Marxisme et théorie de l’équilibre. A propos de la reconstruction de John Roemer

Can Marx's thought be reconstructed from the neoclassical equilibrium theory? John Roemer tried to answer such a question. Together with several academics, including G.A. Cohen and Jon Elster, he was a major actor of Analytical Marxism, mainly during the 1980s. His main contribution to the debate focused on economics, and he is a central protagonist of "Neo-classical Marxism" or "Rational Choice Marxism". For Roemer Marx's intellectual tools date back more than a century and they are not adapted to the contemporary social science; Marx's theory, and particularly its economic foundations, must break away from the idea that it has a methodological peculiarity. Hence he aims to reach conclusions that are close to Marx in using different methodological tools, especially hypothetical-deductive reasoning. His research program is based on the neoclassical theory of equilibrium and it aims to establish that the Marxian economic theory can be built on microeconomic foundations. We will see how Roemer, after deconstructing the labour theory of value and refuting the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, proposes to reconstruct the Marxian theory of exploitation on the basis of game theory, of optimizing behaviors and of the equilibrium theory. We shall discuss the consistency and the relevance of this approach, especially in focusing on the difficulty that Roemer's results put on the assumption of a theoretical unity of the Marxian theory, and we will wonder either what is questioned is Marx's theory or the possibility to associate it to equilibrium theory's tools.