Alex Callinicos
Alex Callinicos
Alex Callinicos
ALEX CALLINICOS
ABSTRACT: G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (KMTH)
bears examination from the standpoint of the renewed critique
of capitalism promoted by the anti-globalization movement.
Cohen’s own current view of his book places it firmly within the
framework of rational-choice Marxism, which is characterized by
a nihilist attitude towards the entire tradition of Marxist political
economy. KMTH itself displays an ambivalent attitude towards
Capital, simultaneously basing itself on a close reading of Marx’s
economic writings and seeking to make ever more explicit
Cohen’s rejection of the labor theory of value. This results in
significant conceptual tensions, notably in Cohen’s effort sharply
to distinguish between the material and the social, but also weak-
ens KMTH’s account of the fettering of the productive forces by
capitalist relations of production. The effect — particularly when
combined with Cohen’s espousal of rational-choice Marxism — is,
regrettably, to shut him off from the current renaissance of Marx-
ist political economy.
A
SSUMING THAT ONE’S INTEREST in Marxism is more than
philological, any consideration of its theoretical foundations
must always address the familiar question of this tradition’s
capacity to help us engage with the present. Not, of course, that
Marxism’s claim to intellectual attention is reducible to whatever is
asserted about this capacity. One major contribution of Jerry Cohen’s
great work Karl Marx’s Theory of History (hereinafter KMTH) has been
to remind us of Marx’s claim to offer a general theoretical account
of the mechanisms of historical change. It is perfectly coherent to
deny that Marx is of much help in addressing the present but to find
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COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 253
deserved to perish in the long agony of the Western left during the
last decades of the 20th century. And it is a good discipline for those
who still consider themselves Marxists to have to show a new genera-
tion of activists that their tradition still has something to say to those
who want to resist capitalism, rather than to rely on a kind of taken-
for-granted equation of Marxism and anti-capitalism that was often
sustained by the influence of Stalinism in the Western workers’ move-
ment. In any case, it is here that Marxism’s capacity to speak to the
present must surely be tested: what does the tradition (or, more ac-
curately, the cluster of traditions) inaugurated by Marx have to offer
to those seeking to develop a critical understanding of capitalism in
its present forms and of the feasibility of alternatives to it?1
1 I try to offer some answers of my own in Callinicos, 2003. I am grateful to all those who
took part in the conference on KMTH for which the original version of this paper was
written, and in particular to Jerry Cohen himself. I would also like to thank Alan Carling
and Paul Wetherly for their very helpful comments on a revised version.
2 All undated references in the text are to Cohen, 2000.
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 255
Marxism is fundamentally concerned not with behaviour, but with the forces
and relations constraining and directing it. When we turn from the imme-
3 Though Roemer then and Cohen now equate rational-choice and Analytical Marxism,
my own usage reflects the fact that the latter is, in principle, broader than the former.
See, for a discussion by a leading Analytical Marxist that also resists this equation, Wright,
1994, and, for a good overview of the entire current, Roberts, 1996. It is true that Cohen
does not in the passages cited above explicitly endorse a key component of methodologi-
cal individualism, namely the rationality principle according to which individuals opti-
mize, but, since his defense of the Development Thesis relies on the assumption that
humans are “somewhat rational” (Cohen, 2000, 152), Cohen’s more recent commitment
to reducing macro-entities and processes to micro-mechanisms, together with this assump-
tion, amounts to an endorsement of rational-choice Marxism.
256 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
The difference between Elster and Cohen regarding the validity of functional
explanations is not about the importance of basing mechanisms of histori-
cal change in the rational behaviour of individuals. It is, rather, a difference
of opinion about whether one must understand the micro-mechanisms
before an event can be considered explained. (Roemer, 1986a, 6.)
Roemer, in other words, claimed that Elster and Cohen were both
committed to the reduction program implicit in the methodological
individualism that forms the core of rational-choice theory — as Elster
puts it, “the doctrine that all social phenomena — their structure and
their change — are in principle explicable in ways that only involve
individuals — their properties, their goals, their beliefs, and their
actions” (Elster, 1985. 5). The difference between them, on Roemer’s
account, came down to Cohen’s claim that functional explanations
that account for social phenomena in terms of their tendency to pro-
duce certain effects may legitimately stand in for micro-explanations
that successfully performed the required reduction and Elster’s de-
nial of this claim (a denial, incidentally, that he subsequently with-
drew: see Elster, 1986, 202–7). The significance of Cohen’s remarks
in the 2000 Introduction to KMTH cited above is that he now accepts
Roemer’s gloss on this debate. Contrary to what he affirmed in 1984,
the reduction of social phenomena to the kind of individualistic
micro-mechanisms posited by rational-choice theory is now not merely
pertinent to secondary topics in historical materialism but constitu-
tive of Analytical Marxism “in the narrow sense.”
Cohen is moreover committed to the reduction program in a very
strong sense:
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 257
It has to be said that this is pretty wild stuff. The dialectic is a red
herring, used here, fairly typically, to present Marxist critics of Ana-
lytical Marxism as practitioners of reactionary mysticism. Forget about
this: concentrate on what Cohen says about “analysis in the narrow
sense.” His commitment to it — that is, to the reduction program
implied by methodological individualism — is “absolute” and “unre-
visable” because it is “a commitment to reason itself.” Cohen offers
no argument to support this equation of reason and methodological
individualism. The closest he comes to one is when he directs the
charge of “irrationalist obscurantism” at anyone who “resist[s] analysis
in the narrow sense in the name of anti-individualist holism.” The
implication here is that anyone who opposes the reduction program
must therefore reject including any reference to individual agents and
their properties in social explanations. It is this asserted implication
that has provided the launching pad for the polemics mounted by
advocates of methodological individualism, from the late John Watkins
during the Popperian heyday in the 1950s to Elster’s proselytizing
for rational-choice Marxism in the 1980s, that accuse their opponents
of hypostatizing supra-individual social institutions and the like (see,
for example, Watkins, 1973a, 1973b).
But, of course, the implication doesn’t hold. All that rejecting
the reduction program commits one to is exactly that: that is, it com-
mits one to denying that “social phenomena . . . are in principle ex-
plicable in ways that only involve individuals.” The crucial word in
the quoted phrase is “only.” Denying what the phrase asserts does not
commit one to the claim that “social phenomena are in principle
explicable only in ways that do not involve individuals,” an assertion
that does easily lead to the acceptance of “anti-individualist holism.”
258 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
when you call what you do non-bullshit Marxism, you seem to imply that all
other Marxism is bullshit, and, therefore, that your own Marxism is uniquely
legitimate. In fact, there exists Marxism which is neither analytical nor
bullshit, but, once such (as we may designate it) pre-analytical Marxism
encounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical or
become bullshit. (xxv–xxvi.)
4 For a much more detailed analysis of the issues discussed in this and the preceding two
paragraphs, see Callinicos, 1987, ch. 2.
260 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
the claims made for analysis, particularly in the narrow sense, that
I have been subjecting to critical scrutiny. After demanding that all
versions of Marxism be assimilated to the one he favors, Cohen goes
on to discuss the difference between bullshit and dogmatism. No
one would dream of calling Cohen a bullshitter. But — on the evi-
dence provided here — he is in danger of becoming a dogmatist,
at least in respect of the primacy that he now asserts for rational-
choice Marxism.
6 Howard and King, 1992, Part IV, give a good account of the controversy from a Sraffian
perspective. For more on the relationship between rational-choice Marxism and neo-
Ricardianism, see Callinicos, 1987, ch. 2, section 4.
262 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
7 At the conference where the original version of this paper was presented Cohen told me
that he actually came to reject the LTV when he was 18 or 19; nevertheless, there does
seem to be a shift in his readiness publicly to avow this rejection between the 1972 article
and KMTH. The apparent hesitations in his treatment of the LTV in KMTH are no doubt
to some degree a function of the fact that Cohen wrote the book over a relatively pro-
tracted period (between 1965 and 1977, he said at the conference): passages probably
coexist in the final text that date from different stages in its composition and in the de-
velopment of Cohen’s views.
8 Shortly after KMTH appeared, Elster noted passages in Chapter V where Cohen in fact
presupposes the LTV: Elster, 1980, 122, citing KMTH, 116, 123, 124. Cohen responded:
“I have long thought the labor theory of value false, and I was not wishing to commit my-
self to it in expounding Marx’s theory of fetishism, which does indeed presuppose it”
(Cohen, 1980, 125).
264 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
9 See also Marx, 1976, 152, where he criticizes “the customary manner” of calling a com-
modity “both a use-value and an exchange-value,” and his comments on this passage in
the “Notes on Wagner” (Marx and Engels, 1989, 544ff).
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 265
10 For a pioneering essay that began to set these issues on the agenda, see Mepham, 1979.
Good discussions of the conceptual developments in Marx’s economic mss. will be found
in Vygodsky, 1974, Bidet, 2000 and Dussel, 2001.
266 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
11 Interestingly, Althusser criticizes the 1859 Preface for affirming a Hegelian conception
of history based on the dialectic between Form and Content (Althusser, 1995, 243–52).
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 267
forms of ground rent, and the relationship between supply and de-
mand (Rosdolsky, 1977, ch. 3).
Cohen does note that “Marx was sensitive to the interlacing of use-
value and exchange-value” (104), a theme that emerges already in the
Grundrisse, composed prior to the 1859 Contribution, though it only
becomes fully visible in Capital itself. Why, then, does he rely on the
passage from the 1859 Contribution that Marx dropped in Capital? The
Contribution might have more generally recommended itself to Cohen
(apart, of course, from the Preface that provides his reconstruction of
historical materialism with its benchmark) because, while it affirms the
LTV, discussion proceeds largely in terms of the exchange-value/use-
value opposition. The analysis of the value-form that is developed across
successive versions of Chapter 1 of Capital I is absent, and the distinc-
tion between value and exchange-value as the latter’s form of appear-
ance, while implicit in certain passages, is not explicitly drawn. This is
a respect in which one might see a connection between Cohen’s fail-
ure to consider the theoretical differences between Marx’s economic
manuscripts and his attempt to restate key Marxian concepts without
reliance on the LTV.
The main reason, however, why Cohen follows the Contribution in
excluding use-value from the domain of political economy, is no doubt
the importance that he attaches to the material/social distinction. The
trouble is that the more that one looks at the role of use-value in Capital
the harder it is to sustain the distinction in the way that he seeks to do.
One case in which use-value figures in Capital that Rosdolsky does not
discuss is that of the labor process. Though it is an essential feature of
all social formations, the labor process is analyzed in Chapter 7 of Capital
I as the capitalist process of production insofar as it involves concrete
useful labor employing means of production of a particular kind to
produce use-values. As such, it is counterposed to the production pro-
cess inasmuch as the latter is a process of valorization in which abstract
social labor creates value, and thereby surplus value for capital. Marx
explicitly treats the distinction between labor and valorization processes
as mirroring that between use-value and value: “Just as the commodity
itself is a unity formed of use-value and value, so the process of produc-
tion must be a unity, composed of the labor process and the process of
creating value [Wertbildungsprozess]” (Marx, 1976, 292).
Cohen makes extensive use of Marx’s account of the labor pro-
cess in his discussion of the productive forces in KMTH, Chapter II.
268 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
12 Cohen’s concept of the material relations of production is not identical to Marx’s con-
cept of the labor process: relations are not the same as a process. But the two are closely
related: one might take my claim in the preceding paragraph to be that material rela-
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 269
tions of production are required for any labor process to take place and therefore for the
productive forces actually to be used. For arguments that, respectively, the material rela-
tions of production and the labor process are part of the productive forces, see Suchting,
1983, 76–7 (Suchting calls the former “technical relations of production”), and Callinicos,
1987, 42–5.
270 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
Conclusion
What is the upshot of all this? In KMTH Cohen uses Capital and
its precursors as a kind of quarry for the raw material with which he
constructs what he regards as a defensible version of classical histori-
cal materialism. But the book also represented the beginning of a
process of emancipation from that tradition. Cohen has written about
the impact that writing KMTH had on his relationship to Marxism:
13 The extent to which the material/social distinction is one of art in Cohen is brought out
by a passage where he deals with the problem of “mental productive forces” (e.g., scientific
knowledge): “when we oppose the material to the social, as Marx systematically did, we may
classify mental productive forces as material, though they are of course not material in a
more familiar sense of that term” (47). Had I the necessary skill with (and faith in) the rele-
vant Lacanian concepts, I would be tempted to borrow a trick of Slavoj Z"iz'ek’s and to argue
that the material relations of production are a case of the Real, which constitutes the limit
of, and also subverts the Symbolic, or Social, order: see, for example, Z"iz'ek, 1999.
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 271
It isn’t just that — setting aside the normative work that he and
Roemer have done on egalitarian justice — rational-choice Marxism
has had nothing interesting to say about capitalism. We are currently
experiencing what looks like becoming a great renaissance of Marxist
political economy. Ignoring the preachments of rational-choice Marx-
ists, numerous researchers are using one version or other of value
theory in a vast effort to unlock the secrets of capitalism’s trajectory.
Some of them are Marxist scholars of broadly the same generation as
Cohen and me who fought their way through the value controversy of
the 1970s and who seek in different ways to continue Marx’s project in
Capital: Gérard Duménil, Ben Fine, David Harvey, and Anwar Shaikh
are examples. Others are younger researchers: for example, the Eco-
nomics Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies in
London, thanks to the efforts of Fine and his colleagues, has several of
these.16 Capital continues to be reread: collective studies of volumes I,
II and III have recently been published. Often this work is encouraged
by comparatively new Marxist journals such as Actuel Marx and Histori-
cal Materialism. All this takes place against the background of larger
debates that seek to situate what is called globalization in the secular
history of capitalism: the controversy provoked by Hardt and Negri’s
Empire is a relevant example here, though in many ways more interest-
ing are the efforts of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to bring
together a Braudelian perspective on the longue durée with more focused
economic analysis (see Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi, Silver, et al., 1999). In
this context, Brenner’s recent work is best seen, less as a rare substan-
tive study to issue from Analytical Marxism, than as one voice in this
much broader dialog among students of Marxist political economy.17
In evoking this intellectual renaissance I do not mean to suggest
that its products merit no criticism. But, precisely because of the
power of Cohen’s critical intelligence and the depth of his engage-
ment with Marx’s thought, it is a matter of great regret that his own
evolution should have, in effect, locked him out of the renewal of
Marxist political economy that is one form of the broader revival of
critiques of capitalism. Whatever Cohen’s doubts about classical
Marxism, it seems clear that he has not lost any of his hostility to capi-
16 See, for a critical survey of recent Marxist economic literature by one younger scholar,
Saad-Filho, 2002.
17 The symposium on Brenner in Historical Materialism 4 and 5 (1999) is therefore a fitting
display of the diversity of approaches in contemporary Marxist political economy.
COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 273
talism. His recent philosophical work has been of great help in clari-
fying why we should hold this economic system to be unjust. It would
be good to find ways of reconnecting this work with the continuing
critique of political economy that will bind together Marxism and
capitalism as long as the latter exists.
European Studies
King’s College, London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk
REFERENCES