Relations of production
If productive forces are not the things they are so often taken to be, then definitions of production relations, and hence Marx's economic structure of society', in terms of ownership of these forces are clearly in some jeopardy. But there is far more to be said about the concepts of production relations and economic structure than this. We may begin with a common criticism of historical materialism, to which I briefly alluded in chapter 1. In the 1859 Preface, as we know, Marx says that property relations are but a legal expression for' relations of production, and his writings frequently assimilate the two terms. H. B. Acton, amongst others, has argued that this renders Marxism incoherent. It amounts, he says, to defining production relations - the alleged ‘economic base' of society - by legal forms which belong in the very ‘superstructure' which that base, within historical materialist theory, is supposed to determine. The theory is thus viciously circular. Acton goes on to argue, more generally, that ‘the "material or economic basis of society" is not . . . something that can be clearly conceived, still less observed, apart from the legal, moral and political relationships of men' (quoted Cohen, 1978: 235).
This charge is obviously a serious one for any Marxism which wishes to retain a standard base/superstructure model, and it has not gone unchallenged. Cohen, in particular, has replied at length. On the face of it, he has little trouble in disposing of Acton's argument. He simply develops a general 'rechtsfrei’ definition of ‘ownership’ in terms of real powers over, as distinct from legal rights in, the objects owned - productive forces, as he conceives them. Other Marxists, like Balibar (in Althusser, 1970: 226 ff.), take a similar tack. Within such views, Marx's production relations' are ownership relations in some distinctively non-juridical sense. Legally formalized property relations can then coherently be conceived as both distinct from and expressive of production relations thus defined, exactly as the 1859 Preface seems to require. This resolves Acton's problem of the independent conceivability of economic structure and superstructure. Cohen further argues, not unreasonably, that the fact that economic variables may not be empirically observable independently of the non-economic variables they are held to determine does not of itself invalidate the claim of determination. Such situations, he maintains, are commonplace in any developed science.
Cohen's solution is a nice, and characteristically elegant, piece of philosophical reasoning. But whether it satisfactorily resolves the substantial problem which lies at the heart of Acton's comments is another issue. Consider, by way of example, the following satirical observation of E. P. Thompson's on the supposed 'relative autonomy' of law. His ire is directed at Althusser's structural Marxism' rather than Cohen's, but the point is pertinent none the less:
I have, as it happens, been interested in this myself, in my historical practice: not, of course, in any grand way – for the whole of history, nor for the capitalist mode of production everywhere, but in a very petty conjuncture: in an island on the edge of the Atlantic, very well supplied with lawyers, at a moment in the eighteenth century. So my evidence is highly marginal, as well as being seriously contaminated by empirical content. But what I discovered there would make La Structure à Dominante boggle. For I found that law did not keep politely to a ‘level' but was at every bloody level; it was imbricated within the mode of production and production relations themselves (as property-rights, definitions of agrarian practice) and it was simultaneously present in the philosophy of Locke; it intruded brusquely within alien categories, re-appearing bewigged and gowned in the guise of ideology; it danced a cotillion with religion, moralising over the theatre at Tyburn; it was an arm of politics and politics was one of its arms; it was an academic discipline, subjected to the rigours of its own autonomous logic; it contributed to the definition of the self-identity both of rulers and ruled; above all, it afforded an arena for class struggle, within which alternative notions of law were fought out. (1978a: 288).
'La Structure à Dominante’ is Althusser's structural causality' model, referred to above (p. 9). He, like Cohen - and many other Marxists – supposes the separability of the economic' from other levels of social structure. It is this separation Thompson rejects, going on to ridicule the very notion of “"levels"motoring around history at different speeds and on different schedules' as ‘an academic fiction' (ibid.: 289). I could have cited other Marxist historians like Christopher Hill on Coke's Institutes, or Rodney Hilton on jurisdiction in feudal Europe,² to similar effect.
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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