Thoughts on Cohen's Defense of Historical Materialism

[A.R.Amistad]

Can anyone recommend GA Cohen's book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense? The book seems really neat, but he is of the analytic Marxist school, and I've never really liked their works on anything. I haven't read much else of Cohens, but would anyone agree that his defense of Historical Materialism is legitimate?

[mountainfire]

I find Cohen's work very useful as a restatement of some of the key features of Marx's theory of history when you consider that much of the work prior to his own contribution, especially the work of Althusser and other theorists influenced by his ideas, emphasized the relations of production and the independence of those relations from the productive forces. Cohen's argument, as you may be aware, is that the relations of production are ultimately subordinate to the forces of production in the sense that modes of production rise and fall depending on their capacity to allow for the further expansion of the forces of production and that the expansion of the productive forces constitutes the driving force behind human history due to the fact that changes in relations of production can only occur as a result of action by classes whose very existence is a product of the productive forces having reached a certain level of development - these and other observations comprising the primacy and development thesis which lie at the heart of his interpretation. The most interesting aspect of his work is his willingness to apply functional explanation to both the relationship between the relations of production and the productive forces on the one hand and the base and the superstructure on the other, as this kind of explanation helps make sense of relationships that are otherwise ambiguous. However, there are also some important criticisms that can and deserve to be made - one is to do with his use of texts, in that he relies almost exclusively on the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, generally known as the Preface, when there are also other texts, such as The German Ideology, Capital, and the Grundrisse, which have also been considered central to Marx's overall theory of history but do not so easily lend themselves to Cohen's version of Marx's theory. Elster, who is also associated with Analytical Marxism, due to his use of game theory to explore Marx's theory of exploitation, has also specifically critiqued Cohen's reliance on functional explanation on the grounds that this is a type of explanation that, when applied to politics rather than its original sphere of application (i.e. evolutionary biology), is unfalsifiable, at least with regard to the relationship between base and superstructure, in that all elements of the superstructure can be made to seem as if they support the prevailing relations of production in one way or another.

There is a collection of essays in a book called 'Marxist Theory', edited by Alex Callinicos, which are almost all orientated towards Cohen's work, including one by Elster, and I would also recommend taking a look at Cohen's own 'History, Labour, and Freedom', in which he returns to his work on Marx's theory of history and both revises and defends some of his claims. Most of his other work, such as 'If You're an Egalitarian, how come you're so rich?', is concerned with moral philosophy and theories of justice, Rawls and Dworkin in particular, but is still interesting if you're familiar with those thinkers and the debates that are associated with them. Incidentally, this should probably be in theory.