252 Science

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

&&SOCIETY

G. A. Cohen and the Critique

of Political Economy

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
252
 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 such
device has no doubt helped many Marxist scholars to keep going over
the past 25 years.
All the same, the problem of Marx’s relation to the present seems
inescapable. It has certainly survived all the efforts to bury him po-
litically and intellectually since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whatever
one thinks of Jacques Derrida’s attempt to recruit Marx to his haunto-
logical speculations in Spectres of Marx, Marx has certainly proved a
very hard ghost to lay. The main reason is pretty obvious. Capitalism
— certainly in the neoliberal form that supposedly triumphed with
the collapse of the Stalinist regimes — has become, with remarkable
speed, an object of contestation once again. The most visible evidence
of this shift is provided by the emergence since the Seattle protests
of November 1999 of a movement that has many names — the anti-
globalization movement, the anti-capitalist movement, the global
justice movement, the movement for another globalization — but
one definite target, neoliberalism.
The revival of protest has been accompanied by the re-emergence
of critiques of capitalism — most famously Naomi Klein’s No Logo —
and, interestingly, more recently by the appearance of attempts to
spell out programmatic alternatives — for example, Michael Albert’s
Parecon and George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent. There has, in other
words, been a rediscovery of Marx’s main subject, the critique of
political economy. Yet — by comparison with the last great wave of
radicalization in the 1960s and 1970s — it is striking how relatively
marginal an intellectual reference point Marx himself is today. Some
version of Marxism, however bizarre or bowdlerized, was the natural
terminus 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 eccentric
version offered by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in their celebrated
book Empire, a work that generally seeks to disavow a connection with
anything resembling Marxist orthodoxy.
This state of affairs is easy enough to explain: its roots surely lie
in the crisis of Marxism and indeed more generally of the traditional
left 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
254 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

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

Analysis and Dogmatism

It is in the light of this question that I intend to assess KMTH. But

how does Cohen himself now judge the overall significance of his
project? 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 to
so-called ‘dialectical’ thinking, and analytical thinking, in the narrow
sense 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 as
a 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-constituents
and micro-mechanisms that respectively compose the entities and underlie
the processes which occur at a grosser level of resolution. . . . Insofar as
analytical Marxists are analytical in this narrower sense, they reject the point
of 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 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

This characterization of Analytical Marxism is more or less identical

to that made by John Roemer in the influential 1986 collection he
edited. Here too we have, on the one hand, a disparaging dismissal
of any attempt to ascribe to Marxism a dialectical method — “The
yoga of Marxism is ‘dialectics’” — and, on the other hand, the equa-
tion of analytical and rational-choice Marxism: “What Marxists must
provide are explanations of mechanisms, at the micro-level, for the
phenomena they claim come about for teleological reasons” (Roemer,
1986b, 191, 192).3 Roemer offered a particularly interesting gloss on
the exchanges between Cohen and Jon Elster over the place of func-
tional explanations in historical materialism. Perhaps the single most
brilliant 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 explanatory
primacy of both the productive forces over production relations and
the base over the superstructure with the effects that, respectively,
relations have on forces and the superstructure has on the base. Elster
offered a dual critique, arguing that a functional explanation is incom-
plete unless it specifies the mechanism connecting the phenomenon
in 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 game
theory. Cohen in response denied that functional explanations are
so incomplete: they invite, but do not require elaborations that specify
an appropriate mechanism. He also insisted that game-theoretical
explanations address phenomena — the behavior of social actors —
that cover ground “near, but not quite at, the heart of historical
materialism”:

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

diacy of class conflict to its long-term outcome game theory provides no

assistance, because that outcome, for historical materialism, is governed by
a dialectic of forces and relations of production that is background to class
behaviour, and not explicable in terms of it. (Cohen, 1989a, 104, 96–7; see
also Cohen, 1988, 15–16, and Elster, 1980 and 1989.)

So both Elster and Cohen counterposed the latter’s use of functional

explanation to recapture the fundamental claims of historical mate-
rialism to the alternative of relying on rational-choice theory. In his
comments on the controversy, Roemer sought to displace this oppo-
sition, and to incorporate the debate about functional explanations
within rational-choice Marxism:

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

Now, the commitment of analytical Marxists to the constitutive techniques

of analytical Marxism is absolute: our belief in the power of analysis, both
in its broad and in its narrow sense, is unrevisable. And our commitment to
Marxist theses (as opposed to our commitment to socialist values) is not
absolute in the way that the commitment to analytical technique is. The
commitment to the technique, so we should claim, reflects nothing less than
a commitment to reason itself. It is a refusal to relax the demand for clear
statement and rigorous argument. We believe it is irrationalist obscurantism
to resist analytical reasoning, to resist analysis in the broad sense in the name
of 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 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

It is the evasion of this elementary logical point that undermines the

principled argument that exponents of methodological individual-
ism offer for the reduction program. It is perfectly coherent to reject
methodological individualism and to hold that social explanations
typically ascribe causal powers to both social structures and individual
agents. Another way to put it would be to say that the kinds of mecha-
nisms legitimately invoked in social explanations are not required to
be reducible to micro-mechanisms. Not simply is this a coherent po-
sition, but it is widely held. It is, for example, common to Anthony
Giddens’ theory of structuration and to Roy Bhaskar’s application of
Critical Realism to the social sciences: the — in different ways —
rather depressing evolution of these thinkers in recent years does not
provide grounds for dismissing their important and influential ear-
lier writings (see, for example, Giddens, 1979; Bhaskar, 1979). More
embarrassing 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, Robert
Brenner (for example, Wright, Levine, and Sober, 1992, ch. 6;
Brenner, 1986). So it isn’t entirely clear who the “we” is in whose name
Cohen claims to speak.
The force that rational-choice Marxism enjoyed on its initial
appearance derived to a significant extent from the critique it offered
of functionalist versions of Marxism. Elster in particular was very ef-
fective in exposing numerous examples of the lazy appeal to the idea
that this or that institution was serving to reproduce capitalist rela-
tions of production. In this context, but also from a more principled
point of view, the demand for micro-foundations was an entirely rea-
sonable one: social explanation cannot proceed without reference
to the interests and mental states of individual actors. But, as I have just
tried to show, it is perfectly possible to search for micro-foundations
without imposing the methodological individualist reduction pro-
gram. One of the distinctive features of Capital, as opposed to Marx’s
earlier 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 interests
and calculations of individual actors (see especially Bidet, 2000). This
explanatory strategy may or may not be successful, but why should
we reject it in principle? Behind methodological individualism is a kind
 COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 259

of ontological anxiety — a fear of the intellectual monsters that we

may unleash unless we rigorously reduce everything to the suppos-
edly unproblematic coherence of the individual subject. But why can’t
we be more laid back about ontology? Why can’t we adopt the kind
of pragmatism espoused by Quine (in some moods at least), and say
that what we are committed to affirming the existence of are simply
those entities to which our best-corroborated theories refer? So long
as we’re sufficiently tough on our theories, why not let them settle
what our ontology is?4
The oddity of Cohen’s present position is that, when Analytical
Marxism first emerged in the late 1970s, he occupied an ambiguous
position relative to these debates: the rigor and originality of KMTH
provided 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 other
champions of rational-choice theory were seeking to exorcise. Now
the tension has been resolved: Cohen is now a rational-choice Marx-
ist pur et dur. The depth of his commitment comes out most clearly
in the Introduction to the 2000 Edition when he discusses the Ana-
lytical Marxists’ self-description as “non-bullshit Marxism.” A more
prudent or self-conscious writer might seek to distance herself from
such an insufferably smug slogan. Cohen, on the contrary, claims to
have invented it. He concedes that,

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.)

So Analytical Marxism is, at least in tendency, “uniquely legitimate.”

It is, as Mrs. Thatcher said, a funny old world. If a relatively orthodox
Marxist such as I were to make this claim for my own take on the
Marxist tradition, this would be held, probably correctly, as evidence
of my irretrievable dogmatism. So what makes it OK for Cohen to
claim 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 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.

Exorcising Value Theory

Even someone sympathetic to my criticisms of Cohen’s current

treatment of Analytical Marxism might still question the relevance of
the argument to an assessment of the current significance of KMTH.
After all, one might object, what Cohen says in the 2000 Introduction
shows how, in retrospect, he intellectually situates his book. It doesn’t
tell us anything about how we should judge the use the book has for
contemporary critiques of political economy. And, of course, in an
important sense this is true. All the same, the relationship between the
content of an important philosophical book and its author’s subsequent
intellectual trajectory is unlikely to be entirely accidental.
At any rate, one thing is for sure: whatever we say about Cohen
or his book, rational-choice Marxism has been of virtually no use in
trying to understand capitalism today. The debate that Roemer initi-
ated over exploitation in the early 1980s was fairly soon subsumed
into mainstream debates about egalitarian conceptions of justice in
normative 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 have
done is, in my view, undeniable, but it has not been in the domain of
explanatory social theory.5 On the questions that currently engage
activists and intellectuals in the anti-globalization movement — for
example: what is distinctive to neoliberalism compared to earlier
phases of capitalist development? What is the historical significance
and extent of globalization itself? How far is the deregulation of
financial markets responsible for the evident ills wrought by neo-
5 See especially Cohen, 1989a; Roemer, 1996; and, for my own assessment of the debates
to which they have contributed, Callinicos, 2000.
 COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 261

liberalism? Does the collapse of the American boom–bubble mark

the inception of a systemic crisis? Can states, acting either singly or
together, develop new forms of economic regulation? Does construct-
ing fairer and more democratic alternatives to neoliberalism require
a break with capitalism and/or the market altogether? — rational-
choice Marxists have had little to say beyond Roemer’s earlier work
on market socialism. The Analytical Marxists who are trying to ad-
dress at least some of these questions are precisely those who are more
distanced from the methodological individualist reduction program
that Cohen now equates with reason itself. Wright has been involved
in research on alternative models, while Brenner has, of course, writ-
ten two important and widely noticed analyses of the dynamics of
capitalist crisis during the “long downturn” that began in the early
1970s (Fong and Wright, 2003; Brenner, 1998; Brenner, 2002).
The failure of rational-choice Marxism to make a significant
contribution 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 body
of economic writing that it inaugurated seem largely to have been
consigned to the category of bullshit that fails to meet the required
analytical standards of rational-choice theory (an intellectual para-
digm whose origins lie, after all, in the formation of neoclassical
economics in the late 19th century, which developed partly in direct
competition with Marxist economic theory). Elster’s dismissive treat-
ment of Capital in Making Sense of Marx is typical in this respect. In
the background lie the debates among Marxist economists in the
1970s in which a school influenced by Piero Sraffa (the so-called
neo-Ricardians) sought to demolish Marx’s value theory and the
theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In effect, Analyti-
cal Marxism internalized the neo-Ricardian critique (to which two
of their number, Roemer and Philippe van Parijs, directly contrib-
uted).6 The continued resonances of these debates can be traced
in Brenner’s writings on contemporary capitalism, which in a rather
tense 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 Sraffian
perspective. For more on the relationship between rational-choice Marxism and neo-
Ricardianism, see Callinicos, 1987, ch. 2, section 4.
262 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

choice Marxists could have undertaken a substantive analysis of the

dynamics of capitalism, that their failure to do so was merely con-
tingent, reflecting the fact that they had different priorities. All the
same, the critique of political economy is a central part of Marx’s
heritage that rational-choice Marxists have chosen not to make any
serious 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 tout
court? This is a complicated question to answer. On the one hand,
the book draws on a deep knowledge, not merely of Capital, but of
those of Marx’s other economic works that were then available —
above all the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value. Not the least of
the pleasures to be gained from reading KMTH comes from encoun-
tering a powerful philosophical intelligence that is so thoroughly at
home with Marx’s economic writings. This is one reason why the book
belongs among the classics of Marxist philosophy, alongside works
such as History and Class Consciousness and Reading Capital. But, on the
other hand, Capital and its precursors are not used in KMTH for a
treatment of Marx’s economic theory. Rather, they provide raw ma-
terial in the form of obiter dicta and exemplifications of particular
concepts that are worked up into Cohen’s rational reconstruction of
historical materialism. At one level, this is fair enough: KMTH is, after
all, about Marx’s theory of history, not his analysis of capitalism. But
there is more to it than that. It seems fairly clear that, in the course
of composing KMTH, Cohen came to be more confident about pub-
licly distancing himself from the labor theory of value (LTV). This is
reflected 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 other
disavowals are on 298, 312, 417–18). After KMTH appeared, Cohen
decided that even this italicized health warning was not enough. He
added the following to the Introduction to the 1979 paperback edi-
tion: “I regret my failure to indicate that Chapter V and Appendix I
of 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 and
Appendix 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).
 COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 263

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 latter
text Cohen quite straightforwardly relies on the LTV: presumably by
the time KMTH appeared he had decided that he could no longer
dissimulate his rejection of this theory.7 The fetishism chapter is, by
contrast, stated in terms that seek to be neutral between the LTV and
“a competing material theory, such as Sraffa’s, in which value ratios
are technically determined, but not by labor alone” (116 n. 1).8 Along
with Chapter XI, “Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and Contemporary
Capitalism,” it relies on a set of definitions in Appendix II in which
key concepts in Marx’s economic theory — use-value, commodity,
exchange-value, money, and capital — are restated in terms that do
not depend on the LTV. Cohen offered some reasons for rejecting
the 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’s
concepts: the argument turns on an understanding — rare among
critics of the LTV — that the theory is one of abstract social labor
and not embodied labor. It is perhaps because Cohen must have been
developing this argument while completing KMTH that he shows a
certain degree of anxiety — reflected in the repeated disclaimers I
have cited — to disentangle his reconstruction of historical
materialism from Marx’s economic theory. How successful is he in
doing so?
Cohen’s general strategy is to replace statements that Marx makes
about value with statements about exchange-value. Most importantly,
capital is defined as “exchange-value exchanged with a view to increasing
the 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 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

course, exchange-value is “the necessary mode of expression, or form

of appearance, of value,” which is the socially necessary labor-time
required to produce the commodity. Accordingly, capital is “value
in process,” the process through which a given sum of value expands
itself through the addition of new value, as a direct or indirect result
of an exchange with labor-power (Marx, 1976, 128, 256).9 My reason
for noting this difference is not, of course, to denounce Cohen’s de-
viation from orthodoxy. The point is rather that Cohen’s asceticism
about Marx’s economic theory helps to limit the scope of KMTH’s
critique of capitalism. Chapter XI, where this critique is to be found,
identifies a “distinctive contradiction of advanced capitalism,” namely
that the priority given to exchange-value over use-value produces a
systemic bias towards the expansion of output, to the detriment of
human welfare (303). Capitalism therefore “functions irrationally, in
the sense that the structure of the economy militates against optimal
use of its productive capacity” (310).
This is an important argument, and one that has lost none of its
relevance in the intervening quarter century. All the same, it can only
be one piece in a larger jigsaw. Andrew Levine and Erik Olin Wright
pointed 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 an
incompatibility between the forces and relations of production, but
because 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). Certainly
this doesn’t amount even to the beginnings of a crisis theory in the
sense that the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall seeks
to specify a systemic mechanism through which capitalist relations
of production fetter the development of the productive forces. Cohen
does devote a couple of paragraphs elsewhere to Marx’s theory of
capitalist crisis (203–4), but, as Levine and Wright note, the crucial
claim that “crises become ever more intense . . . is simply asserted”
(Levine and Wright, 1980, 65). This passage, along with an earlier
reference 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 in
the “Notes on Wagner” (Marx and Engels, 1989, 544ff).
 COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 265

composition of KMTH from his earlier public identification with

Marx’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 is
not supported by a systematic account of how relations fetter forces
in the case of the mode of production that concerned Marx most.
So restating Marxian economic concepts in non–value-theoretical
terms 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) and
the social. KMTH is relatively insensitive to the differences among
Marx’s major economic texts. In this respect at least, it is typical of
its time. The “return to Marx” of the 1960s and 1970s was impelled
by the effort, in different philosophical idioms, to establish “what
Marx really said” through a critical interrogation of Marx’s economic
writings: we were all reading Capital. Inasmuch as conceptual dis-
continuities between Marx’s texts were foregrounded, debate turned
on the famous “break” that Althusser claimed to have discovered
between 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 of
Rosdolsky’s major commentary, the Grundrisse tended to be read as
the key to Capital rather than as a work in its own right with its dis-
tinctive theoretical presuppositions and conceptual tensions. The
complex 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 drafts
of the three volumes of Capital itself — only gradually became vis-
ible, in part as a result of the theoretical controversies of the 1970s
and in part as the whole corpus was finally published.10
Though Cohen didn’t need to return to Marx, having imbibed
him, as it were, with his mother’s milk, he participated in this gen-
eral intellectual climate. As I have already noted, Marx’s economic
writings 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 found
in Vygodsky, 1974, Bidet, 2000 and Dussel, 2001.
266 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

for Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism. This is a perfectly

legitimate procedure, but it doesn’t encourage consideration of the
conceptual 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 substance
of the commodity, and the body of capital. Political economy exam-
ines not the content or substance or body, but exchange-value and
capital, the social forms they assume” (103). Cohen’s discussion of
use-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 “distinction
between 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 nature
and 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 be
conceived as a kind of contingent social envelope for society’s mate-
rial content.11 One can see why Cohen should seek to subsume the
contrast between use-value and exchange-value under this broader
distinction between the material and the social. He cites in support
a 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 to
this 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 result
of an extensive redrafting of the 1859 Contribution. In all probabil-
ity, this was because he had come to recognize the pervasive role
that use-value played as “a determinate economic form” at various
levels of his analysis — for example, as Rosdolsky shows in his de-
tailed discussion of this topic, in the exchange between capital and
labor-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 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

But he doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the difficulty that the labor

process presents for his attempt to map the distinction between the
forces and relations of production onto that between the material
and the social. Marx famously lists “the simple elements of the labor
process . . . (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object
on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that
work” (Marx, 1976, 284).
But for this to be more than an inert list, these elements have to
be combined to constitute an actual process, which in turn requires some
form of social organization. This social organization cannot be sub-
sumed under the relations of production: for were this to be so, the
development of the productive forces would lack the autonomy that is
required for any version of the Primacy Thesis to be true. Later on in
Capital I, in Chapter 13, Marx discusses cooperation: here there takes
vague shape the idea that any labor process requires some form of social
organization by the producers that reflects, not the imperatives of
exploitation, 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 between
the social relations of production — “relations of effective power over
persons 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 enjoy
vis-à-vis one another, and others” (62, 111). Cohen expends much
effort trying to establish that the material relations of production (or
what 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 be
capable of being used or owned, and that relations are not so capable
(32). Thus “knowledge of ways of organizing labor is a productive
force, part of managerial labor power, but the relations established
when that knowledge is implemented are not productive forces”
(113). But, even if we accept this argument, the fact remains that
Cohen has effectively complicated his conception of social structure:
“Thus material work relations belong alongside the productive forces
as 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 closely
related: one might take my claim in the preceding paragraph to be that material rela-
 COHEN AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 269

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 the
relations of production stricto sensu, and clearly some such qualifica-
tion is necessary for the distinction between the two kinds of relations
to be intelligible. But it does not follow that the material relations of
production are not social relationships. Cohen stipulates a definition
of the social under which it would so follow, where “a description is
social if and only if it entails an ascription to persons — specified or
unspecified — of rights or powers vis-à-vis other men” (94). Even were
we to accept this definition, we would still be left with the fact that
both Marx’s conception of the labor process and Cohen’s related
concept of the material relations of production (or “material work
relations”) identify an analytically distinct domain of human inter-
action reducible to neither the productive forces (since they are not
facilities used for the purposes of production) nor social relations of
production (since, per hypothese, they do not involve the distribution
of 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 the
social would be to rely on a technical definition of the social that is
constructed precisely to support the point at issue. Insisting on this
definition would merely force us to come up with some new term to
refer (either together with or in contrast to whatever falls under
Cohen’s stipulative definition of the “social”) to those human rela-
tions that do not belong to or depend on the relations of production
but that (by virtue of being human relations) do not belong to non-
human nature. Giving these relations their proper place does not
require us to overturn the two principal explanatory connections —
those between the level of development of the productive forces and
the social relations of production and between the economic struc-
ture and the superstructure — on which Cohen’s reconstruction of
historical materialism rests. But — preoccupied with defending this

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

reconstruction — he does not sufficiently register the difference

between the development of the productive forces and what these forces
themselves are. For the forces to be used, let alone to develop, labor
power and means of production have to be combined in technically
appropriate forms. Marx’s concept of the labor process and Cohen’s
refinement of the material relations of production are tools for ana-
lyzing these combinations that cannot be ignored even if they fail to
fit 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 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:

When I had finished the book, an unexpected thing happened. I came to

feel, what I had not consciously anticipated when planning or writing it, that
I had written the book in repayment for what I had received. It reflected
gratitude to my parents, to the school which had taught me, to the political
community in which I was raised. It was my homage to the plain Marxism
which the book defended. But, now that the book was written, the debt was
paid, and I no longer felt obliged to adjust my thinking to that of Marx. I
felt, for the first time, that I could think entirely for myself. I certainly did
not forthwith stop believing what I had believed when I embarked upon the
book, but I no longer experienced my commitment to those beliefs as an
existential necessity. (Cohen, 1988, xi.)

Cohen’s most recent books, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality and

If 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 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

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 I
know) unpublished early critique of KMTH, Michael Rosen compared
Cohen’s project to the final phase of Phileas Fogg’s journey in Around
the 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 up
and burned to provide fuel, reducing the upper part of the vessel to
a naked iron skeleton. Cohen’s rescue of historical materialism, Rosen
argued, 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 from
his economic theory, inasmuch as the latter depends on the labor
theory 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 seeks
to drop, and because concepts that he rightly does not drop (the
labor 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 with
the process of emancipation from classical Marxism in a much more
radical way. This in effect is the path that Cohen has followed since
the publication of KMTH. His dogmatically asserted espousal of
rational-choice Marxism is the stage that it seems currently to have
reached (though one that, it is important to stress, still falls well short
of the abandonment of Marxism altogether15). In the case of a phi-
losopher as rigorous as Cohen, the reasons driving this trajectory are
likely to be carefully thought through and the consequent beliefs
therefore 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 easily
revised (Cohen, 1988, 238). But — without going into why I think
this rejection is mistaken, which would be an enormous debate in its
own right — I do want to say the nihilism about Marxist economic
theory 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 materialism
in chs. XII–XV, added to the expanded 2000 edition of KMTH.
272 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

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

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