Alex Callinicos

252 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

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Science & Society, Vol. 70, No. 2, April 2006, 252–274

252

G. A. Cohen and the Critiqueof Political Economy

ALEX CALLINICOS

ABSTRACT: G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (KMTH)bears examination from the standpoint of the renewed critiqueof capitalism promoted by the anti-globalization movement.Cohen’s own current view of his book places it firmly within theframework of rational-choice Marxism, which is characterized bya nihilist attitude towards the entire tradition of Marxist politicaleconomy. KMTH itself displays an ambivalent attitude towardsCapital, simultaneously basing itself on a close reading of Marx’seconomic writings and seeking to make ever more explicitCohen’s rejection of the labor theory of value. This results insignificant conceptual tensions, notably in Cohen’s effort sharplyto distinguish between the material and the social, but also weak-ens KMTH’s account of the fettering of the productive forces bycapitalist relations of production. The effect — particularly whencombined with Cohen’s espousal of rational-choice Marxism — is,regrettably, to shut him off from the current renaissance of Marx-ist political economy.

ASSUMING THAT ONE’S INTEREST in Marxism is more thanphilological, any consideration of its theoretical foundationsmust always address the familiar question of this tradition’s

capacity to help us engage with the present. Not, of course, thatMarxism’s claim to intellectual attention is reducible to whatever isasserted about this capacity. One major contribution of Jerry Cohen’sgreat work Karl Marx’s Theory of History (hereinafter KMTH) has beento remind us of Marx’s claim to offer a general theoretical accountof the mechanisms of historical change. It is perfectly coherent todeny that Marx is of much help in addressing the present but to find

COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 253

him — or at least the intellectual tradition he founded — indispens-able in unravelling, say, the mysteries of Byzantine history. Some suchdevice has no doubt helped many Marxist scholars to keep going overthe past 25 years.

All the same, the problem of Marx’s relation to the present seemsinescapable. It has certainly survived all the efforts to bury him po-litically and intellectually since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whateverone thinks of Jacques Derrida’s attempt to recruit Marx to his haunto-logical speculations in Spectres of Marx, Marx has certainly proved avery hard ghost to lay. The main reason is pretty obvious. Capitalism— certainly in the neoliberal form that supposedly triumphed withthe collapse of the Stalinist regimes — has become, with remarkablespeed, an object of contestation once again. The most visible evidenceof this shift is provided by the emergence since the Seattle protestsof November 1999 of a movement that has many names — the anti-globalization movement, the anti-capitalist movement, the globaljustice movement, the movement for another globalization — butone definite target, neoliberalism.

The revival of protest has been accompanied by the re-emergenceof critiques of capitalism — most famously Naomi Klein’s No Logo —and, interestingly, more recently by the appearance of attempts tospell out programmatic alternatives — for example, Michael Albert’sParecon and George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent. There has, in otherwords, been a rediscovery of Marx’s main subject, the critique ofpolitical economy. Yet — by comparison with the last great wave ofradicalization in the 1960s and 1970s — it is striking how relativelymarginal an intellectual reference point Marx himself is today. Someversion of Marxism, however bizarre or bowdlerized, was the naturalterminus point of the individual political itineraries taken by hun-dreds of thousands of young people at the end of the 1960s. Now,however, if Marxism figures in the intellectual fare of their counter-parts today it is most likely in the extremely abstract and eccentricversion offered by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in their celebratedbook Empire, a work that generally seeks to disavow a connection withanything resembling Marxist orthodoxy.

This state of affairs is easy enough to explain: its roots surely liein the crisis of Marxism and indeed more generally of the traditionalleft that set in during the second half of the 1970s. The present situ-ation is far from being an unhealthy one. There was much that


deserved to perish in the long agony of the Western left during thelast decades of the 20th century. And it is a good discipline for thosewho still consider themselves Marxists to have to show a new genera-tion of activists that their tradition still has something to say to thosewho want to resist capitalism, rather than to rely on a kind of taken-for-granted equation of Marxism and anti-capitalism that was oftensustained by the influence of Stalinism in the Western workers’ move-ment. In any case, it is here that Marxism’s capacity to speak to thepresent must surely be tested: what does the tradition (or, more ac-curately, the cluster of traditions) inaugurated by Marx have to offerto those seeking to develop a critical understanding of capitalism inits present forms and of the feasibility of alternatives to it?1

Analysis and Dogmatism

It is in the light of this question that I intend to assess KMTH. Buthow does Cohen himself now judge the overall significance of hisproject? In the Introduction to the 2000 edition of KMTH, he distin-guishes broad and narrow senses of the term “Analytical Marxism”:“analytical thinking, in the broad sense of ‘analytical,’ is opposed toso-called ‘dialectical’ thinking, and analytical thinking, in the narrowsense of ‘analytical,’ is opposed to what might be called ‘holistic’ think-ing” (xvii).2 Cohen offers very little elaboration about Analytical Marx-ism in the broad sense, beyond the assertion that “belief in dialectic asa rival to analysis thrives only in an atmosphere of unclear thought”(xxiii). He does say rather more about the narrower version:

In that narrower sense the analyticalness of analytical Marxism is its dispo-sition to explain molar phenomena by reference to the micro-constituentsand micro-mechanisms that respectively compose the entities and underliethe processes which occur at a grosser level of resolution. . . . Insofar asanalytical Marxists are analytical in this narrower sense, they reject the pointof view in which social formations and classes are depicted as entities obey-ing laws of behaviour that are not a function of the behaviours of their con-stituent parts. (xxiii.)

1 I try to offer some answers of my own in Callinicos, 2003. I am grateful to all those whotook part in the conference on KMTH for which the original version of this paper waswritten, and in particular to Jerry Cohen himself. I would also like to thank Alan Carlingand Paul Wetherly for their very helpful comments on a revised version.

2 All undated references in the text are to Cohen, 2000.


This characterization of Analytical Marxism is more or less identicalto that made by John Roemer in the influential 1986 collection heedited. Here too we have, on the one hand, a disparaging dismissalof any attempt to ascribe to Marxism a dialectical method — “Theyoga of Marxism is ‘dialectics’” — and, on the other hand, the equa-tion of analytical and rational-choice Marxism: “What Marxists mustprovide are explanations of mechanisms, at the micro-level, for thephenomena they claim come about for teleological reasons” (Roemer,1986b, 191, 192).3 Roemer offered a particularly interesting gloss onthe exchanges between Cohen and Jon Elster over the place of func-tional explanations in historical materialism. Perhaps the single mostbrilliant argument in KMTH was Cohen’s use of an analysis of func-tional explanations — where a phenomenon is explained by its ten-dency to bring about certain effects — to reconcile the explanatoryprimacy of both the productive forces over production relations andthe base over the superstructure with the effects that, respectively,relations have on forces and the superstructure has on the base. Elsteroffered a dual critique, arguing that a functional explanation is incom-plete unless it specifies the mechanism connecting the phenomenonin question with the tendency that (according to the explanation)accounts for its existence, and proposing a reconstruction of Marx-ism on the basis of rational-choice theory, and more specifically gametheory. Cohen in response denied that functional explanations areso incomplete: they invite, but do not require elaborations that specifyan appropriate mechanism. He also insisted that game-theoreticalexplanations address phenomena — the behavior of social actors —that cover ground “near, but not quite at, the heart of historicalmaterialism”:

Marxism is fundamentally concerned not with behaviour, but with the forcesand 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 Cohendoes 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 thathumans are “somewhat rational” (Cohen, 2000, 152), Cohen’s more recent commitmentto reducing macro-entities and processes to micro-mechanisms, together with this assump-tion, amounts to an endorsement of rational-choice Marxism.


diacy of class conflict to its long-term outcome game theory provides noassistance, because that outcome, for historical materialism, is governed bya dialectic of forces and relations of production that is background to classbehaviour, and not explicable in terms of it. (Cohen, 1989a, 104, 96–7; seealso Cohen, 1988, 15–16, and Elster, 1980 and 1989.)

So both Elster and Cohen counterposed the latter’s use of functionalexplanation to recapture the fundamental claims of historical mate-rialism to the alternative of relying on rational-choice theory. In hiscomments on the controversy, Roemer sought to displace this oppo-sition, and to incorporate the debate about functional explanationswithin rational-choice Marxism:

The difference between Elster and Cohen regarding the validity of functionalexplanations is not about the importance of basing mechanisms of histori-cal change in the rational behaviour of individuals. It is, rather, a differenceof opinion about whether one must understand the micro-mechanismsbefore an event can be considered explained. (Roemer, 1986a, 6.)

Roemer, in other words, claimed that Elster and Cohen were bothcommitted to the reduction program implicit in the methodologicalindividualism that forms the core of rational-choice theory — as Elsterputs it, “the doctrine that all social phenomena — their structure andtheir change — are in principle explicable in ways that only involveindividuals — their properties, their goals, their beliefs, and theiractions” (Elster, 1985. 5). The difference between them, on Roemer’saccount, came down to Cohen’s claim that functional explanationsthat account for social phenomena in terms of their tendency to pro-duce certain effects may legitimately stand in for micro-explanationsthat 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 remarksin the 2000 Introduction to KMTH cited above is that he now acceptsRoemer’s gloss on this debate. Contrary to what he affirmed in 1984,the reduction of social phenomena to the kind of individualisticmicro-mechanisms posited by rational-choice theory is now not merelypertinent 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 verystrong sense:


Now, the commitment of analytical Marxists to the constitutive techniquesof analytical Marxism is absolute: our belief in the power of analysis, bothin its broad and in its narrow sense, is unrevisable. And our commitment toMarxist theses (as opposed to our commitment to socialist values) is notabsolute in the way that the commitment to analytical technique is. Thecommitment to the technique, so we should claim, reflects nothing less thana commitment to reason itself. It is a refusal to relax the demand for clearstatement and rigorous argument. We believe it is irrationalist obscurantismto resist analytical reasoning, to resist analysis in the broad sense in the nameof dialectic, and to resist analysis in the narrow sense in the name of anti-individualist holism. (xxiv.)

It has to be said that this is pretty wild stuff. The dialectic is a redherring, used here, fairly typically, to present Marxist critics of Ana-lytical Marxism as practitioners of reactionary mysticism. Forget aboutthis: concentrate on what Cohen says about “analysis in the narrowsense.” His commitment to it — that is, to the reduction programimplied by methodological individualism — is “absolute” and “unre-visable” because it is “a commitment to reason itself.” Cohen offersno argument to support this equation of reason and methodologicalindividualism. The closest he comes to one is when he directs thecharge of “irrationalist obscurantism” at anyone who “resist[s] analysisin the narrow sense in the name of anti-individualist holism.” Theimplication here is that anyone who opposes the reduction programmust therefore reject including any reference to individual agents andtheir properties in social explanations. It is this asserted implicationthat has provided the launching pad for the polemics mounted byadvocates of methodological individualism, from the late John Watkinsduring the Popperian heyday in the 1950s to Elster’s proselytizingfor rational-choice Marxism in the 1980s, that accuse their opponentsof hypostatizing supra-individual social institutions and the like (see,for example, Watkins, 1973a, 1973b).

But, of course, the implication doesn’t hold. All that rejectingthe 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 inthe quoted phrase is “only.” Denying what the phrase asserts does notcommit one to the claim that “social phenomena are in principleexplicable only in ways that do not involve individuals,” an assertionthat does easily lead to the acceptance of “anti-individualist holism.”


It is the evasion of this elementary logical point that undermines theprincipled argument that exponents of methodological individual-ism offer for the reduction program. It is perfectly coherent to rejectmethodological individualism and to hold that social explanationstypically ascribe causal powers to both social structures and individualagents. Another way to put it would be to say that the kinds of mecha-nisms legitimately invoked in social explanations are not required tobe reducible to micro-mechanisms. Not simply is this a coherent po-sition, but it is widely held. It is, for example, common to AnthonyGiddens’ theory of structuration and to Roy Bhaskar’s application ofCritical Realism to the social sciences: the — in different ways —rather depressing evolution of these thinkers in recent years does notprovide grounds for dismissing their important and influential ear-lier writings (see, for example, Giddens, 1979; Bhaskar, 1979). Moreembarrassing for Cohen, a similar position has been explicitly de-fended by one of the two more empirically oriented Analytical Marx-ists, Erik Olin Wright, and informs the practice of the other, RobertBrenner (for example, Wright, Levine, and Sober, 1992, ch. 6;Brenner, 1986). So it isn’t entirely clear who the “we” is in whose nameCohen claims to speak.

The force that rational-choice Marxism enjoyed on its initialappearance derived to a significant extent from the critique it offeredof functionalist versions of Marxism. Elster in particular was very ef-fective in exposing numerous examples of the lazy appeal to the ideathat this or that institution was serving to reproduce capitalist rela-tions of production. In this context, but also from a more principledpoint of view, the demand for micro-foundations was an entirely rea-sonable one: social explanation cannot proceed without referenceto the interests and mental states of individual actors. But, as I have justtried to show, it is perfectly possible to search for micro-foundationswithout imposing the methodological individualist reduction pro-gram. One of the distinctive features of Capital, as opposed to Marx’searlier economic writings (particularly the Grundrisse), is that, while(like the preceding texts) it treats the relations of production as ex-planatorily autonomous, it also provides what Cohen calls micro-mechanisms that seek to connect macro-tendencies with the interestsand calculations of individual actors (see especially Bidet, 2000). Thisexplanatory strategy may or may not be successful, but why shouldwe reject it in principle? Behind methodological individualism is a kind


of ontological anxiety — a fear of the intellectual monsters that wemay unleash unless we rigorously reduce everything to the suppos-edly unproblematic coherence of the individual subject. But why can’twe be more laid back about ontology? Why can’t we adopt the kindof pragmatism espoused by Quine (in some moods at least), and saythat what we are committed to affirming the existence of are simplythose entities to which our best-corroborated theories refer? So longas we’re sufficiently tough on our theories, why not let them settlewhat our ontology is?4

The oddity of Cohen’s present position is that, when AnalyticalMarxism first emerged in the late 1970s, he occupied an ambiguousposition relative to these debates: the rigor and originality of KMTHprovided the paradigm of how to be an Analytical Marxist, yet in re-lying so heavily on functional explanation Cohen seemed to be le-gitimizing precisely the kind of functionalism that Elster and otherchampions of rational-choice theory were seeking to exorcise. Nowthe tension has been resolved: Cohen is now a rational-choice Marx-ist pur et dur. The depth of his commitment comes out most clearlyin the Introduction to the 2000 Edition when he discusses the Ana-lytical Marxists’ self-description as “non-bullshit Marxism.” A moreprudent or self-conscious writer might seek to distance herself fromsuch an insufferably smug slogan. Cohen, on the contrary, claims tohave invented it. He concedes that,

when you call what you do non-bullshit Marxism, you seem to imply that allother Marxism is bullshit, and, therefore, that your own Marxism is uniquelylegitimate. In fact, there exists Marxism which is neither analytical norbullshit, but, once such (as we may designate it) pre-analytical Marxismencounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical orbecome bullshit. (xxv–xxvi.)

So Analytical Marxism is, at least in tendency, “uniquely legitimate.”It is, as Mrs. Thatcher said, a funny old world. If a relatively orthodoxMarxist such as I were to make this claim for my own take on theMarxist tradition, this would be held, probably correctly, as evidenceof my irretrievable dogmatism. So what makes it OK for Cohen toclaim unique legitimacy for his take? Only, as far as I can make out,

4 For a much more detailed analysis of the issues discussed in this and the preceding twoparagraphs, see Callinicos, 1987, ch. 2.


the claims made for analysis, particularly in the narrow sense, thatI have been subjecting to critical scrutiny. After demanding that allversions of Marxism be assimilated to the one he favors, Cohen goeson to discuss the difference between bullshit and dogmatism. Noone 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.

Exorcising Value Theory

Even someone sympathetic to my criticisms of Cohen’s currenttreatment of Analytical Marxism might still question the relevance ofthe argument to an assessment of the current significance of KMTH.After all, one might object, what Cohen says in the 2000 Introductionshows how, in retrospect, he intellectually situates his book. It doesn’ttell us anything about how we should judge the use the book has forcontemporary critiques of political economy. And, of course, in animportant sense this is true. All the same, the relationship between thecontent of an important philosophical book and its author’s subsequentintellectual trajectory is unlikely to be entirely accidental.

At any rate, one thing is for sure: whatever we say about Cohenor his book, rational-choice Marxism has been of virtually no use intrying to understand capitalism today. The debate that Roemer initi-ated over exploitation in the early 1980s was fairly soon subsumedinto mainstream debates about egalitarian conceptions of justice innormative political philosophy. Here Roemer, like Cohen himself,has made a distinguished contribution, but their work has been con-cerned with the conceptual articulation of values that a socialist cri-tique of capitalism might employ. The importance of what they havedone is, in my view, undeniable, but it has not been in the domain ofexplanatory social theory.5 On the questions that currently engageactivists and intellectuals in the anti-globalization movement — forexample: what is distinctive to neoliberalism compared to earlierphases of capitalist development? What is the historical significanceand extent of globalization itself? How far is the deregulation offinancial markets responsible for the evident ills wrought by neo-

5 See especially Cohen, 1989a; Roemer, 1996; and, for my own assessment of the debatesto which they have contributed, Callinicos, 2000.


liberalism? Does the collapse of the American boom–bubble markthe inception of a systemic crisis? Can states, acting either singly ortogether, develop new forms of economic regulation? Does construct-ing fairer and more democratic alternatives to neoliberalism requirea break with capitalism and/or the market altogether? — rational-choice Marxists have had little to say beyond Roemer’s earlier workon market socialism. The Analytical Marxists who are trying to ad-dress at least some of these questions are precisely those who are moredistanced from the methodological individualist reduction programthat Cohen now equates with reason itself. Wright has been involvedin research on alternative models, while Brenner has, of course, writ-ten two important and widely noticed analyses of the dynamics ofcapitalist crisis during the “long downturn” that began in the early1970s (Fong and Wright, 2003; Brenner, 1998; Brenner, 2002).

The failure of rational-choice Marxism to make a significantcontribution to the critique of political economy cannot, in my view,be separated from the nihilist attitude that its practitioners have dis-played towards Marxist economic theory. Capital and the great bodyof economic writing that it inaugurated seem largely to have beenconsigned to the category of bullshit that fails to meet the requiredanalytical standards of rational-choice theory (an intellectual para-digm whose origins lie, after all, in the formation of neoclassicaleconomics in the late 19th century, which developed partly in directcompetition with Marxist economic theory). Elster’s dismissive treat-ment of Capital in Making Sense of Marx is typical in this respect. Inthe background lie the debates among Marxist economists in the1970s in which a school influenced by Piero Sraffa (the so-calledneo-Ricardians) sought to demolish Marx’s value theory and thetheory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In effect, Analyti-cal Marxism internalized the neo-Ricardian critique (to which twoof their number, Roemer and Philippe van Parijs, directly contrib-uted).6 The continued resonances of these debates can be tracedin Brenner’s writings on contemporary capitalism, which in a rathertense and potentially unstable way combine key neo-Ricardian axi-oms with more classical Marxist themes (see, for example, Callinicos,1999; Shaikh, 1999). One might respond that in principle rational-

6 Howard and King, 1992, Part IV, give a good account of the controversy from a Sraffianperspective. For more on the relationship between rational-choice Marxism and neo-Ricardianism, see Callinicos, 1987, ch. 2, section 4.


choice Marxists could have undertaken a substantive analysis of thedynamics of capitalism, that their failure to do so was merely con-tingent, reflecting the fact that they had different priorities. All thesame, the critique of political economy is a central part of Marx’sheritage that rational-choice Marxists have chosen not to make anyserious effort to continue.

How does KMTH stand with respect to the debunking of Marx-ist economic theory that, I have suggested, is characteristic of rational-choice Marxism and, to a large extent, of Analytical Marxism toutcourt? This is a complicated question to answer. On the one hand,the book draws on a deep knowledge, not merely of Capital, but ofthose of Marx’s other economic works that were then available —above all the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value. Not the least ofthe pleasures to be gained from reading KMTH comes from encoun-tering a powerful philosophical intelligence that is so thoroughly athome with Marx’s economic writings. This is one reason why the bookbelongs among the classics of Marxist philosophy, alongside workssuch as History and Class Consciousness and Reading Capital. But, on theother hand, Capital and its precursors are not used in KMTH for atreatment of Marx’s economic theory. Rather, they provide raw ma-terial in the form of obiter dicta and exemplifications of particularconcepts that are worked up into Cohen’s rational reconstruction ofhistorical materialism. At one level, this is fair enough: KMTH is, afterall, about Marx’s theory of history, not his analysis of capitalism. Butthere is more to it than that. It seems fairly clear that, in the courseof composing KMTH, Cohen came to be more confident about pub-licly distancing himself from the labor theory of value (LTV). This isreflected in a series of disavowals that culminate in the very last sen-tence of the book: “The theses of the labor theory of value are not presup-posed or entailed by any contentions advanced in this book” (423; the otherdisavowals are on 298, 312, 417–18). After KMTH appeared, Cohendecided that even this italicized health warning was not enough. Headded the following to the Introduction to the 1979 paperback edi-tion: “I regret my failure to indicate that Chapter V and Appendix Iof this book are intended as exposition without defense of Marx’s views.That is why the labor theory of value is prominent in chapter V andAppendix I, despite the disclaimer in the last sentence on p. 353” (xii;the disclaimer is the underlined sentence quoted earlier in this para-graph, now on p. 423 of the 2000 edition).


Chapter V of KMTH is devoted to Marx’s critique of fetishism,while Appendix I is a reprint of an article that first appeared in 1972,“Karl Marx and the Withering Away of Social Science.” In this lattertext Cohen quite straightforwardly relies on the LTV: presumably bythe time KMTH appeared he had decided that he could no longerdissimulate his rejection of this theory.7 The fetishism chapter is, bycontrast, stated in terms that seek to be neutral between the LTV and“a competing material theory, such as Sraffa’s, in which value ratiosare technically determined, but not by labor alone” (116 n. 1).8 Alongwith Chapter XI, “Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and ContemporaryCapitalism,” it relies on a set of definitions in Appendix II in whichkey concepts in Marx’s economic theory — use-value, commodity,exchange-value, money, and capital — are restated in terms that donot depend on the LTV. Cohen offered some reasons for rejectingthe LTV in “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploi-tation,” first published in 1979 (revised reprint in Cohen, 1988, ch.11). This shows — as always with Cohen — a very good grasp of Marx’sconcepts: the argument turns on an understanding — rare amongcritics of the LTV — that the theory is one of abstract social laborand not embodied labor. It is perhaps because Cohen must have beendeveloping this argument while completing KMTH that he shows acertain degree of anxiety — reflected in the repeated disclaimers Ihave cited — to disentangle his reconstruction of historicalmaterialism from Marx’s economic theory. How successful is he indoing so?

Cohen’s general strategy is to replace statements that Marx makesabout value with statements about exchange-value. Most importantly,capital is defined as “exchange-value exchanged with a view to increasingthe amount of exchange-value possessed by its owner” (421). For Marx, of

7 At the conference where the original version of this paper was presented Cohen told methat he actually came to reject the LTV when he was 18 or 19; nevertheless, there doesseem to be a shift in his readiness publicly to avow this rejection between the 1972 articleand KMTH. The apparent hesitations in his treatment of the LTV in KMTH are no doubtto 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 probablycoexist 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 factpresupposes 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).


course, exchange-value is “the necessary mode of expression, or formof appearance, of value,” which is the socially necessary labor-timerequired to produce the commodity. Accordingly, capital is “valuein process,” the process through which a given sum of value expandsitself through the addition of new value, as a direct or indirect resultof an exchange with labor-power (Marx, 1976, 128, 256).9 My reasonfor noting this difference is not, of course, to denounce Cohen’s de-viation from orthodoxy. The point is rather that Cohen’s asceticismabout Marx’s economic theory helps to limit the scope of KMTH’scritique of capitalism. Chapter XI, where this critique is to be found,identifies a “distinctive contradiction of advanced capitalism,” namelythat the priority given to exchange-value over use-value produces asystemic bias towards the expansion of output, to the detriment ofhuman welfare (303). Capitalism therefore “functions irrationally, inthe sense that the structure of the economy militates against optimaluse of its productive capacity” (310).

This is an important argument, and one that has lost none of itsrelevance in the intervening quarter century. All the same, it can onlybe one piece in a larger jigsaw. Andrew Levine and Erik Olin Wrightpointed out soon after the first appearance of KMTH that this con-tradiction can count as fettering for the purposes of historical mate-rialism only in a relatively weak sense of the term: “This generates anincompatibility between the forces and relations of production, butbecause it ceases to be rationally deployed . . . the relations of pro-duction become irrational with respect to a general notion of improv-ing the human condition” (Levine and Wright, 1980, 61). Certainlythis doesn’t amount even to the beginnings of a crisis theory in thesense that the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall seeksto specify a systemic mechanism through which capitalist relationsof production fetter the development of the productive forces. Cohendoes devote a couple of paragraphs elsewhere to Marx’s theory ofcapitalist crisis (203–4), but, as Levine and Wright note, the crucialclaim that “crises become ever more intense . . . is simply asserted”(Levine and Wright, 1980, 65). This passage, along with an earlierreference to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (179), is prob-ably best seen as reflecting Cohen’s incomplete transition during the

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 inthe “Notes on Wagner” (Marx and Engels, 1989, 544ff).


composition of KMTH from his earlier public identification withMarx’s economic theory to the stance of “exposition without defense”that he made explicit after the book had appeared. Paradoxically,then, Cohen’s general statement of classical historical materialism isnot supported by a systematic account of how relations fetter forcesin the case of the mode of production that concerned Marx most.

So restating Marxian economic concepts in non–value-theoreticalterms doesn’t get Cohen terribly far. This weakness is perhaps re-lated to another limitation of the book that bears on the central op-position that Cohen develops between the material (or natural) andthe social. KMTH is relatively insensitive to the differences amongMarx’s major economic texts. In this respect at least, it is typical ofits time. The “return to Marx” of the 1960s and 1970s was impelledby the effort, in different philosophical idioms, to establish “whatMarx really said” through a critical interrogation of Marx’s economicwritings: we were all reading Capital. Inasmuch as conceptual dis-continuities between Marx’s texts were foregrounded, debate turnedon the famous “break” that Althusser claimed to have discoveredbetween the young “humanist” Marx and the mature “scientific” Marx.The economic writings of the great decade 1857–67 were on the “sci-entific” side of the alleged divide, and tended to be conceived (what-ever one thought about their relationship to the writings of the 1840s)as forming a single theoretical corpus. Partly under the influence ofRosdolsky’s major commentary, the Grundrisse tended to be read asthe key to Capital rather than as a work in its own right with its dis-tinctive theoretical presuppositions and conceptual tensions. Thecomplex process of recastings through which Marx’s critique of po-litical economy developed — across the Grundrisse, the 1859 Contri-bution and its Primitive Version, the 1861–3 Manuscript, and the draftsof the three volumes of Capital itself — only gradually became vis-ible, in part as a result of the theoretical controversies of the 1970sand in part as the whole corpus was finally published.10

Though Cohen didn’t need to return to Marx, having imbibedhim, as it were, with his mother’s milk, he participated in this gen-eral intellectual climate. As I have already noted, Marx’s economicwritings figure primarily in KMTH to provide supporting references

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 foundin Vygodsky, 1974, Bidet, 2000 and Dussel, 2001.


for Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism. This is a perfectlylegitimate procedure, but it doesn’t encourage consideration of theconceptual context of the passages extracted from Marx’s writings.One point at which this insensitivity to context registers in the sub-stantive argument is when Cohen asserts: “Use-value is the substanceof the commodity, and the body of capital. Political economy exam-ines not the content or substance or body, but exchange-value andcapital, the social forms they assume” (103). Cohen’s discussion ofuse-value comes in Chapter IV of KMTH, “Material and Social Prop-erties of Society,” where he seeks systematically to ground the oppo-sition between forces and relations of production in the “distinctionbetween the content and the form of a society. People and produc-tive forces comprise its material content, a content endowed by pro-duction relations with social form” (89).

The difference between the material and the social — deriving,according to Cohen, from “the Sophists’ distinction between natureand convention [which] is the foundation of all social criticism” (107)— is critical to the entire argument of KMTH: it is, to say the least,congenial to the Primacy Thesis that production relations may beconceived as a kind of contingent social envelope for society’s mate-rial content.11 One can see why Cohen should seek to subsume thecontrast between use-value and exchange-value under this broaderdistinction between the material and the social. He cites in supporta well-known passage from the 1859 Contribution: “Use-value as such,since it is independent of the determinate economic form, lies out-side the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs tothis sphere only when it is itself a determinate form” (Marx, 1971,28). Marx does not repeat this assertion at the start of Capital, Vol-ume I, Chapters 1 and 3, which are, among other things, the resultof an extensive redrafting of the 1859 Contribution. In all probabil-ity, this was because he had come to recognize the pervasive rolethat use-value played as “a determinate economic form” at variouslevels of his analysis — for example, as Rosdolsky shows in his de-tailed discussion of this topic, in the exchange between capital andlabor-power, the distinction between fixed and circulating capital,the reproduction schemes in Volume II of Capital, the different

11 Interestingly, Althusser criticizes the 1859 Preface for affirming a Hegelian conceptionof history based on the dialectic between Form and Content (Althusser, 1995, 243–52).


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 theGrundrisse, composed prior to the 1859 Contribution, though it onlybecomes fully visible in Capital itself. Why, then, does he rely on thepassage from the 1859 Contribution that Marx dropped in Capital? TheContribution might have more generally recommended itself to Cohen(apart, of course, from the Preface that provides his reconstruction ofhistorical materialism with its benchmark) because, while it affirms theLTV, discussion proceeds largely in terms of the exchange-value/use-value opposition. The analysis of the value-form that is developed acrosssuccessive 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 isa respect in which one might see a connection between Cohen’s fail-ure to consider the theoretical differences between Marx’s economicmanuscripts and his attempt to restate key Marxian concepts withoutreliance on the LTV.

The main reason, however, why Cohen follows the Contribution inexcluding use-value from the domain of political economy, is no doubtthe importance that he attaches to the material/social distinction. Thetrouble is that the more that one looks at the role of use-value in Capitalthe 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 notdiscuss is that of the labor process. Though it is an essential feature ofall social formations, the labor process is analyzed in Chapter 7 of CapitalI as the capitalist process of production insofar as it involves concreteuseful labor employing means of production of a particular kind toproduce use-values. As such, it is counterposed to the production pro-cess inasmuch as the latter is a process of valorization in which abstractsocial labor creates value, and thereby surplus value for capital. Marxexplicitly treats the distinction between labor and valorization processesas mirroring that between use-value and value: “Just as the commodityitself 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 ofcreating 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.


But he doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the difficulty that the laborprocess presents for his attempt to map the distinction between theforces and relations of production onto that between the materialand the social. Marx famously lists “the simple elements of the laborprocess . . . (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the objecton which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of thatwork” (Marx, 1976, 284).

But for this to be more than an inert list, these elements have tobe combined to constitute an actual process, which in turn requires someform of social organization. This social organization cannot be sub-sumed under the relations of production: for were this to be so, thedevelopment of the productive forces would lack the autonomy that isrequired for any version of the Primacy Thesis to be true. Later on inCapital I, in Chapter 13, Marx discusses cooperation: here there takesvague shape the idea that any labor process requires some form of socialorganization by the producers that reflects, not the imperatives ofexploitation, but rather the requirements of performing a given eco-nomic task employing the skills and technology they have to hand.

Cohen is well aware of all this. He draws the distinction betweenthe social relations of production — “relations of effective power overpersons and productive forces” — and “the material relations of pro-duction . . . relations binding producers engaged in material produc-tion, conceived in abstraction from the rights and powers they enjoyvis-à-vis one another, and others” (62, 111). Cohen expends mucheffort trying to establish that the material relations of production (orwhat he also calls “work relations”) cannot be included in the pro-ductive forces. The main thought here seems to be that the produc-tive forces, conceived as “what are used to produce things,” must becapable of being used or owned, and that relations are not so capable(32). Thus “knowledge of ways of organizing labor is a productiveforce, part of managerial labor power, but the relations establishedwhen that knowledge is implemented are not productive forces”(113). But, even if we accept this argument, the fact remains thatCohen has effectively complicated his conception of social structure:“Thus material work relations belong alongside the productive forcesas the substratum of the economic structure” (113).12

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 closelyrelated: one might take my claim in the preceding paragraph to be that material rela-


The effect is unavoidably to blur the opposition between mate-rial and social. It is true that Cohen attaches the qualification “mate-rial” to the relations involved in the labor process and “social” to therelations of production stricto sensu, and clearly some such qualifica-tion is necessary for the distinction between the two kinds of relationsto be intelligible. But it does not follow that the material relations ofproduction are not social relationships. Cohen stipulates a definitionof the social under which it would so follow, where “a description issocial if and only if it entails an ascription to persons — specified orunspecified — of rights or powers vis-à-vis other men” (94). Even werewe to accept this definition, we would still be left with the fact thatboth Marx’s conception of the labor process and Cohen’s relatedconcept of the material relations of production (or “material workrelations”) identify an analytically distinct domain of human inter-action reducible to neither the productive forces (since they are notfacilities used for the purposes of production) nor social relations ofproduction (since, per hypothese, they do not involve the distributionof rights or powers). To deny that this domain is part of what is nor-mally regarded as the social would be perverse.

To maintain that its recognition does not disturb the sharp dis-tinction that Cohen seeks to establish between the material and thesocial would be to rely on a technical definition of the social that isconstructed precisely to support the point at issue. Insisting on thisdefinition would merely force us to come up with some new term torefer (either together with or in contrast to whatever falls underCohen’s stipulative definition of the “social”) to those human rela-tions that do not belong to or depend on the relations of productionbut that (by virtue of being human relations) do not belong to non-human nature. Giving these relations their proper place does notrequire us to overturn the two principal explanatory connections —those between the level of development of the productive forces andthe social relations of production and between the economic struc-ture and the superstructure — on which Cohen’s reconstruction ofhistorical materialism rests. But — preoccupied with defending this

tions of production are required for any labor process to take place and therefore for theproductive 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.


reconstruction — he does not sufficiently register the differencebetween the development of the productive forces and what these forcesthemselves are. For the forces to be used, let alone to develop, laborpower and means of production have to be combined in technicallyappropriate forms. Marx’s concept of the labor process and Cohen’srefinement of the material relations of production are tools for ana-lyzing these combinations that cannot be ignored even if they fail tofit neatly into an architectonic organized around the ancient oppo-sition between matter and form.13

Conclusion

What is the upshot of all this? In KMTH Cohen uses Capital andits precursors as a kind of quarry for the raw material with which heconstructs what he regards as a defensible version of classical histori-cal materialism. But the book also represented the beginning of aprocess of emancipation from that tradition. Cohen has written aboutthe impact that writing KMTH had on his relationship to Marxism:

When I had finished the book, an unexpected thing happened. I came tofeel, what I had not consciously anticipated when planning or writing it, thatI had written the book in repayment for what I had received. It reflectedgratitude to my parents, to the school which had taught me, to the politicalcommunity in which I was raised. It was my homage to the plain Marxismwhich the book defended. But, now that the book was written, the debt waspaid, and I no longer felt obliged to adjust my thinking to that of Marx. Ifelt, for the first time, that I could think entirely for myself. I certainly didnot forthwith stop believing what I had believed when I embarked upon thebook, but I no longer experienced my commitment to those beliefs as anexistential necessity. (Cohen, 1988, xi.)

Cohen’s most recent books, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality andIf You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, certainly develop

13 The extent to which the material/social distinction is one of art in Cohen is brought outby a passage where he deals with the problem of “mental productive forces” (e.g., scientificknowledge): “when we oppose the material to the social, as Marx systematically did, we mayclassify mental productive forces as material, though they are of course not material in amore 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 arguethat the material relations of production are a case of the Real, which constitutes the limitof, and also subverts the Symbolic, or Social, order: see, for example, Z"iz'ek, 1999.


much stronger criticisms of Marxism than are to be found in KMTH.14

But it is important to see that this process of disengagement from“plain Marxism” began in his first book. In a brilliant but (as far as Iknow) unpublished early critique of KMTH, Michael Rosen comparedCohen’s project to the final phase of Phileas Fogg’s journey in Aroundthe World in Eighty Days, when in a desperate attempt to cross the At-lantic in time, Fogg has the wooden superstructure of his ship cut upand burned to provide fuel, reducing the upper part of the vessel toa naked iron skeleton. Cohen’s rescue of historical materialism, Rosenargued, similarly involved an attempt to strip it down to its essentials.Of course, what counts as essential is inherently a matter of argument.Critically, Cohen seeks to disentangle Marx’s theory of history fromhis economic theory, inasmuch as the latter depends on the labortheory of value. What I have tried to show is the difficulty of this pro-cess, both because of the traces left by the concepts that Cohen seeksto drop, and because concepts that he rightly does not drop (thelabor process/material relations of production) subvert the material/social distinction that informs his entire argument.

One way of responding to such difficulty is to press ahead withthe process of emancipation from classical Marxism in a much moreradical way. This in effect is the path that Cohen has followed sincethe publication of KMTH. His dogmatically asserted espousal ofrational-choice Marxism is the stage that it seems currently to havereached (though one that, it is important to stress, still falls well shortof the abandonment of Marxism altogether15). In the case of a phi-losopher as rigorous as Cohen, the reasons driving this trajectory arelikely to be carefully thought through and the consequent beliefstherefore strongly held. His rejection of the labor theory of value,for example, which he describes as “a terrible incubus on progres-sive reflection about exploitation,” isn’t going to be lightly or easilyrevised (Cohen, 1988, 238). But — without going into why I thinkthis rejection is mistaken, which would be an enormous debate in itsown right — I do want to say the nihilism about Marxist economictheory to which it leads Cohen is a great pity.

14 I discuss Cohen’s critique of Marxism in these books in Callinicos, 2001.15 Compare, for example, Cohen’s fine vindication of Marx against Berlin’s criticisms in

Cohen, 1991, and the refinements he offers of his own version of historical materialismin chs. XII–XV, added to the expanded 2000 edition of KMTH.


It isn’t just that — setting aside the normative work that he andRoemer have done on egalitarian justice — rational-choice Marxismhas had nothing interesting to say about capitalism. We are currentlyexperiencing what looks like becoming a great renaissance of Marxistpolitical economy. Ignoring the preachments of rational-choice Marx-ists, numerous researchers are using one version or other of valuetheory in a vast effort to unlock the secrets of capitalism’s trajectory.Some of them are Marxist scholars of broadly the same generation asCohen and me who fought their way through the value controversy ofthe 1970s and who seek in different ways to continue Marx’s project inCapital: Gérard Duménil, Ben Fine, David Harvey, and Anwar Shaikhare examples. Others are younger researchers: for example, the Eco-nomics Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies inLondon, thanks to the efforts of Fine and his colleagues, has several ofthese.16 Capital continues to be reread: collective studies of volumes I,II and III have recently been published. Often this work is encouragedby comparatively new Marxist journals such as Actuel Marx and Histori-cal Materialism. All this takes place against the background of largerdebates that seek to situate what is called globalization in the secularhistory of capitalism: the controversy provoked by Hardt and Negri’sEmpire is a relevant example here, though in many ways more interest-ing are the efforts of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to bringtogether a Braudelian perspective on the longue durée with more focusedeconomic analysis (see Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi, Silver, et al., 1999). Inthis 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 thismuch broader dialog among students of Marxist political economy.17

In evoking this intellectual renaissance I do not mean to suggestthat its products merit no criticism. But, precisely because of thepower 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 ownevolution should have, in effect, locked him out of the renewal ofMarxist political economy that is one form of the broader revival ofcritiques of capitalism. Whatever Cohen’s doubts about classicalMarxism, 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 fittingdisplay of the diversity of approaches in contemporary Marxist political economy.


talism. His recent philosophical work has been of great help in clari-fying why we should hold this economic system to be unjust. It wouldbe good to find ways of reconnecting this work with the continuingcritique of political economy that will bind together Marxism andcapitalism as long as the latter exists.

European StudiesKing’s College, LondonStrandLondon WC2R 2LSUnited [email protected]

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