques. In part, this article may be taken as a contribution to that effort, though ultimately it involves much more. The intention of this paper is to contribute to the critique of RCM from the standpoint of a genuine alternative paradigm.
