Thus what made Elster’s attack so forceful was not the accusation of objective teleology in Marxist theory, but rather the suggestion that much of Marxian “class analysis” overlooked the potential for collective action problems among the various world-historical actors. Consider, for example, the familiar claim that capitalists retain a “reserve army of the unemployed” in order to depress wages. This means that individual capitalists must stop hiring new workers at a point where marginal benefit