In a series of articles for the social democratic magazine Jacobin, columnist Ben Burgis recommended the work of Gerald A. Cohen: “If You Want to Understand Marxism, Read G. A. Cohen,” Burgis said: “I sometimes find myself wishing that [Cohen’s] Karl Marx’s Theory of History would get more love from contemporary socialist writers and thinkers, given its refreshing combination of analytical rigor and engagement with questions of historical change that lie at the heart of the socialist project.” 

Certainly, Cohen is an important figure in many academic debates on historical materialism. He was largely responsible for giving birth to Analytical Marxism that hoped to clarify Marxist theory using analytical philosophy and the modern social sciences. However, does this mean that socialists should turn to Cohen’s work to illuminate Marxist ideas?

Karl Marx’s Theory of History

Coming from a Canadian working-class family that was part of the Communist Party, Cohen pursued an academic career without renouncing his socialist convictions.¹For background on Cohen’s life see Jim Farmelant, “G. A. Cohen, 1941-2009,” Monthly Review Online, August 8, 2009. On a personal note, I’ve appreciated Jim’s help with research avenues for this essay. A practitioner of analytical philosophy, Cohen sought to use its “rigor and clarity” to defend Marx’s theory of historical materialism. The fruit of Cohen’s endeavors was his magnum opus, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (henceforth KMTH), first published in 1978. Upon its release, Cohen’s work was hailed as a classic in philosophy by figures such as Marx’s biographer David McLellan and the prominent leftist intellectual Perry Anderson.²David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995), 454; Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980), 40 and 72. In the anglophone academy, Cohen’s work inaugurated a whole new school of “Analytical Marxism” whose ranks included John Roemer, Jon Elster, and Erik Olin Wright. Jumping off from Cohen, these Analytical Marxists sought to reconstruct Marxism with the tools of analytical philosophy, logical positivism, rational choice theory, methodological individualism, and neoclassical economics.

In KMTH, Cohen set out to defend what he considered the “traditional” view of historical materialism where “history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth.”³G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000,), x. All quotes are from the updated 2000 edition. Cohen based his argument on a very literalist reading of Marx’s 1859 Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.⁴“Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,” Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 263. (henceforth MECW)

According to Cohen, the heart of Marx’s theory of history could be summed up by the following two points:

(a) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history (the Development Thesis).

(b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis proper).⁵Cohen 2000, 134.

For Cohen, it is the development of the productive forces that is the motor of history. In effect, he is advancing a technological determinist (or more precisely: a fatalist) version of history that was defended by many leaders of the Second International, notably Karl Kautsky, Jules Guesde, and Georgii Plekhanov. Like Kautsky, Cohen believed that socialism would free the productive forces and satisfy human wants, making it the only rational choice for humanity. He claimed that this fact made socialism inevitable: “in so far as the course of history and, more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do.”⁶Ibid. 147. During the 1930s, Stalin also advanced his own form of technological determinism in what could be considered Kautsky’s revenge.

To defend his position on historical materialism, Cohen argued that its main claims were a form of functional explanation. According to functionalists, the existence of something is explained by the effect that it has. Functionalism is often employed in evolutionary biology. For example, the most important function of lungs is to allow an animal to breathe, therefore the presence of lungs occurs from the need to breathe. This means giving breathing, rather than lungs, the explanatory priority. To explain historical materialism in functional terms, Cohen gives priority to the development of the productive forces, while the relations of production and the superstructure are explained by whether they advance the development of production. As Cohen states: “[T]he central claims of historical materialism are functional explanations,” which means “the economic structure has the function of developing the productive forces, and the superstructure the function of stabilizing the economic structure.”⁷G.A. Cohen, “Functional Explanation, Consequence Explanation, and Marxism,” Inquiry 25 (1982): 27 and G.A. Cohen, “Functional Explanation: Reply to Jon Elster,” Political Studies 28:1 (1980): 129. See Fabien Tarrit, “A Brief History, Scope, and Peculiarities of “Analytical Marxism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 38 (2006): 604. In order to tie together both the development and primacy theses, Cohen believed that functional explanations were necessary: “We have said that central Marxian explanations are functional, which means, very roughly, that the character of what is explained is determined by its effect on what explains it. One reason for so interpreting Marx: if the direction of the explanatory tie is as he laid down, then the best account of the nature of the tie is that it is a functional one.”⁸Cohen 2000, 278.

Cohen versus Marx

As we have discussed, Cohen uses Marx’s 1859 Preface as the main work in his defense of historical materialism. Undoubtedly, this is an important text since it is one of the few places where Marx succinctly discusses the materialist conception of history and the metaphor of base and superstructure. For that reason, Marx’s Preface has been committed to memory by generations of communist militants. Yet a few caveats about the work are in order. The Preface was published with the help of Ferdinand Lassalle in Berlin, where it was essential for Marx to avoid saying anything that would antagonize the Prussian censors. Marx himself lived in exile and was in no danger himself of prosecution, but if he hoped to reach German workers, then he had to be careful that the police did not confiscate his work. As he told Lassalle: “The presentation—the manner of it, I mean—is entirely scientific, hence unobjectionable to the police in the ordinary sense.”⁹“Marx to Lassalle. 22 February 1858,” MECW, vol. 40, 270. For a seminal scholarly account of the circumstances surrounding the writing of the Preface see Arthur M. Prinz, “Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s ‘Preface’ of 1859,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 3 (July-September 1969): 437-450. As a result, the Preface did not make any reference to ideas essential to historical materialism such as class struggle. Marx was successful in his subterfuge and his writing was published. A few years later in 1865, Marx gave advice to Engels about how to write a preface to articles on the Prussian army that would pass the censor’s pen:

As far as your anxiety about confiscation is concerned, what you must do is to announce quite briefly, as a foreword to the first article, that you are firstly going to throw light on the subject from the military point of view, secondly you are going to criticise the bourgeoisie and, thirdly, the reaction, etc., and the attitude of the workers’ party to the question, etc., whereby the drift can already be narrowly outlined or hinted at. This will, [from the outset] make it more difficult for the government to confiscate.¹⁰“Marx to Engels. 30 January 1865,” MECW, vol. 42, 70.

Marx was speaking from experience in this regard. Therefore, the Preface must be read not in isolation, but in the totality of Marx’s wider work. In that light, a much different portrait of Marx and historical materialism emerges than in KMTH.

Cohen’s reading of the Preface leads has him argue that Marx gave primacy to the development of the productive forces throughout history. In and of itself, no Marxist would have a principled disagreement with Cohen on this score. However, he goes much farther and transforms the productive forces into the sole determining element of history. Yet this is something that both Marx and Engels rejected as a distortion of historical materialism. In 1890, Engels wrote to Joseph Bloch: “According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in history is, in the final analysis, the production and reproduction of actual life. More than that was never maintained either by Marx or myself. Now if someone distorts this by declaring the economic moment to be the only determining factor, he changes that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, ridiculous piece of jargon.”¹¹“Engels to Bloch. 21-22 September 1890,” MECW, vol. 49, 34.

Cohen’s overemphasis on the productive forces leads him to conclude that Marx was a rigid stagist. In this conception of history, every society must follow definite stages — primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and communism. Cohen’s “traditional” historical materialism is not what Marx argued. It is actually the anticommunist caricature. The only difference is that Cohen puts a plus sign where the anticommunists place a minus sign.

Furthermore, there is something dark about Cohen’s technological determinism and stagism that he fails to discuss. In the time of the Second International, some figures argued that the necessity of developing the productive forces justified a “socialist” colonial policy. According to them, advanced capitalism brought civilization and modernity to backward societies in Asia and Africa. At a meeting of the Second International, the arch-revisionist Eduard Bernstein said:

We must get away from the utopian notion of simply abandoning the colonies. The ultimate consequence of such a view would be to give the United States back to the Indians. The colonies are there; we must come to terms with that. Socialists too should acknowledge the need for civilized peoples to act somewhat like guardians of the uncivilized.¹²Quoted in John Riddell, ed., The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, Documents: 1907-1917; The Preparatory Years (New York: Monad Press, 1984), 10-11.

It is not unfair to say that Bernstein’s defense of imperialism dovetails with Cohen’s technological determinism. In fact, there is nothing in KMTH that could provide a rebuttal to Bernstein. By failing to address the issues of colonialism and imperialism, Cohen leaves the door open to social imperialism. In his early writings on India, Marx toyed with the stagist idea that British colonialism could be progressive in at least developing the productive forces.¹³An important caveat is that even in his 1853 writings on India, Marx still described British colonialism as a form of barbarism: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.” After viewing the problem more carefully, he saw that colonialism distorted the class struggle and held back progress. Ultimately, both Marx and Engels rejected Cohen-style stagism when it came to non-Western societies, and they supported anticolonial struggles in Ireland, China, and India.¹⁴For Marx’s evolving views on non-European societies see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); On the charge that Marx was an “orientalist,” Aijaz Ahmad says:

“What one wishes to emphasize here is that the writings of Marx and Engels are indeed contaminated in several places with the usual banalities of nineteenth century Eurocentrism, and the general prognosis they offered about the social stagnation of our societies was often based on unexamined staples of conventional European histories. Despite such inaccuracies, however, neither of them portrayed resistance to colonialism as misdirected; the resistance of the ‘Chinese coolie’ was celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communard.” Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (New York: Verso Books, 2008), 229.

We do not have to look far to find more evidence that Marx does not fit the mold created by Cohen. In his correspondence with Russian populists, Marx told them that the Tsarist Empire was not necessarily fated to follow the exact same historical path as Western Europe. He warned the populists that his theory was not the stagist dogma that they championed: 

But this is too little for my critic. It is absolutely necessary for him to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to eventually attain this economic formation which, with a tremendous leap of the productive forces of social labor, assures the most integral development of every individual producer. But I beg his pardon. This does me too much honor, and yet puts me to shame at the same time.¹⁵“Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky – November 1877,” MECW, vol. 24, 200.

Cohen knows about Marx’s letter but does not ponder its meaning. Marx seriously considered the idea that Russia, if supported by a proletarian revolution in Western Europe, could leap over capitalism entirely and go straight to socialism. Earlier, in the Revolutions of 1848, Marx also rejected stagism. He saw the possibility of the revolution developing in permanence from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution. These are both clear examples of Marx’s anti-stagist thinking.

Ultimately, Cohen’s Second International “orthodoxy” means that he is forced to agree with the Mensheviks that the Russian Revolution was premature.¹⁶Cohen 2000, 389-395. His stagist schema does not allow him to consider the possibility of uneven development or shortening historical stages through permanent revolution. Like Marx, the Bolsheviks were far more open to the possibility of permanent revolution. 

Now we come to the most egregious fault in Cohen’s Marxism, which is the denial of the central role that the class struggle plays in history. This can be clearly seen in Marx’s main writings, most notably in the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”¹⁷“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” MECW, vol. 6, 482. Yet Cohen’s KMTH just shoves class aside: “The focus is on the more basic concepts of the theory, those of forces and relations of production, and there will be unusually little discussion, as books on Marx and society go, of class conflict, ideology, and the state.”¹⁸Cohen 2000, x. This raises the obvious question: how can anyone defend Marx’s theory of historical materialism without an extended discussion of classes and class struggle?

Strangely for a writer devoted to defending historical materialism, Cohen is uninterested in any actual history. Just a glance at Marx’s writings on France shows a different method than Cohen’s. Marx analyzes the role of class struggle, the state, and ideology in history. When it comes to the primacy and development of the productive forces, Marx spent a lot of time discussing them. The opening section of the Communist Manifesto reveals that Marx was impressed with the productive and revolutionary nature of capitalism. Yet Marx was not just someone who cataloged the growth of factories in dry statistics. Marx developed his ideas because he was committed to the class struggle and the emancipation of the working class. All of this is gone from KMTH, replaced by abstract definitions, thought experiments, and numbered sentences. In the end, Cohen’s Marx comes off as a harmless analytical philosopher rather than as the dedicated communist revolutionary that he really was.

The Functionalist House of Cards

As we have seen, Cohen resorted to functionalist explanations to provide consistency to historical materialism. However, fellow Analytical Marxists such as Jon Elster believed functionalism was an incomplete account of historical materialism unless it could specify how the different non-economic phenomena were connected to the primacy and development theses. For Elster, the methods of biological evolution did not easily transfer to a science of society: “I do not, of course, quarrel with the use of functional explanation in biology. Here natural selection provides a general mechanism that creates a presumption that beneficial consequences of structure or behaviour explain their own causes. Cohen does not, however, provide any similar mechanism for functional explanation in the social sciences, and therefore his argument cannot succeed.”¹⁹Jon Elster, “Review Article: Cohen on Marx’s Theory of History,” Political Studies 28:1 (1980): 125-126. In response to the criticisms of Elster and others, Cohen offered clarifications and revisions on the role of functional explanation in historical materialism. Many of these ideas appear in his second book, History, Labour, and Freedom (1988).²⁰G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 158-159. 

Here, Cohen elaborates on the differences between “inclusive” and “restricted” types of historical materialism. He claims that the “inclusive” version is more ambitious since it seeks to explain all non-economic phenomena “in their large lines” by identifying their functional places in securing and supporting the development of the productive forces.²¹Cohen 2000, 367. Thus, inclusive Marxism can explain both base and superstructure. By contrast, the “restricted” variant is more defensive since it affirms just the development and primacy theses as central to history, while refraining from saying anything about non-economic spheres: “Unlike inclusive historical materialism, the restricted doctrine says nothing about economically irrelevant phenomena.”²²Cohen 1988, 174. Therefore, restricted historical materialism can only explain the economic base, but not the superstructure.

In his own self-clarification, Cohen identified KMTH with the restricted variant: 

The restricted construal commits historical materialism to explaining only those non-economic phenomena which have substantial material or economic consequences, they pose a challenge which must be neutralized. And the appropriately neutralizing way of explaining them … is by recourse to functional explanation. Hence my predilection for functional explanation in KMTH confirms that when I write it I was already, implicitly or incipiently, a restricted historical materialist, even though I often reproduced the traditional inclusivist formulations.²³Ibid.

Let there be no mistake: Cohen’s restricted historical materialism is not claiming that the superstructure is “relatively autonomous” from the base. Rather, he is relegating Marxist theory strictly to the realm of the economic base. As he says: “Restricted historical materialism is defensive, since it is content to protect the story of material progress from undue spiritual intrusion.”²⁴Ibid. 161. For Cohen, restricted historical materialism can only explain the development of the productive forces, while all the elements of the superstructure are left floating in the clouds beyond our understanding. For Cohen, there is a base and a superstructure, but no way to connect them. It is little wonder that Cohen soon abandoned even “restricted” historical materialism since it could explain so little.

Analytics and Dialectics

At the heart of Cohen’s reconstruction of Marxism was the abandonment of dialectical materialism. Unlike most Marxists, Cohen claimed that Marxism had no distinctive philosophical method: “The fateful operation that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own.”²⁵Cohen 2000, xvii. In place of dialectics, Cohen employed analytical philosophy, which emphasizes precision in language and definition by employing the tools of formal logic and mathematics.²⁶An immediate theoretical precursor to Analytical Marxism in the rejection of Marxism’s Hegelian legacy was the French philosopher Louis Althusser. There were three important ways Althusser prefigured Analytical Marxism’s project. The first was Althusser’s argument that historical materialism was incompatible with Hegelian philosophy. Two: like Cohen, Althusser emphasized the need to systematically interrogate the basic components of theory. Finally: Althusser’s failure acted as a negative proof that encouraged others to view that there was nothing distinctive about the Marxist method. See Alex Callinicos, “Introduction: Analytical Marxism,” in A. Callinicos, ed., Marxist Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5.

In the 2000 preface to KMTH, Cohen acknowledged the impact of Althusser on his own work:

But, while initially attracted to Althusserianism, I finally resisted its intoxication, because I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigour was not matched by conceptual rigour in its intellectual practice. The ideas the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, were exciting and suggestive, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations, on one of which they were all too obviously true, and, on the other, all too obviously false.²⁷Cohen 2000, xxi-xii.

Cohen argued that the removal of dialectics allowed Analytical Marxism to practice “non-bullshit” Marxism.²⁸Ibid. xxv-xxvi.

Part and parcel of his rejection of dialectics, Cohen tossed aside the Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality as well. As he said: “‘analytical’ is opposed to what might be called ‘holistic’ thinking.”²⁹Ibid. xvii. Throughout KMTH, Cohen employed his analytical method to break down the whole into its component parts. After this, he sought to isolate the elements and then develop appropriate definitions of phenomena. These definitions of the separate parts were done without reference to their interconnections and relationships. For Cohen, phenomena have an essential nature and they are best understood independently of their relationships and wider context. The result is an atomized, fragmented, and reified portrait of reality. Ultimately, analytics leads Cohen into a dead end when it comes to defending Marxism.

There is a way to salvage Marxism, but it requires the dialectical method and totality. Contrary to Cohen’s claims, Marxism needs an underlying philosophy. If Marxists are committed to proletarian revolution and communism, that means being serious about ideas and what is true. Unlike Cohen’s analytical method, Marxists need a systematic, universal, and monistic view of reality to know the laws of the world and why they act. As opposed to Cohen, who restricts historical materialism, Marxists insist that reason is total since the natural and social worlds are an intelligible totality. Undertaking this momentous task requires the philosophy of dialectics — a universal method to comprehend all the necessary laws of thinking and being.³⁰For more on the importance of dialectical materialism, see my “Introduction to Materialist Dialectics and Historical Materialism,” The Blanquist, June 2, 2018. The best recent defense of the importance of philosophy to Marxism declared:

“Philosophical knowledge is for everyone; it’s not the private reserve of an academic elite. Precisely because monism is true, and reflects the actual organization of our shared reality, it is accessible to all. Clarifying our daily experience tends towards a dialectical understanding of the world as not governed by supernatural or spontaneous forces, but by what’s real, rational, and necessary.”

See Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Reason is Red: Why Marxism Needs a Philosophy,” Spectre Journal, August 29, 2022. As Engels said, dialectics is “the science of interconnections.”³¹“The Dialectics of Nature,” MECW, vol. 25, 356.

For Marx, the source of all dialectics lay with the Hegelian notion of contradiction.³²Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 744. Contradiction is universal to all phenomena and change comes through internal development. Another way of describing contradiction is the unity and interpenetration of opposites. Marx’s dialectical analysis postulates that material conditions ultimately determine being and consciousness. Furthermore, a dialectical analysis of reality reveals that events can be traced back to their underlying cause(s), particularly in socio-economic structures.

For Marx, application of the dialectic explains capitalism’s inner laws of motion. Capitalist property relations compel the bourgeoisie to seek profits, compete, and revolutionize the means of production. There is a struggle and unity of opposites between the fundamental classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Marx, capitalism’s contradictions are not fixed and static, but insurmountable and pointed to their end: “if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.”³³Karl Marx, The Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 159. Thus, economic crises do not appear out of nowhere, but they are foreseeable results inherent in capitalism’s drive for exchange value and profit. This worldview places working-class struggle on material foundations. In its struggle, the working class represents the universal interests of humanity by doing away with an irrational and exploitative system. In other words, dialectical materialism explains the material necessity of communist revolution.

Cohen cannot see any of this since his non-dialectical view of totality means that he sees things in fixed positions. Cohen is correct that the separation of elements and their aspects is necessary for a scientific account, and no dialectician would deny this. However, dialectics insists that an analysis of a natural or social process such as capitalism look at how the parts interconnect with their own laws of motion to form a greater totality. Cohen’s standpoint does not see the totality of a real social relation, but only fragmentary bits and pieces in isolation.

When it comes to the relationship between base and superstructure, Cohen’s account of historical materialism forgets the dialectical concept of mediation. Cohen seems to believe that the base must directly impact the superstructure. The parts and the whole of a dialectical totality, such as base and superstructure, condition one another through a variety of complex mediations. Religious doctrines, for example, are certainly the products of their economic environment, but attempting to reduce the specifics of theology simply and directly to economics is the most vulgar application of historical materialism. The dialectical concept of mediation prevents the crude reductionism that Cohen employs when it comes to understanding the relation between base and superstructure.

Simply put: without dialectical materialism, a defense of historical materialism is impossible. Cohen’s analytical philosophy acts as a blindfold that prevents him from seeing the connections and social relations of the world. Yet Marxists do not need to grope around aimlessly in the dark the way analytical philosophers do. As Engels said, we can use the dialectic to see: 

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world such metaphysically polar opposites exist only in a crisis, that instead the whole great process takes place solely and entirely in the form of interplay — if of very unequal forces of which the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and the most vital — and that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. So far as they are concerned, Hegel might never have existed.³⁴“Engels to Schmidt. 27 October 1890,” in MECW, vol. 49, 63.

Ethical Socialism

It is beyond the scope of this essay to give a full account of Cohen’s ideas or the wider development of Analytical Marxism.³⁵In addition to the sources cited here, other critical works worth consulting on Analytical Marxism include: Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?” New Left Review vol. 177, no. 1 (Sept-Oct. 1989): 41-88; Alex Callinicos, “Having Your Cake and Eating it,” Historical Materialism vol. 9 (2001): 169–195; Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (New York: Verso, 2002), 40-68 and 164-73; Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Brill: Boston, 2004), 69–102, 111, 129–36, and 225–38. However, a few more words must be said about Cohen’s views on Marx’s critique of political economy. From an early agnosticism, Cohen came to openly reject the labor theory of value and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.³⁶On Cohen’s agnosticism about the labor theory of value, see Cohen 2000, 352. On his rejection of the labor theory of value, see Cohen 1988, 209-238 and 255-285. On the rate of profit, see ibid. 110. For a criticism of Cohen’s views on political economy, see Alex Callinicos, “G. A. Cohen and the Critique of Political Economy,” Science & Society vol. 70, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 252-274; and Paul Warren, “In Defense of the Marxian Theory of Exploitation: Thoughts on Roemer, Cohen, and Others,” Social Theory and Practice vol. 41, no. 2 (April 2015): 286-308. For a recent series of essays defending the validity of Marx’s ideas on the falling rate of profit to explain the modern world, see Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, ed., World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). For an in-depth discussion of the problems of Analytical Marxism and political economy, see Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (New York: Verso Books, 1996), 137-178. For a defense of the breakdown theory to Marxist political economy see Henryk Grossman, Henryk Grossman Works, Volume 3. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises (Boston: Brill, 2022). See also my overview on breakdown in “Crisis and Breakdown,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, August 10, 2017. This meant that Cohen rejected Marx’s scientific understanding of how labor is exploited, capital accumulation occurs, capitalist breakdown, and the material necessity for proletarian revolution. He did not replace Marx’s political economy with a viable alternative. Finally, Cohen’s position calls into question the existence of economic classes as well, since Marx locates class in exploitative relations of production rooted in the private ownership of the means of production. Indeed, Cohen comes to conceive of political action as the role of individual choice rather than of classes.³⁷See Cohen 1988, 51-82.

Feeling pessimistic about prospects for socialism after the collapse of the USSR, Cohen formally abandoned Marxism. For one, he believed that the ecological crisis made the Marxist vision of developing the productive forces and a society of abundance impossible: “We can no longer sustain Marx’s extravagant, pre-Green, materialist optimism. At least for the foreseeable future, we have to abandon the vision of abundance. But, if I am right about the straitened choices posed by the ecological crisis, we also have to abandon, on pain of giving up socialist politics, a severe pessimism about social possibility which accompanied Marx’s optimism about material possibility.”³⁸G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10. Elsewhere, Cohen blamed Hegel for Marxism’s scientific pretensions. See G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 64. For a thorough Marxist critique of this sort of eco-pessimism, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism (New York: Anthem Press, 2022). Secondly, he no longer saw a historical agent for social change in the proletariat: “Capitalism does not produce its own gravediggers. The old (partly real, partly imagined) agency of socialist transformation is gone, and there is not, and never will be, another one like it.”³⁹Cohen 2000, 112.

Now cut off from the material necessity of working-class solidarity and revolution, Cohen saw moral appeals as the only avenue left to achieve socialism: “Socialists have to settle for a less dramatic scenario, and they must engage in more moral advocacy than used to be fashionable.”⁴⁰Ibid. Cohen’s new moralistic socialism was close to the “true socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized in their works. The “true socialists” rejected an allegiance to the working class in the class struggle, in favor of general and ineffectual ethical appeals to “humanity” in general. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels ridiculed the ideas of “true socialism,” for its abstract moralism which was “no longer concerned with real human beings but with ‘Man’, [and] has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind.”⁴¹“The German Ideology,” in MECW, vol. 5, 457.

In his final book, Why Not Socialism? (2009), Cohen maintained his belief in a non-market socialism. This stood in contrast to most Analytical Marxists, who now embraced market socialism that looked little different than capitalism.. The socialism Cohen advocated no longer had a grounding in material necessity or a social agent, but was reduced to being a good idea. While Cohen thinks socialism is moral, he questions whether it is practicable: “I do not know whether the needed refinements are possible, nor do I know, speaking more generally, whether the full socialist ideal is feasible…”⁴²G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 75.

Bullshit “Marxism”

At one point, Cohen claimed that if Analytical Marxism failed, then Marxism itself was beyond saving:

I believe, moreover, that there is no viable alternative construal of the central claims of historical materialism, so that if my defence fails, historical materialism fails. Hence the cost incurred by Marxism, if I am wrong, is considerable.⁴³Cohen 1980, 129.Yet if Cohen was correct, then there is no hope for Marxism at all. Analytical Marxism represents the worst traits of academia. Alongside its obscure and obscurantist language, there is no relation between Analytical Marxism and the real life of the class struggle. In fact, Analytical Marxism was detached almost completely from any socialist or communist political movement and safely insulated inside academia. No effort was made to overcome this division. Minor exceptions aside, Analytical Marxism seemed oblivious to the major questions that have dogged Marxists for the last century: on the development of imperialism, socialist revolution, national liberation, and anti-fascism.

Regarding Cohen’s value, Burgis said: “Karl Marx’s Theory of History [is] a useful book for anyone who wants to think carefully about how history progresses — a subject of enduring relevance to anyone who wants to lose their chains.” To return to our opening question of whether socialists should consult Cohen to understand Marxism, we can offer a definitive no. It is little wonder that writers at Jacobin are attracted to Cohen’s stagist distortion of Marxism, since they advocate a long-term strategy of supporting the Democrats before ever engaging in socialist politics. It is very unlikely that anyone was ever radicalized by reading Cohen or the Analytical Marxists. Those wanting a defense of the revolutionary heart and soul of Marxism would do better to read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and others. They understood that Marxism was the theory and practice of proletarian revolution — something Analytical Marxists can never understand.