Karl Marx's Theory of History

Rating:
Summary: A Strong Defense
Review: In the Base-Superstructure debate that has been raging for a while, and still is, within modern Marxism, GA Cohen's Defense of Karl Marx's Theory of History is one of the more powerful blows struck and deserves to be read.

Cohen is a supporter of "the primary of productive forces" (the word primacy here being used to avoid the label of being a determinist or vulgar marxist) and argues to uphold the base-superstructure metaphor which Marx set forth in the 1859 preface to the Contribution to Political Economy. In a nutshell, the metaphor basically said that the base of all society is the economic structure, where everything else (legal and political institutions, for example) rise as a superstructure on this base. The implication is that the most influential thing in society is indeed our economic system. The further implication here, and surely what Marx was trying to say, is that capitalism is the defining aspect of everything and essentially the primarily determining entity in society.

GA Cohen upholds this metaphor by first scouring the 1859 preface, then other Marx works and finally arguing for the legitimacy of the "primary of productive forces" himself. His arguments are concise and powerful. If you are a serious student of Marxism, the read is basically mandatory and helps break the illusion that there is really one theory of Marxism and thats it. Cohen's interpertation of Marx tends to be the one that most people identify Marx with themselves and also tends to paint Marxism as cold and determinist (despite his attempts to keep away from the dreaded title).

However, if you are going to read this, be sure to read Althusser, Williams and Lukacs. These are the other three major points on the debate and reading them will give you a rounded perspective on the entire thing. I tend not to agree with Cohen (though that doesn't show in my rating) and think that if you read a lot of Marx, you can see he himself differing from Cohen. The famous 11th statement in his Thesis of Feurbach sums it all up:

"The philosophers have only interperted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Cohen's views on the economic base's primacy doesn't leave much room for this statement to be anything other than a hollow statement.