Forces[even as yet non-existent forces] select structures according to their capacity to promote development' (ibid.: 162; my interjection, based on Cohen's arguments in ibid.: 177). Cohen is right that if Marx is interpreted thus, the contradiction disappears. His reading is internally coherent, whatever other objections might be raised against it. In chapter 5 I shall argue against both functional explanation as Cohen conceives it, and its ascription byhim to Marx.
The second problem I have raised is that of social relations themselves being putative productive forces. I hope I have shown that the view that they may be is more than warranted by Marx's texts. Cohen, to my mind, simply evades this issue when commenting on these analyses, He draws a distinction, within the category of production relations, between social relations' and what he calls material relations between producers' or work relations'. The former alone enter into the ‘economic structure'. I shall discuss this distinction further in my next chapter. The relevant point here is that Cohen classifies the forms of co-operation and division of labour I argue were for Marx (also) productive forces, as material relations'. He then concedes that something in this conceptual area is a productive force, but not the work relations themselves' (ibid.: 113). In his view, the relevant productive force is knowledge of ways of organising labour', not that organization as such (ibid.). This seems to me a wholly artificial, if characteristically ingenious, piece of special pleading: knowledge, like machines, is a productive force only in so far as it is productively applied.
It is also, it should be said, an extremely cavalier reading of the texts I have cited. Marx makes it abundantly clear that the relevant power is that of – in his own words - co-operation itself', not the knowledge of or blueprint for co-operation, and he does so repeatedly. The only justification for denying Marx's contention is consistency within Cohen's own theory, and whatever the merits of the
Following a characteristically capacious account of what, in capitalism, the social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour' actually comprise, the sixth chapter' goes on to observe that:
This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour ... takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it which is identical with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the process of production. The mystification implicit in the relations of capital as a whole is greatly intensified here, far beyond the point it had reached or could have reached in the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital. (1866: 1024)
This brings me to the second major argument I want to develop on Marx's understanding of productive forces. This is that to conceive them otherwise than as powers of social labour – and specifically, to identify them with the things used in production', means of production and labour-power - is, so far as Marx is concerned, to mystify’ them. It is in fact a paradigm instance of what he diagnosed as the fetishism peculiar to the capitalist mode of production', from which, in his view, most economics suffered (ibid.: 1046). Since the concept of fetishism will be a central one in the overall argument of this book, it is worth spending some time establishing what exactly Marx meant by it.15
We saw earlier that he systematically distinguished a material side’ and a formal side' to production. The material side is that which all human productive activities have in common, or that which pertains to production in general in abstraction from its particular social modalities. For instance all production involves a labour process, and all products have a use-value (understood as a capacity to meet some human need). But to conceive production simply thus, from its material side’ alone, is, Marx argues, to grasp it abstractly. For - Robinson Crusoe notwithstanding - production only takes place empirically within definite social relations, and it is these which imprint on its elements, in any given case, their particular social or economic forms. It is these forms which are Marx's prime concern, defining real historical stages' of production,
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the latter as a functional rather than straightforwardly causal argument. In brief:
the primacy thesis does not say that forces characteristic of capitalism preceded its arrival. It rather requires that nascent forces could not be used or developed within pre-capitalist relations, and that a capitalist structure was necessary for productive progress. (1978: 179)
latter, this is not a good reason for attributing to Marx a view he demonstrably did not hold, or denying to him the view he equally demonstrably did. Particularly if, as is the general argument of this book, an alternative and equally coherent account of historical materialism, which is consistent with Marx's own conceptual usage, is eminently possible.
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