Two further consequences of Cohen's definition of the economic base', where he differs somewhat from more traditional (and usually less scrupulously formulated) Marxist accounts, should be noted. First, for Cohen productive forces are not themselves part of the economic structure of society'. If they were, he argues, we could not make sense of Marx's claim that productive forces and production relations come into conflict, which would seem to suppose that they are separate entities. The primacy thesis demands their clear demarcation. Second, only relations of ownership in his sense can be bona fide production relations. This means other forms of social relationship which are evidently connected with or have a bearing on material production fall outside the category. These include both relations within the immediate production process itself, like forms of division of labour in the workshop', which Cohen calls material relations' between producers; and relations which lie apparently outwith, but nevertheless facilitate, production, like particular forms of law, state or family. Though Cohen does not deny the productive salience of such relations, he does not count them as relations of production. The economic base is made up of, and only of, property relations as he defines them.
This base is the real foundation' on which legal and political superstructures’in turn arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness' correspond. Cohen is similarly punctilious in his definition of the superstructure. He is also, on this occasion, rather less than orthodox. Marxists who adhere to a base/superstructure perspective have usually implicitly taken the superstructure to include all else in society - though there have always been some grey areas, prominent amongst them language. For Cohen, however, the superstructure specifically comprises ‘non-economic institutions', above all the institutions of law and state. This implies that phenomena may exist in social life which are neither basic nor superstructural, an important limitation on the explanatory pretentions of historical materialism. Additionally, for Cohen, the 1859 Preface's ‘forms of social consciousness' are not part of the superstructure, where for most Marxists they quintessentially belong. Not much hangs on this, however - at least in Cohen's view - since Marx says very similar things about both: namely, that they are strongly conditioned' by the economic base.
As productive forces develop, production relations are forced to change; the entire immense superstructure' sooner or later alters accordingly. Marxists have traditionally interpreted such propositions causally (although, in most cases, with a determined effort not to do so mechanistically). Cohen makes a persuasive philosophical case for the view that if Marxism is to be rendered coherent, correspondence' – of production relations to productive forces, and superstructure to base - must be interpreted in functional terms. Functional explanation is thus in his view indissociable from historical materialism. He also maintains, with some justice, that Marxists for the most part do treat these relationships functionally, loth as they might be to admit it. So for him Marxism holds that ‘economic structures are as they are because, being so, they enable human productive power to expand’, and superstructures are as they are because, being so, they consolidate economic structures' (1978: xi). There, in a nutshell, we have Karl Marx's theory of history. It is an economic, indeed in the final analysis a largely technological determinism, albeit of a functional rather than a conventionally causal sort. The Poverty of Philosophy's infamous dictum, The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist' (1847a: 109) should not be considered the embarrassment twentiethcentury Marxist intellectuals have so often found it. On the contrary, it expresses the very core of Marx's thought.
II
Cohen's reading is cogent, and his book undeniably persuasive. In many ways he cuts through a century of evasion and double-think, and forces us to think seriously, clearly and honestly about what are the central and distinctive claims of historical materialism. In so doing, he powerfully restores and lends new philosophical credibility to a certain traditional Marxist 'orthodoxy'. The Marxists of the Second International, for long the whipping boys of western Marxism', stand posthumously vindicated. But there is still room, perhaps, for doubt.
Let us begin, not with Marx himself, but with a famous series of letters written by another stalwart of the Second International, Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, in the 1890s. By then Marx was dead (he died in 1883), but his ideas, often in bastardized forms, were beginning to animate Social Democratic parties throughout Europe. In these letters Engels – who was habitually, it might be remembered, more of a popularizer than Marx1- showed himself appalled at the crudity with which some of the younger ‘Marxists' of the time were treating Marx's work, and sought to soften the hard economic determinism drawn by them from such texts as the 1859 Preface. Marx's references to contemporary Marxists' in the early 1880s had been no more flattering, as Engels elsewhere recalls.2 Cohen's own formulation of the primacy thesis’ and ‘correspondence' of superstructure to base is, as I have noted, functional rather than straightforwardly causally determinist, and these letters of Engels's in no way in and of themselves simply refute’ him. They do, however, suggest an altogether different attitude or approach to Marx's ‘guiding thread', and it is for that reason that I rehearse them here.
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PROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD
PROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD
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