Karl Marx's Theory of History

If the base explains the rest, the next question is what explains the base — what makes it move at all. Cohen's answer, drawn from Marx, is deceptively simple. Human beings are rational and somewhat inventive, they face scarcity, and so over the long run they tend to improve their productive powers. Knowledge accumulates; nobody willingly forgets a better technique. This gives history a direction. The forces of production have a persistent tendency to grow.

The economic relations, then, are selected for their fit with that growth. A given set of relations — say, feudal ties between lord and serf — takes hold and lasts as long as it houses and encourages the development of the forces. When those relations start to fetter further growth, when they hold back techniques that could otherwise flourish, they come under pressure and are eventually replaced by relations that suit the new level of power. History moves through a sequence of economic structures, each rising when it best develops production and falling when it no longer does.

The theory earns its keep at the transitions, and the sharpest example is the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Under feudalism, land was worked by peasants bound to lords, tied down by custom, obligation, and local authority. That arrangement fit a world of limited technique. But as commerce spread, as towns and trade and new methods of production grew, those bonds became a fetter. Capitalism offered a different set of relations: free laborers who owned nothing but their capacity to work, and owners who commanded the means of production and hired that labor for a wage.

This is where class enters, and where Cohen keeps class in careful proportion. Marx is famous for the line that all history is the history of class struggle, and the struggle is real — between lord and serf, between capitalist and worker. But in Cohen's reconstruction the classes are not the deepest layer. Which classes exist, and which one is on the rise, is set by the economic structure, which is in turn set by the level of productive power. Class conflict is the mechanism through which the deeper changes work themselves out, the human drama that carries the underlying logic. People fight; but what they can fight over is framed by where production has arrived.

Step back from the machinery and a larger question comes into view, and it is the one Cohen most wanted to force. What kind of claim is Marx's theory of history? It is easy to read Marx as a moralist promising justice, or a prophet announcing an inevitable dawn. Cohen's whole procedure refuses both. He treats historical materialism as a would-be science: an empirical hypothesis about how societies change, one that stands or falls on evidence and argument rather than on hope. That reframing is bracing, and it cuts against much of what both admirers and enemies of Marx assume.

The cost of the reframing is that it exposes the theory to defeat. If the driver of history is the tendency of productive powers to grow, and if economic structures survive only so long as they serve that growth, then the twentieth century poses hard questions. Capitalism did not obligingly fetter the forces and hand over to the proletariat. Revolutions came, when they came, in poor agrarian countries rather than advanced industrial ones — nearly the reverse of what the theory seemed to predict. A defense worth the name has to sit with that.

Cohen's book ends less like a manifesto than like a careful audit. He had pulled from Marx a genuine theory — productive forces tending to grow, economic relations rising and falling by how well they serve that growth, class struggle carrying the change through — and he had stated it precisely enough to be judged. The materialism comes first, the classes follow from it, and the whole sequence points, in Marx's telling, toward a society beyond class. Whether history obliges is another matter, and Cohen was too honest to pretend it plainly had.