On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:38:31 +1100 Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com>
writes:
> This was in the London Review of Books a couple weeks ago, seems
> relevant to certain discussions on here of late.
>
> Happy Campers
> Ellen Meiksins Wood
>
> Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen
> Princeton, 83 pp, £10.95, September 2009, ISBN 978 0 691 14361
> 3
>
> ‘Socialism’, Albert Einstein said, is humanity’s attempt ‘to
> overcome
> and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development’, and
> for
> G.A. Cohen ‘every market
is a system of predation.’ That is the
> essence of his short but trenchant and elegantly written last book
> –
> Cohen died last August. His object is to make what he calls a
> ‘preliminary’ case – a tentative case that may, in the end, be
> defeated by inescapable realities – for a socialist alternative. Is
> it
> desirable, he asks, and if desirable is it feasible, to construct a
> society driven by something other than predation, which doesn’t
> answer
> to the ‘shabby’, ‘base’, ‘repugnant’ motivations of the market but
> is
> guided instead by a moral commitment to community and equality?
>
> In his characteristically lucid, engaging and gently humorous
> style,
> Cohen begins by imagining a group of people on a camping trip. In
> such
> circumstances, he suggests, most people would ‘strongly favour a
> socialist form of life over feasible alternatives’, conducting
> themselves on principles of equality and community very different
> from
> normal market behaviour. The question is whether these camping trip
> principles could or should be implemented throughout society. His
> view
> is that it would be desirable, in order to avoid the inevitably
> unjust
> results of market mechanisms and the inequalities associated with
> them. But is it also feasible? On this, the jury is still out. It
> is
> important, Cohen insists, to distinguish between two contrasting
> kinds
> of obstacle, the limits of human nature and the limits of social
> technology; and he concludes that our main problem is not human
> selfishness but ‘our lack of a suitable organisational technology’.
> It
> is, in other words, a problem of design. But just because we don’t
> yet
> know how to design the social machinery that would make socialism
> work, this doesn’t mean we never can or never will.
>
> Cohen considers the idea of ‘market socialism’: a system that would
> still be based on the price mechanism but would prevent the
> concentration of capital that produces the gross inequalities of
> the
> capitalist market. On balance, this would, for him, be better than
> nothing. It is ‘the genius of the market that it recruits low-grade
> motives to desirable ends’, but what market socialists forget is
> that
> it also has undesirable effects and that even their kind of market
> must be driven by those ‘shabby’ motives. So he would still prefer
> to
> look for a means of achieving productive economic effects based on
> other motives.
>
> The moral preoccupations of Cohen’s philosophy and, in his analysis
> of
> markets, his emphasis on the morality of motives, may at first seem
> very distant, even diametrically opposed, to the work that first
> made
> his name, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). The
> Guardian’s obituary for Cohen, which described him as ‘arguably the
> leading political philosopher of the left’, called the book a
> ‘revolutionary reinterpretation of Marxist theory’. In fact what
> Cohen
> produced was even more daring. It was less a reinterpretation of
> Marx
> than an uncompromising defence of the most orthodox interpretation.
His interpretation of historical materialism was arguably the one favored by Kautsky and Plekhanov at the time of the Second International and which was retained later on in the Third International. Cohen himself having grownup within the milieu of the Communist Party of Canada. What was new about the book was not the interpretation that he offered of historical materialism but the methodology that he relied upon to defend it.
>
> It is true, as the Guardian observed, that what Cohen and his
> ‘analytic Marxist’ colleagues liked to call ‘non-bullshit Marxism’
> dragged Marxist theory ‘into mainstream bourgeois social science’
> by
> applying to it the linguistic and logical techniques of analytical
> philosophy; and this alone was a considerable feat. The theory he
> was
> defending, the substance of which was a technological determinism,
> may
> have owed less to Marx himself than to later interpreters like
> Georgi
> Plekhanov; but it had become the essence of historical materialism
> as
> understood by both Communist Party ideologues and the most rabid
> anti-Marxists. What made Cohen’s project still more remarkable was
> that, by the time his defence was published, this orthodoxy had
> been
> powerfully challenged, especially by historians working in the
> Marxist
> tradition, from E.P. Thompson to Robert Brenner; and the old
> technological determinism was already giving way to very different
> interpretations of Marx.
In my own view Alan Carling's selectionist interpretation of historical materialism builds upon Cohen's work while deemphasizing his technological determinism and increasing the scope for the role of contingency in the making of history. His approach offers a way for understanding the relationship of necessity and contingency in history that is analogous to the relationship between necessity and contingency in Darwinian biology.
www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/cspt/papers/2002/carling02.pdf http://www.scienceandsociety.com/editorial_apr06.html http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2000w43/msg00246.htm http://tinyurl.com/64ko2e http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2002-February/017528. html http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2002-February/017529. html
> if only because, once discovered, no advance is ever likely to
> disappear completely. But the overriding compulsion constantly to
> improve the technical forces of production is not a general law of
> history. It is – for better or worse – specific to one social form,
> capitalism. Its particular mode of exploitation, unlike any other,
> creates an unavoidable compulsion, as a condition of survival, to
> improve the productivity, and thus to lower the cost, of labour in
> order to compete and to maximise profit.
In Carling's interpretation, there is a general tendency over historical time for the forces of production to advance because societies with more advanced forces of production tend to do better than other rival societies in terms of both economic competition and political/military competion.
>
> Although the historical inevitabilities of Cohen’s technological
> determinism were translated by other analytic Marxists into the
> language of ‘rational choice’, there seemed little scope in it for
> moral choice or motivation as driving forces of history. Yet his
> career thereafter was devoted to the question of socialist justice
> and
> equality, which stands at the core of this last book. This seems a
> very long way from his own brand of Marxism; and since he came to
> describe himself as an ‘ex-Marxist’, we may be tempted to leave it
> at
> that: to conclude that, having repudiated Marxism, and with it any
> illusions about the necessary course of history, he was free to
> think
> about socialism not as a historical inevitability but as a moral
> choice.
>
> Yet that is too simple. If we consider Cohen’s Marxism against
> other
> available versions, what is striking is the congruence between his
> early technological determinism and his later moral philosophy.
> This
> is so not only in the sense that he remained passionately
> committed,
> from beginning to end, as an ex-Marxist no less than as an orthodox
> Marxist, to socialist values and especially to equality. The theory
> of
> history is connected to the moral philosophy also in the sense that
> both are at bottom ahistorical. This is obvious enough as a comment
> on
> the logical abstractions of analytic philosophy, but it may seem an
> odd thing to say about a theory of history. The point is simply
> that
> it’s very hard to sustain this kind of transhistorical determinism
> without disengaging from the processes of history: not only the
> particularities and the contingencies of time and place but the
> distinctive operating principles of each historically specific mode
> of
> organising social life.
As some commentators have noted there is a certain underlying similarity between Cohen's understanding of Marxism and Althusser's, despite their fundamental differences. Indeed, Cohen in the preface to *Karl Marx's Theory of History* gave a kind of backhanded acknowledgement to Althusser, pointing out that he had correctly (in Cohen's view) placed due emphasis on Marx's later work, especially, *Capital*, as opposed to Marx's earlier writings like the *1844 Manuscripts*. At the same time, Cohen took Althusser to task for the obscurities of his theorizing. And yet both Cohen and Althusser can be seen as sharing a kind of ahistorical approach to the theory of history.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ____________________________________________________________ Banking Click here to find the perfect banking opportunity! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=-7HYuPPKNqHGY9LOCwb4hQAAJ1DoEMrytxsVXKlEh0tvqeWlAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAXeAAAAAA=