commentAlex Callinicos

The Limits of Political Marxism

It was hard to read Ellen Woods article Rational Choice Marxism: Isthe Game Worth the Candle? without mixed feelings.1 The generalthrust of her critique is undoubtedly correct: in the hands of JonElster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski et al., the attempt to reinter-pret historical materialism along methodological-individualist lineshas deprived the theory of much of its specificity and substance. She isalso right to set Rational Choice Marxism (RCM) alongside post-struc-turalism as the two main intellectual tendencies which, in the pastdecade or so, have provided the reaction against Marxism with a leftguise. Wood sought, however, not merely to demolish RCM, but to doso in part by demonstrating the existence of another, better version ofhistorical materialism. And here the difficulties begin. For while Ishare most of her criticisms of RCM (indeed, Ive made quite a few ofthem myself 2), her own account of what is distinctive to, and worthdefending in, Marxism seems to me seriously inadequate.

This account emerges most clearly where Wood discusses putativecandidates for a RCM theory of history (pp. 5975). She regards it as atacit acknowledgement of the inadequacy of RCM theories of exploit-ation and class such as that constructed by Roemer that they shouldrequire supplementation by some separate account of the sources ofhistorical change. Two such accounts are considered by Roemer in hisbook Free to Lose. One, G.A. Cohens restatement of orthodox histor-ical materialism, is indeed compatible with Roemers static models;but the reason why this is so, namely that the development of the pro-ductive forces provides an exogenous cause of social change, is indic-ative of the sense in which Cohens is not a proper theory of history,since it invokes to explain social transformations, not the propertiesinternal to the mode of production in question, but rather a trans-historical rationality which leads human beings in conditions ofscarcity to improve their methods of labour (pp. 6971). Wood lookswith much more favour on the other candidate, provided by the workof Robert Brenner, but argues both that his account of the transition

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1 NLR 177, SeptemberOctober 1989. All references in the text are to this article.2 See Alex Callinicos, Socialism, Justice, and Exploitation, Morell Studies in Toleration 16, 1985; Making History, Cambridge 1987, especially ch. 2; and Introduction: Analyt-ical Marxism, in Alex Callinicos, ed., Marxist Theory, Oxford 1989.

from feudalism to capitalism is inconsistent with the idea of anyhistorical necessity for less productive economic structures to befollowed by more productive ones, and that it involves a theory ofhistory whose focus is on the specificity of every mode of produc-tion, its endogenous logic of process, its own laws of motion, itscharacteristic crisesto use Brenners formula, its own rules of repro-duction, in both respects sitting ill with RCMs tendency to rely onexplanations derived from transhistorical features of human societies(pp. 68, 70).

This is by no means the first time that Wood has used Brenners workto distinguish her alternative reading of historical materialism fromCohens. Indeed, at one point she adopted for this reading the labelgiven to Brenners work by one of his Marxist critics, Guy Bois,namely political Marxism. Bois elaborates: It amounts to a volun-tarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced from allobjective contingencies, and, in the first place, from such laws ofdevelopment as may be peculiar to a specific mode of production.3Wood rejects the charge of voluntarism, but takes Marx himself to saythat capitalism is unique in its drive to revolutionize the productiveforces, while other modes of production have tended to conserve exist-ing forces (p. 70 n. 47). The explanatory force of the development ofthe productive forces is subject to severe limits; to understand socialchange we must look instead in the direction of class struggle as theoperative principle of historical movement.4 Thus the main sense inwhich historical explanation draws on features intrinsic to particularsocial systems seems to be that it identifies the specific form ofsurplus-extraction, thereby providing the context of the class struggleswhich provide the motor of change; as, for example, Brenner doeswhen he argues that the breakthrough to agrarian capitalism in Eng-land depended on the specific outcome there of the Europe-widestruggles between lord and peasant at the end of the Middle Ages.5

The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism

This is a version of Marxism that it is hard not to have great reserv-ations about. In part, these reservations stem from difficulties specificto Brenners account of the rise of agrarian capitalism. His writinghas undoubtedly provided a valuable corrective to those accounts ofthe transition to capitalism which, from Pirenne and Sweezy to Brau-del and Wallerstein, have accorded prime importance to the expan-sion of the world market.6 Brenner is, moreover, right to stress thecrucial role played by the emergence in England of a distinctively

3 Guy Bois, Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy, reprinted in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate, Cambridge 1985, p. 115. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Separation of the Economic and Political under Capitalism, NLR 127, MayJune 1981, pp. 758.4 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Marxism and the Course of History, NLR 147, SeptemberOctober 1984, pp. 101, 105.5 Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, reprinted in Aston and Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate.6 See especially Robert Brenner, The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism, NLR 104, JulyAugust 1977.

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capitalist agriculture, especially in making possible that countrysestablishment of first military and then industrial primacy over itsrivalsparticularly Franceafter 1689.7 Nevertheless, Brennersexclusive focus on agrarian capitalism has encouraged, perhaps con-trary to his own intentions, some wildly one-sided readings of the pro-cess of capitalist development. Probably the most lamentable exampleis George Comninels Rethinking the French Revolution (based, incident-ally, on a dissertation supervised by Wood), which argues that, sincethere was no equivalent in pre-revolutionary rural France of thecapitalwage-labour relations increasingly prevalent in the contem-porary English countryside, there simply were no capitalist relationsno appropriation of surplus-value, as opposed to commercial profit-takingthat can be attributed to the [French] bourgeoisie.8 Whatsuch arguments leave out of account is the extent to which earlymodern merchant capitalism, though still rooted in feudal socialrelations, provided a framework for the emergence of what Lenincalled transitional forms through which capital began to acquirecontrol over production.9 One such form was what Robin Blackburncalls the systemic slavery of the British and French West Indies, andlater Cuba, Brazil and the American South: the large-scale exploit-ation of slave labour, producing for the world market eithermass-consumption goods (sugar) or industrial inputs (cotton).1Proto-industrializationthe spread of rural industry, usuallyproducing textiles, often on the basis of the putting-out systemrepresented another form in which labour was partially subsumedunder capital, and arguably a more decisive one, since the abolition ofslavery led often to a fragmentation of productive units, while thelimitations of the putting-out system tended to drive capitalists tocentralize the labour process in the factory.11 The development ofagrarian capitalism, on which Brenner and his followers concentrate,was part of a much broader process through which bourgeois socialrelations progressively undermined the old feudal order.

But it is not simply doubts about the historical claims advanced byBrenner (or, perhaps better, by those influenced by him) which giveone pause when confronted with Woods employment of his work toconstruct political Marxism. Historical materialism explains socialtransformations as the outcome of two mechanisms: first, the struc-tural contradictions that arise between the development of the pro-ductive forces and the prevailing production relations; and secondly,

7 See Robert Brenner, The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, in Aston and Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate; and Bourgeois Revolution and the Transition to Capitalism, in A.L. Beier, ed., The First Modern Society, Cambridge, 1989. I discuss Brenners account of capitalist development in Making History, pp. 15772.8 George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, London 1987, p. 180. See the excel-lent critique by David McNally, A Bourgeois Revolution?, Socialist Worker (Toronto), August 1989.9 See V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Moscow 1967, ch. III. ChrisHarman offers a powerful critique of Brenners conception of the transition, in FromFeudalism to Capitalism, International Socialism 2: 45, 1990.10 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 17761848, Verso, London 1988. 11 See, for example, P. Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists, Leamington Spa 1983.

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and only in the context of the socio-economic crises generated by thesecontradictions, the class struggle. Capital does not only elucidate theconditions and forms of the extraction of surplus-value within theproduction process; it also locates capitalisms chronic liability torecurrent economic crises in the tendency of the rate of profit to fallthe form of the contradiction between the forces and relations ofproduction specific to that mode of production. Some of the greatestrecent triumphs of Marxist historiography have been to delineatemore precisely the nature of this contradiction in pre-capitalistmodes. As Perry Anderson points out, G.E.M. de Ste Croixs explan-ation of the decline of classical antiquity is an instance of the kind ofsystemic contradiction that occurs when the forces and relations of pro-duction enter into decisive contradiction with each other.12 Similarly,there is little doubt that, despite their disagreements, Brenner andBois have greatly advanced our understanding of the form taken bythe similar contradiction responsible for the late-medieval crisis offeudalism.13

A Sociology of Domination

The trouble is that Wood is plainly hostile to giving any explanatoryweight to structural contradictions between the forces and relations ofproduction. The proposition that history is propelled forward by theinevitable contradictions between forces and relations of production,contradictions that emerge as developing productive forces comeagainst the fetters imposed by production relations is, she says,vacuous.14 Wood also suggests that Marxs attachment to thisproposition represented an undeveloped phase of Marxs work, stilluncritically bound to classical bourgeois thought (p. 69), a claimdeveloped at great length by Comninel, who argues, implausibly, thatthe development of the productive forces is a central theme only ofThe German Ideology, which must therefore be consigned to the flamesas a piece of liberal materialist ideology, and plays no part in Capi-tal.15 But, once structural contradictions between the forces and rela-tions of production have been excised from historical materialism, itis not clear that what is left amounts to a theory of social transform-ation in any real sense. Class struggle alone cannot account for thetransition from one mode of production to another. Open or con-cealed conflict between exploiter and exploited is an endemic featureof class societies. But it assumes a greater intensity in periods of whatGramsci called organic crisis, where the very viability of the prevailing

12 Perry Anderson, Class Struggle in the Ancient World, History Workshop 16, Autumn 1983, p. 68. Compare G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London 1981, pp. 22659.13 See, in addition to the articles by Brenner cited above, Boiss magnificent Crise du fodalisme, Paris 1976.14 Wood, Marxism and the Course of History, p. 102.15 Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, p. 133. Brenner offers a much more serious version of this argument in The Social Basis of Economic Development, in John Roemer, ed., Analytical Marxism, Cambridge 1986, pp. 4048; but to address the issues he raises would require far greater space than I have here. See my discussion of Comninel on Marx in Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism, Inter-national Socialism 2: 43, 1989, pp. 1613.

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social system is placed in question.16 Marxism can only provide thetheory of history it purports to offer if it can explain the emergence ofsuch crises. To do so in terms of the class struggle itself, as some con-temporary versions of Marxist economic theory (for example, the capital logic school and regulation theory) tend, is not merely tocommit a vicious circularity, in which intensifying class struggleexplains intensifying class struggle; it is also to reduce historicalmaterialism to a voluntarist social theory, where the motor of changeis the clash of hostile class wills. Andrew Levine argues that versionsof Marxism that do not theorize transitions, that fail to postulate adirection of change between epochal structures, represent not amaterialist theory of history but a materialist sociology.17 Woods political Marxism is little more than a sociology of domination. It isgood that, unlike other such sociologies, chiefly of Weberian proven-ance, Woods attaches primacy to class exploitation, but it is very farfrom being enough.

The conflict between the forces and relations of production can onlyserve as a mechanism of social change if the productive forces tend todevelop and thereby become incompatible with existing relations. It isone of the great merits of Cohens Karl Marxs Theory of History to haveso forcefully redirected attention to this simple fact. Wood, whenseeking to evade its implications, resorts to Brenners argument thatthe rules of reproduction in pre-capitalist societies, in particular thefact that both producers and exploiters have direct, non-market accessto the means of subsistence, rules out the intensive development of theproductive forces, which becomes possible only when economicagents dependence on commodity production forces them to competeand therefore to innovate.18 But even if we readily grant that capital-ism is incomparably more dynamic a mode of production than itspredecessors, how far are we to take Brenners argument? He surelyisnt saying that there was no development of the productive forcesunder feudalism (the main pre-capitalist mode with which he con-cerns himself). Apart from being plainly false, such a claim conjuresup a vista of endless stagnation unlikely to issue in any new socialform. Brenners argument is better taken as setting limits to the devel-opment of the productive forces in pre-capitalist societies, and there-fore requires supplementation with an account of how such societiesnevertheless permit a degree of technological progress. The mostobvious candidate for such an account, Cohens Primacy Thesis, unfortunately wont do, for well-known reasonsits postulation of ageneral human interest in the development of the productive forces, its reliance on functional explanations, and its requirement that socialrevolutions are inevitable.19 But one can imagine some elements of aless vulnerable account. One is what Erik Olin Wright calls the weakimpulse for the productive forces to develop arising from, inter alia, thefact that under conditions in which increases in labour productivity

16 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, p. 178.17 Andrew Levine, The End of the State, London 1987, p. 104. 18 Brenner, Social Basis, passim.19 The locus classicus of these criticisms is Andrew Levine and Erik Olin Wright,Rationality and Class Struggle, NLR 123, SeptemberOctober 1980.

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have the consequence of reducing the toil of the direct producers, direct producers will in general have interests in developing the forcesof production.20 Another is an analysis of the mechanisms whichpermit specific pre-capitalist modes of production to achieve product-ive progress over their predecessors. One weakness of Brenners dis-cussion of pre-capitalist societies is his failure to differentiate betweenthem, so that slave and feudal modes of production are treated asrepresenting the same level of development, which, once again, illaccords with the historical record.21

Whatever the merits of these suggestions, they do point to the centralflaw common both to Wood andin as much as she draws on his his-toriographyto Brenner, namely a unilateral concentration on classexploitation and struggle in the explanation of social transformation. One can speculate about the reasons for thissome good (a rejectionof the technological determinism of Second International Marxism), others less so (Wood eschews any discussion of RCMs critique of thelabour theory of valuean unnecessary concession which, oncemade, makes it difficult to accord proper importance to the theory ofcrises that provides the objective context of Marxs strategy ofsocialist revolution). But whatever the reasons, the voluntarism ofWoods political Marxism is disabling, undermining any claim itmight have to constitute an adequate alternative to RCMs collapseinto social democracy.

20 Erik Olin Wright, Giddenss Critique of Marx, NLR 138, MarchApril 1983, p. 28.Wood does at one point endorse this argument: see Marxism and the Course of His-tory, pp. 101102, n. 16. But she doesnt seem to realize that the weak impulse for the forces to develop creates what Wright calls a dynamic asymmetry between the forces and relations, such that eventually the forces will reach a point at which they are fettered, that is, a point at which further development is impossible in the absence of transformation in the relations of production. Giddenss Critique of Marx, p. 29.21 Brenner, Social Basis, pp. 323, n. 6.

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