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Alex Callinicos

The Limits of Political Marxism

It was hard to read Ellen Woods article Rational Choice Marxism: Is

the Game Worth the Candle? without mixed feelings.1 The general
thrust of her critique is undoubtedly correct: in the hands of Jon
Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski et al., the attempt to reinterpret historical materialism along methodological-individualist lines
has deprived the theory of much of its specificity and substance. She is
also right to set Rational Choice Marxism (RCM) alongside post-structuralism as the two main intellectual tendencies which, in the past
decade or so, have provided the reaction against Marxism with a left
guise. Wood sought, however, not merely to demolish RCM, but to do
so in part by demonstrating the existence of another, better version of
historical materialism. And here the difficulties begin. For while I
share most of her criticisms of RCM (indeed, Ive made quite a few of
them myself 2), her own account of what is distinctive to, and worth
defending in, Marxism seems to me seriously inadequate.
This account emerges most clearly where Wood discusses putative
candidates for a RCM theory of history (pp. 5975). She regards it as a
tacit acknowledgement of the inadequacy of RCM theories of exploitation and class such as that constructed by Roemer that they should
require supplementation by some separate account of the sources of
historical change. Two such accounts are considered by Roemer in his
book Free to Lose. One, G.A. Cohens restatement of orthodox historical materialism, is indeed compatible with Roemers static models;
but the reason why this is so, namely that the development of the productive forces provides an exogenous cause of social change, is indicative of the sense in which Cohens is not a proper theory of history,
since it invokes to explain social transformations, not the properties
internal to the mode of production in question, but rather a transhistorical rationality which leads human beings in conditions of
scarcity to improve their methods of labour (pp. 6971). Wood looks
with much more favour on the other candidate, provided by the work
of Robert Brenner, but argues both that his account of the transition
1

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

NLR

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from feudalism to capitalism is inconsistent with the idea of any

historical necessity for less productive economic structures to be
followed by more productive ones, and that it involves a theory of
history whose focus is on the specificity of every mode of production, its endogenous logic of process, its own laws of motion, its
characteristic crisesto use Brenners formula, its own rules of reproduction, in both respects sitting ill with RCMs tendency to rely on
explanations derived from transhistorical features of human societies
(pp. 68, 70).
This is by no means the first time that Wood has used Brenners work
to distinguish her alternative reading of historical materialism from
Cohens. Indeed, at one point she adopted for this reading the label
given to Brenners work by one of his Marxist critics, Guy Bois,
namely political Marxism. Bois elaborates: It amounts to a voluntarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced from all
objective contingencies, and, in the first place, from such laws of
development as may be peculiar to a specific mode of production.3
Wood rejects the charge of voluntarism, but takes Marx himself to say
that capitalism is unique in its drive to revolutionize the productive
forces, while other modes of production have tended to conserve existing forces (p. 70 n. 47). The explanatory force of the development of
the productive forces is subject to severe limits; to understand social
change we must look instead in the direction of class struggle as the
operative principle of historical movement.4 Thus the main sense in
which historical explanation draws on features intrinsic to particular
social systems seems to be that it identifies the specific form of
surplus-extraction, thereby providing the context of the class struggles
which provide the motor of change; as, for example, Brenner does
when he argues that the breakthrough to agrarian capitalism in England depended on the specific outcome there of the Europe-wide
struggles 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 reservations about. In part, these reservations stem from difficulties specific
to Brenners account of the rise of agrarian capitalism. His writing
has undoubtedly provided a valuable corrective to those accounts of
the transition to capitalism which, from Pirenne and Sweezy to Braudel and Wallerstein, have accorded prime importance to the expansion of the world market.6 Brenner is, moreover, right to stress the
crucial 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, September
October 1984, pp. 101, 105.
5
Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrial 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 countrys

establishment of first military and then industrial primacy over its
rivalsparticularly Franceafter 1689.7 Nevertheless, Brenners
exclusive focus on agrarian capitalism has encouraged, perhaps contrary to his own intentions, some wildly one-sided readings of the process of capitalist development. Probably the most lamentable example
is George Comninels Rethinking the French Revolution (based, incidentally, on a dissertation supervised by Wood), which argues that, since
there was no equivalent in pre-revolutionary rural France of the
capitalwage-labour relations increasingly prevalent in the contemporary English countryside, there simply were no capitalist relations
no appropriation of surplus-value, as opposed to commercial profittakingthat can be attributed to the [French] bourgeoisie.8 What
such arguments leave out of account is the extent to which early
modern merchant capitalism, though still rooted in feudal social
relations, provided a framework for the emergence of what Lenin
called transitional forms through which capital began to acquire
control over production.9 One such form was what Robin Blackburn
calls the systemic slavery of the British and French West Indies, and
later Cuba, Brazil and the American South: the large-scale exploitation of slave labour, producing for the world market either
mass-consumption goods (sugar) or industrial inputs (cotton).1
Proto-industrializationthe spread of rural industry, usually
producing textiles, often on the basis of the putting-out system
represented another form in which labour was partially subsumed
under capital, and arguably a more decisive one, since the abolition of
slavery led often to a fragmentation of productive units, while the
limitations of the putting-out system tended to drive capitalists to
centralize the labour process in the factory.11 The development of
agrarian capitalism, on which Brenner and his followers concentrate,
was part of a much broader process through which bourgeois social
relations progressively undermined the old feudal order.
But it is not simply doubts about the historical claims advanced by
Brenner (or, perhaps better, by those influenced by him) which give
one pause when confronted with Woods employment of his work to
construct political Marxism. Historical materialism explains social
transformations as the outcome of two mechanisms: first, the structural contradictions that arise between the development of the productive 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 excellent 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. Chris
Harman offers a powerful critique of Brenners conception of the transition, in From
Feudalism 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 these

contradictions, the class struggle. Capital does not only elucidate the
conditions and forms of the extraction of surplus-value within the
production process; it also locates capitalisms chronic liability to
recurrent economic crises in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
the form of the contradiction between the forces and relations of
production specific to that mode of production. Some of the greatest
recent triumphs of Marxist historiography have been to delineate
more precisely the nature of this contradiction in pre-capitalist
modes. As Perry Anderson points out, G.E.M. de Ste Croixs explanation of the decline of classical antiquity is an instance of the kind of
systemic contradiction that occurs when the forces and relations of production enter into decisive contradiction with each other.12 Similarly,
there is little doubt that, despite their disagreements, Brenner and
Bois have greatly advanced our understanding of the form taken by
the similar contradiction responsible for the late-medieval crisis of
feudalism.13
A Sociology of Domination

The trouble is that Wood is plainly hostile to giving any explanatory

weight to structural contradictions between the forces and relations of
production. The proposition that history is propelled forward by the
inevitable contradictions between forces and relations of production,
contradictions that emerge as developing productive forces come
against the fetters imposed by production relations is, she says,
vacuous.14 Wood also suggests that Marxs attachment to this
proposition represented an undeveloped phase of Marxs work, still
uncritically bound to classical bourgeois thought (p. 69), a claim
developed at great length by Comninel, who argues, implausibly, that
the development of the productive forces is a central theme only of
The German Ideology, which must therefore be consigned to the flames
as a piece of liberal materialist ideology, and plays no part in Capital.15 But, once structural contradictions between the forces and relations of production have been excised from historical materialism, it
is not clear that what is left amounts to a theory of social transformation in any real sense. Class struggle alone cannot account for the
transition from one mode of production to another. Open or concealed conflict between exploiter and exploited is an endemic feature
of class societies. But it assumes a greater intensity in periods of what
Gramsci 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, International Socialism 2: 43, 1989, pp. 1613.
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social system is placed in question.16 Marxism can only provide the

theory of history it purports to offer if it can explain the emergence of
such crises. To do so in terms of the class struggle itself, as some contemporary versions of Marxist economic theory (for example, the
capital logic school and regulation theory) tend, is not merely to
commit a vicious circularity, in which intensifying class struggle
explains intensifying class struggle; it is also to reduce historical
materialism to a voluntarist social theory, where the motor of change
is the clash of hostile class wills. Andrew Levine argues that versions
of Marxism that do not theorize transitions, that fail to postulate a
direction of change between epochal structures, represent not a
materialist theory of history but a materialist sociology.17 Woods
political Marxism is little more than a sociology of domination. It is
good that, unlike other such sociologies, chiefly of Weberian provenance, Woods attaches primacy to class exploitation, but it is very far
from being enough.
The conflict between the forces and relations of production can only
serve as a mechanism of social change if the productive forces tend to
develop and thereby become incompatible with existing relations. It is
one of the great merits of Cohens Karl Marxs Theory of History to have
so forcefully redirected attention to this simple fact. Wood, when
seeking to evade its implications, resorts to Brenners argument that
the rules of reproduction in pre-capitalist societies, in particular the
fact that both producers and exploiters have direct, non-market access
to the means of subsistence, rules out the intensive development of the
productive forces, which becomes possible only when economic
agents dependence on commodity production forces them to compete
and therefore to innovate.18 But even if we readily grant that capitalism is incomparably more dynamic a mode of production than its
predecessors, how far are we to take Brenners argument? He surely
isnt saying that there was no development of the productive forces
under feudalism (the main pre-capitalist mode with which he concerns himself). Apart from being plainly false, such a claim conjures
up a vista of endless stagnation unlikely to issue in any new social
form. Brenners argument is better taken as setting limits to the development of the productive forces in pre-capitalist societies, and therefore requires supplementation with an account of how such societies
nevertheless permit a degree of technological progress. The most
obvious candidate for such an account, Cohens Primacy Thesis,
unfortunately wont do, for well-known reasonsits postulation of a
general human interest in the development of the productive forces,
its reliance on functional explanations, and its requirement that social
revolutions are inevitable.19 But one can imagine some elements of a
less vulnerable account. One is what Erik Olin Wright calls the weak
impulse for the productive forces to develop arising from, inter alia, the
fact that under conditions in which increases in labour productivity
16

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, p. 178.
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.
17

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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 forces
of production.20 Another is an analysis of the mechanisms which
permit specific pre-capitalist modes of production to achieve productive progress over their predecessors. One weakness of Brenners discussion of pre-capitalist societies is his failure to differentiate between
them, so that slave and feudal modes of production are treated as
representing the same level of development, which, once again, ill
accords with the historical record.21
Whatever the merits of these suggestions, they do point to the central
flaw common both to Wood andin as much as she draws on his historiographyto Brenner, namely a unilateral concentration on class
exploitation and struggle in the explanation of social transformation.
One can speculate about the reasons for thissome good (a rejection
of the technological determinism of Second International Marxism),
others less so (Wood eschews any discussion of RCMs critique of the
labour theory of valuean unnecessary concession which, once
made, makes it difficult to accord proper importance to the theory of
crises that provides the objective context of Marxs strategy of
socialist revolution). But whatever the reasons, the voluntarism of
Woods political Marxism is disabling, undermining any claim it
might have to constitute an adequate alternative to RCMs collapse
into 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 History, 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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