Marx's interpretation of history

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REVIEWS MARXISM AND HISTORY: THE CURRENT DEBATE

Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defeuse, G. A. Cohen (P~n~ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), xii + 361 pp., $18.50. Marx and Hiitory: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future, D. Ross Gandy (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1979), 190 pp., $14.95 History and Human Existence: From Marx to Me&au-Ponty, James Miller (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 287 pp., $14.95 Marx’s Interpretation of History, Melvin Rader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), xxiii + 242 pp., $4.95 paperbound. Marx’s Theory of History, William Shaw (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 202 pp., $12.50. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, E. P. Thompson (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 404 pp., $16.00. The past five years have witnessed a reawakening of scholarly interest in the theoretical and methodological foundations of historical materialism. Originating from a number of independent sources, several new studies have brought our understanding of Marx’s theory of history to new levels of interpretive and technical sophistication. In Karl Marx’s Theory ofHi.wory: A Defense (1978), for instance, the British philosopher G. A. Cohen has employed the methods of analytic philosophy as an aid in understanding the nature of productive forces, of the relation between infra- and superstructure, and of the difference between use-value and exchange-value. In Marx’s Theory ofHistory (1978), Cohen’s student William Shaw has developed a new definition of technology in order to investigate the operation of what Marx terms ‘productive forces’. The American philosopher Melvin Rader has looked at Marx’s approach to history as a much more flexible interpretation of Marxism: while in Marx and History: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future (1979), D. Ross Gandy, a historian of ideas, argues for a non-reductive, non-fundamentalist approach to historical materialism. James Miller in History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Panty (1979) demonstrates the importance of twentieth-century Marxist humanists both to the interpretation of Marx himself and to the present-day intellectual respectability of Marxist theory. In The Poverty of Theory and Orher Essays (1978). the social historian E. P. Thompson has re-examined the historicalcausal power of Marx’s analysis of these productive forces and has constructed his own notion of ‘experience’ as a central category in the understanding of all social transformations. 483

484

Reviews

All together these studies have avoided a discussion of historical materialism as a form of ‘historicism’ and of Marx’s view of history as a ‘philosophy’ of inevitable development. Instead they have insisted upon a clearer understanding of Marx’s historical practices and a more thorough comprehension of his methodology. Speaking of his own work (but making a claim which is equally true of all of these studies, (Cohen declares that he has eschewed Marx’s ‘philosophy of history’ for his ‘theory of history. which is not a reflective construal, from a distance, of what happens, but a contribution to the understanding of its inner dynamic’ (Cohen, p. 27). To Shaw this move to theory means a ‘return to basics’, to a reinterpretation of the fundamental categories of historical change; and even Gandy focuses upon what he calls the multilinear dimension of Marx’s theory of history as opposed to the official Soviet and Chinese linear view (Shaw, pp. 4-5; Gandy, pp. 3-12). As a result of this latest wave of interest in historical materialism. Marx himself has emerged not only as a theorist of the historical process (as opposed to a philosopher of it) but also as a working historian. Although these studies have undeniably added to an understanding of specific issues in Marx’s theory of history, it is still questionable whether they have ahered our overall inte~retation of historical materialism. Without too much difficulty the works of Cohen and Shaw, Rader, Gandy, Miller and Thompson can be seen within the, by now well-known, orthodox/revisionist framework which has dominated almost all discussions on the nature of Marxism since the 1920s. Cohen’s book is clearly entitled ‘A Defense’, and along with Shaw’s, is a self-conscious attempt to retest a version of classical Marxism. Their Marxism is scientific and objective, structural (not structurafist) and causal. It is an impersonal science of ‘the growth of human productive forces’ (in the case of Cohen) or of a ‘technological determinant reading of Marx’ (in the case of Shaw). These works aim at re-establishing with fulI vigour what Russell Jacobi has called ‘automatic Marxism’, a form of Marxism which transforms history into an autonomous process and reduces human activity to an insignificant level (Cohen. p. x; Shaw, pp. 2.5-6). On the other side, the various forms of non-scientific Marxism seem like so many updated versions of Marxist humanism. Both Rader and Gandy attempt to explicate Marx’s theory of history from a non-reductionist perspective without, at the same time, falling into the error of making Marxism a mere eclectic bundle of insights and ideas. Although these two attempts show how flexible Marx’s theory of history originally was - an important argument to certain critics of Marxism - they are, nonetheless, more introductions, than advanced anaiyses, of their subject. Miller’s book is an excellent intellectual history of Marxist humanism and its continuing intellectual importance. To Miller, Marx’s original combination of an insight into individual emancipation with a theory of deterministic science of historical development was lost by his immediate successions. The humanism not only of Lukacs and Gramsci but also the members of the Frankfurt School and especially the ‘existential Marxism’ of Sartre and Merleau-Panty are interpreted as various attempts to restore a lost ‘sense of subjectivity’. Compared with these humanistic re-readings of Marx or of the Marxist

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tradition, Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory is of an altogether different order. He explicitly defines his present position as the one he had originally worked out in the 1930s and 1940s under the label ‘cultural Marxism’ (Thompson, pp. E&f., 340%). With this new interest in (‘theory’) and with all the technical sophistication resulting from the close analyses of specific concepts and methods, these current discussions, nonetheless, seem to return to the traditional problems of the formation of social classes, the development of class-consciousness, the relation of the intra- to the superstructure, and the rationality or inevitability of the historical process. Irrespective of their stance within Marxist debates, these scholars have continued to work within certain well-established, but nonetheless unexamined presuppositions concerning Marx’s own understanding of the historical process. They have overlooked, thereby, certain basic questions on the very nature of historical materialism itself. These oversights can be grouped under the general heading of the problem of the origins - meant in both its historical as well as its theoretical sense - of historical materialism These recent studies are not only unconcerned with the question of the intellectual-historical context from which this theory arose but are also equally indifferent to the problem of why Marx moved to a historical mode of understanding in the first place. Unsettled issues still hover around such basic questions as why Marx initially constituted his chosen field of investigation as a historically defined field and how he established the theoretical foundations for the scientific investigation of it. To such questions these recent writers have either naively relied on certain stray remarks made by Marx himself or simply restated the more complex arguments from such earlier Marxist scholars as Lukacs and those of the Frankfurt School. Whichever route they have taken, they have assumed that Marx derived and adopted his historical sense from Hegel or at least from the Left Hegelians. Rader and Gandy restate the oft-repeated interpretation that Marx simply ‘inverted’ Hegel in order to establish an all-embracing dialectical science of human history. More interestingly, Cohen, who on the one hand consistently argues against all forms of Hegelian and humanistic revisionism on the level of theory, nevertheless presents an impressive argument in which he affirms that Marx’s historical theory arose from a critical appropriation of Hegel’s insight into history as a dialectical process of human alienation (Cohen, p. x). Only Thompson breaks from this mold and challenges the interpretation of Marx’s transformation of Hegelian dialectics into historical materialism. For his tastes, Thompson would like to declare an ‘absolute embargo’ upon the very mention of Hegel’s name in all such discussions. And while he quickly admits that such a suggestion is absurd, he nonetheless goes on to construct a rather eccentric interpretation of the origins of Marx’s views of history which combines Vito’s understanding of an immanent process within history with William Blake’s notion of dialectical development - a rather far-fetched piece of intellectual history at that (Thompson, pp. 81ff.). These questions on the origin of Marx’s theory of history are neither of merely scholarly interest nor of secondary concern for an understanding of the theory itself. However refined Marx’s economic analyses, and even

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however self-consistent his theory of society may be shown to be, these analyses and theories still originate in, and continue to be dependent upon. his initial definition of the historical process. Such a study still waits to be written. Benjamin University of Kansas

C. Sax