Analytical Marxism is an academic school of Marxist theory which emerged in the late 1970s, largely prompted by G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978). In this book, Cohen drew on the Anglo–American tradition of analytic philosophy in an attempt to align Marxist theory with an analytic style and standard, which led to his distancing of Marxism from continental European philosophy. Analytical Marxism rejects much of the Hegelian and dialectical tradition associated with Marx's thought.

The school is associated with the "September Group", which included Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski and Erik Olin Wright. This group initially also playfully called themselves No Bullshit Marxist. Its theorists emphasize methodology and utilize analytical philosophy, and some of them favor rational choice theory, game theory and methodological individualism (the doctrine that all social phenomena can only be explained in terms of the actions and beliefs of individual subjects).

Cohen's book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), in which he attempts to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defence of Marx's materialist conception of history, is generally regarded as having started the analytical Marxist approach.

Analytical Marxism can be defined as 'an attempt to reconstruct the philosophical and theoretical legacy of Marxism using the tools of contemporary analytical philosophy and empirical social science.' This intellectual current emerged in the late 1970s within the Anglo-American academic sphere and developed around key figures such as Gerald A. Cohen, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright, Jon Elster, and Adam Przeworski. They emphasized logical rigor and empirical testability, rejecting vague concepts and metaphorical expressions. To this end, they actively incorporated the methods of analytical philosophy as well as contemporary social science approaches such as mathematical modeling, game theory, and micro-level choice theory. In the process, core theses of traditional Marxism such as the labor theory of value, historical inevitability, and the base-superstructure schema were significantly criticized, revised, or abandoned.

For Cohen, Marx's historical materialism is a technologically deterministic theory, in which the economic relations of production are functionally explained by the material forces of production, and in which the political and legal institutions (the "superstructure") are functionally explained by the relations of production (the "base").^{[dubious – discuss]}

The transition from one mode of production to another is driven by the tendency of the productive forces to develop. Cohen's accounts for this tendency by reference to the rational character of the human species: where there is the opportunity to adopt a more productive technology and thus reduce the burden of labour, human beings will tend to take it.

At the same time as Cohen was working on Karl Marx's Theory of History, the American economist John Roemer was employing neoclassical economics to defend the Marxist concepts of exploitation and class. In his A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), Roemer employed rational choice and game theory to demonstrate how exploitation and class relations may arise in the development of a market for labour. Roemer would go on to reject the necessity of the labour theory of value to explain exploitation and class. Value was in principle capable of being explained in terms of any class of commodity inputs, such as oil, wheat, etc., rather than being exclusively explained by embodied labour power. Roemer was led to the conclusion that exploitation and class were thus generated not in the sphere of production but of market exchange. Significantly, as a purely technical category, exploitation did not always imply a moral wrong (see § Justice theory and Normative philosophy below). He consequently recommends that Marxists should drop their traditional focus on the micro level of the relationship between classes in production, and attend rather to the macro level of the distribution structure of property in society.

By the mid-1980s, "analytical Marxism" was being recognized as a "paradigm".^{[page needed]} The September Group had been meeting for several years, and a succession of texts by its members were published. Several of these appeared under the imprint of Cambridge University Press's series Studies in Marxism and Social Theory, including Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx (1985) and Adam Przeworski's Capitalism and Social Democracy (1985). Among the most methodologically controversial were these two authors, and Roemer, due to their use of rational-actor models. Not all analytical Marxists are rational-choice Marxists, however.^{[page needed]}