Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence Book

Review of G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx Theory of History: A Defense

Because of my contempt for “analytic Marxism,” I approached this book with some trepidation, expecting mostly to be irritated. After all, so much of Marx is about how he does things. If someone rejects dialectics, the labor theory of value, aspects of fetishism, and holism, then we might wonder if the “analytics” have not altogether swallowed the “Marxism.” Somehow, I read on. Mind you, I managed to retain my disdain for a school that forsakes dialectics as “sloppy” and adopts methods tied instead to logical positivism, rational choice, and the ontological and methodological individualism of neo-classical economics – all elements that constituted my formal graduate school training. Nevertheless, I ended up liking Cohen’s narrative voice and found the book immensely useful.

Cohen’s narrator is a good guide because: he doesn’t hide anything about his politics or his methods; because he tells us if he thinks that Marx (or Hegel, or anyone) is wrong; because he is dedicated to lucidity (a value I hold dear); because he can take the most difficult Marxian concepts and present them plainly in a paragraph, in a chart/table, and often in just one sentence; because he is willing to admit that Marx is working with a vision of human nature, and therefore that he employs trans-historical categories; because he is does not hide the fact that Marx thought of capitalism’s historical mission as progressive; because his defense of “functional explanations” is bold, brave, and necessary (he comes close to defending teleology itself); because in the additional chapters of the 2000 edition (the book was first published in 1978), he confesses where he was wrong; and, because he seems committed to process -- you can feel and see him work out things. I highly recommend this book but it is difficult going. It took me a full week to get through it.

It begins with a very clear account of the differences between Hegel and Marx: Hegel provides the biography of the world spirit, the self comes to know itself via encounters with the otherness of the world and others; Marx, instead, founds his work on human beings as a creative producers who keep changing their relationship with nature. Chapter 2 takes us to the core formulation of historical materialism: productive forces determine productive relations which determine super-structural elements such as culture, law, ethics, aesthetics, ideology, etc. That is: human history shows a tendency for technological development (the human relationship with nature becomes something that humans begin to control and dominate); the specific “stage” (my word) of economic development determines the economic relations which determine what we might call culture. Of course, there is also a feedback loop so that these relations are not reductionist, but the larger tendency is for a kind of technological determinism. This is what Cohen sets out to defend.

One thing that struck me is that Cohen does not embed Marx’s historical materialism in the Scottish Enlightenment’s “Four Stages Theory” of history – as do, for example, Ronald Meek and Maurice Dobb. In a way, this absence cannot be surprising since one of the effects of a methodological commitment to individualism, micro-foundations, and the priority of logic is that one looks primarily at text and not context. Consider that most economics departments do not have even one person devoted to the history of economic thought. On the other hand, how could someone as erudite as Cohen fail to comment on the relationship of Marx theory of history with that of, say, Adam Smith’s. If Hegel can be included as part of Marx’s context, why not the Scottish Enlightenment and classical political economy?

The second edition has a series of additional chapters that I found juicy and exciting. Specifically, chapter 13 is excellent. There Cohen retreats from his earlier defense of historical materialism and concludes that Marx overstated his case, and that we also need Hegel’s theory of history. His new position, which he calls a “restricted historical materialism” allows for a more direct inclusion of identity, religion, culture, and ideas to a materialist theory of history.

Here are two quotes that give a taste of his new positions:

“My charge against Marxist philosophical anthropology is that, in its exclusive emphasis on the creative side of human nature, it neglects a whole domain of human need and aspiration, which is prominent in the philosophy of Hegel. In [the 1978 version of the book] I said that for Marx, by contrast with Hegel, 'the ruling interest and difficulty of men was relating to the world, not to the self. I would still affirm that antithesis, and I now want to add that, to put it crudely, Marx went too far in the materialist direction. In his anti-Hegelian, Feuerbachian affirmation of the radical objectivity of matter, Marx focused on the relationship of the subject to an object which is in no way subject, and, as time went on, he came to neglect the subject's relationship to itself, and that aspect of the subject's relationship to others which is a mediated (that is, indirect) form of relationship to itself. He rightly reacted against Hegel's extravagant representation of all reality as ultimately an expression of self, but he over-reacted, and he failed to do justice to the self's irreducible interest in a definition of itself, and to the social manifestations of that interest” 346-347.

And,

“A person does not only need to develop and enjoy his powers. He needs to know who he is, and how his identity connects him with particular others. He must, as Hegel saw, find something outside himself which he did not create, and to which something inside himself corresponds, because of the social process that created him, or because of a remaking of self wrought by later experience. He must be able to identify himself with some part of objective social reality: spirit, as Hegel said, finds itself 'at home with itself in its otherness as such'” 347-348.

This opening allows such identity creating elements as religion, nationalism, race, and gender to play a larger role in Marxism.

Another result of this opening is that Cohen finds temporal nuance in Marx’s theory of history: “It is the creative side of human nature, the side emphasized by Marxist philosophical anthropology, which finds fulfilment in free cultural activity both before and after the communist revolution” (379, emphasis added).

This is crucial for me because it shatters the temporal walls by which Marx often seals stages of history from each other. This shattering allows temporal overlap. It means that creativity and humanity exist prior to communism and therefore that previous stages of development have something to offer. Here, Marx and Cohen, are closer to Karl Polanyi and Ashis Nandy.

Last but certainly not least is Cohen’s superb appendix on Marx’s science. Cohen first explains and then critiques Marx’s claim that science is only necessary when there is a gulf between reality and appearance. Cohen calls this “subversive science” but adds that there can also be “neutral science”:

“Marx's dictum must be abandoned….we may say that scientific explanation always uncovers a reality unrepresented in appearance, but that it only sometimes discredits appearance. Let us call science subversive when it does the latter, and neutral when it does not." 412

Cohen develops a middle ground between the view that science perceives a reality unknown to that those living their everyday lives and hence that the scientist/therapist/expert knows what is best. And the view that theory must not alienate or negate the experiences of those it is meant to serve. This middle ground supports the claim that while science may well expose the gulf between reality and experience it must eventually express that gulf in a manner consistent with everyday language and everyday experience. Said differently: Scientists may make meaning that explains but also alienates the everyday but science’s full mission requires a mediation and a translation which can explain such science in everyday terms. This is one reason why lucidity in language matters. And this is one reason that we can charge Hegel and Marx with occasional and even systematic obfuscation (despite the plethora of theoretical insights whose luminescence radiate across decades and centuries.)

Cohen gives this middle ground some contours in the following long footnote on page 413:

“Theory may be used to put someone in a position where he can understand himself without drawing upon it. Consider how psycho-analytic theory is employed in the therapeutic context. The analyst does not aim to supply the analysand with the theory and show him how it applies to himself. Rather, he employs the theory so as to enable the analysand to encounter directly the images and ideas influencing his behaviour and feeling. In this respect the conclusion of the therapy resembles the attainment of Hegel's Absolute Knowledge. For though Absolute Knowledge replaces reasoning, it is possible only after prolonged engagement in it. In the psycho-analytical case too, the aim is intuition, the means is discursion. His end state of an ideal analysis counts as self-knowledge without theory in the sense here intended.”

My conclusion after reading the book is this: that between Marx and Hegel, we need not choose. We can have them both. In a sense, my work with David Blaney has always been here, within this non-decision.

I am still formulating a critique of Cohen’s methodological commitments. His rejection of holism and dialectics is particularly bothersome. Has he never read, for example, Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method – a marriage of precision, clarity, dialectics and holism. He also seems steadfast in thinking that there is no significant difference in the study of natural and social science. I am still at “no” to all that. Graduate school wounds take long to heal.