This has been a bad summer for left wing intellectuals. The radical
political economists Giovanni Arrighi and Peter Gowan died within a
few days of one another in June. And then last week the socialist
philosopher GA “Jerry” Cohen died suddenly at the age of 68.
Jerry is best known for his 1978 book Karl Marx’s Theory of History—a
Defence. This restated and defended the materialist theory of history
that Marx developed in The German Ideology and succinctly outlined in
the 1859 Preface To A Contribution To The Critique Of Political Economy.
In this view of history, societies rise and fall in as much as they
tend to develop the productive forces. Most of the Marxist left from
Marx’s time onwards had largely taken this orthodox historical
materialism for granted.
Cohen described the book as “homage to the plain Marxism” that he had
learned from his parents and the broader Communist community to which
they belonged during his childhood in Quebec at the height of the Cold
War.
By the 1960s and 1970s, however, this “plain Marxism” was
unfashionable. Many of those radicalised by the mass movements of the
time dismissed the emphasis on the development of the productive
forces in the 1859 Preface as “technological determinism” that gave no
importance to ideas or to class struggle.
Cohen’s book also cut against the grain of the contemporary left in a
second way. The rediscovery of Marxism during the 1960s and 1970s
typically favoured one or other philosopher from continental Europe,
notably Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser.
By contrast Cohen developed his interpretation of Marx by drawing on
the analytical philosophy dominant in US and British universities.
This emphasised explicitly defining concepts and spelling out the
steps in an argument.
Original
Jerry carried off this project in such a clever and original way that
he helped to shift the balance of argument back to recognising the
fundamental role of the development of the productive forces in
bringing about historical change.
A less fortunate offspring of the book was the emergence of a school
of “Analytical Marxism”. This was a group of talented but ambitious
scholars who sought to make Marxism compatible with mainstream
approaches in English-speaking philosophy and social science.
Bizarrely, this particularly involved trying to marry Marx to
“rational-choice theory”. This is a very influential academic doctrine
that seeks to reduce social life to the actions of self-interested
individuals.
Not surprisingly, very little of Marx survived processing by rational-
choice theory.
Jerry’s position was more nuanced. Having initially resisted the turn
to rational-choice theory, he later capitulated to it. But he never
completely abandoned the Marxism he had defended in his first book.
Cohen’s later work was closer to more mainstream political philosophy.
He concentrated particularly on developing a theory of social justice
in which the ideal of equality played a central role.
One could interpret this shift as an embrace of the academic
establishment. Jerry was Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory at Oxford University until his retirement last year, and
sometimes he seemed a little too comfortable with Oxford’s peculiarly
privileged life.
But Cohen’s commitment to socialism remained much more than
theoretical. He strongly criticised New Labour’s backsliding from the
idea of equality. And he retained something of the style of his
Communist upbringing.
I can remember debating with Jerry at the Socialist Workers Party’s
annual Marxism festival in the 1990s. To illustrate an argument, he
sang the old American union song “Solidarity Forever”.
There aren’t many philosophers, at Oxford or elsewhere, who would or
could do that. I shall remember Jerry Cohen for his unique mixture of
analytical brilliance and gut socialism.