G.A.Cohen’s Study Of Marx’s Theory Of History

GA.Cohen was the top-three pioneers in Analytical Marxism,whose representative work is the Karl Marx’s Theory of History:A Defense that offered academics an‘analytical’ way of interpreting Marx’s materialist conception of history different from that of Soviet Marxism and Structural Marxism and earned long-lasting significant influences in the English-speaking circle of Marxian study.When Cohen began his study of Marxian theory during the 1960s,Soviet traditional Marxism,especially the Stalinist interpretation of it,had staged into a frozen situation and faced criticisms and hostility from the Western academy as they were always tried to interpret historical materialism according to the expressions and arguments of Marx himself.This was seen by the Western scholars as a simple repeat of Marx rather than a demonstration or defense,and showed the huge gap that was hard to accept from the mainstream research methods and the way of speaking in Western philosophical and social theories.While against the humanist atmosphere in the so-called Western Marxism,Althusser and his supporters developed a structural Marxism that represented the theoretical efforts of turning back to the right scientific interpretation of historical materialism by Engels and traditional Marxists and won its influences across Britain and American.But scholars taught by analytic philosophy thought that the way in which Althusser talked about Marx was not accurate enough,offering no new analysis of Marx’s basic concepts and ideas distinguished from traditional Marxism and rigor definition and demonstration for his own notions of structural causality and over-determination.To get rid of the Arthusserian vagueness for the sake of fully understanding Marx,Cohen dedicated to bring a methodological innovation into the study of Marxian theory of history in English-speaking circle.For doing so,Cohen introduced analytical methods developed in analytical philosophy to demonstrate Marx’s theory of history,rather than to take Marxism as truisms that needs no arguments.Of course,Cohen knew well that Marx was dialectical in terms of his own methodology and his thoughts in general,but claimed that Marx did not take dialectics as a logical tool for demonstrating his ideas and so did not contradict or refuse formal logic.Then in the level of representing and demonstrating,we can use analytic methods to do a new analytical defense for the fundamentals in historical materialism.In other words,to get Western academy familiar with analytic philosophy to understand Marx’s dialectical thoughts easily,it is desirable and possible to employ analytic methods to represent and argue for Marx’s theory of history.In Cohen’s analytical research on Marx’s theory of history,the academic results is to do a conceptual analysis,logical argument and functional explanation of the fundamental principles,such as productive forces determine productive relations,economic basis determines superstructure,social reality determines social consciousness and the later react to the former respectively in historical materialism.Cohen claimed that the way productive forces determining productive relations entails exactly that the productive relations must possess the function of developing or maintaining productive forces,and that the themes of productive forces determine productive relations and that of relations react well to develop forces is two expressions of the one statement.Following the same analytic procedure,Cohen regarded the sum of productive relations,not including the productive forces,as the real economic basis of superstructure,which is determined by the economic basis just because of the fact that basis needs the superstructure that has to be functional in supporting the basis to develop productive forces in turn.To specify the dialectical relationship between social existence and social consciousness,Cohen thought that the former refers to the social position or roles an individual takes in a society while the later refers to a person’s social believes and values about society.The social consciousness is determined by social reality,which means that the social consciousness must be functional to maintain or strengthen social existences.In class society,people’s social positions are different and the dominant ideology functions to support ruling class’s social position against the ruled class whose own revolutionary consciousness will function to make working people aware of the conflicts and fight them out.Generally speaking,what Cohen had done in defending historical materialism consists three aspects:first was to re-write Marx’s dialectical thoughts by analytic methods;second was to offer a logical argument for Marx’s ideas;third was to qualify Marx’s theory of history,that is to interpret historical materialism as a functional explanation according to his own understanding.In doing so,Cohen’s contributions in studying Marxist philosophy consist of three elements:first,as Marxism was initially not an academic theory,but a kind of revolutionary theory appealing to people’s practices,and so can’t be simply measured by theoretical standards of the West,Cohen’s conceptual analysis and logical arguments makes Marx’s conception of history more rigorous,this is of the positive sense;second,at the end of 19th century,social sciences stayed at the stage of un-differentiation with a mixture of all disciplines,it was Cohen devoting to transform Marxian theory of history into a differentiated and specialized scientific theory suitable to 20th century standards that attracts further interests and efforts from English-speaking academy,which is of developmental sense in academic terms;third,Marxism had much less influence before the second world war in English-speaking world,and stayed at the margin in Western philosophy because of the different way of speaking,Cohen made Marxism more popular and earned the academic right to speak among contemporary philosophy and social science by employing the dominant analytic methods to specify the main contents of historical materialism.But alongside the advances Cohen brought in the conceptual anallysis and logical arguments for historical materialism,what he had done also invoked some problems that leads to the ossification of Marxism and lose its richness in theory and potentials in practice.In particular,his functional explanations achieved to understand the dialectical relation between productive forces and productive relations in terms of material and form,and then understand economic basis and superstructure in terms of structure and function,but failed to realize that Marx regards Darwin not only dismissed traditional teleology but also gave an reasonable interpretation of it,and so tried to understand social existence and social consciousness by the same categories of structure and function,and then refused to go further to understand them in terms of purpose and means to reach the height of Marx’s notion of functional teleonomy.These problems cause Cohen turning from analytical Marxism back to political philosophy,from which it is worthy for us to get some lessons.