Structure, Agency and Theory: Contributions to Historical Materialism and the Analysis of Classes, State and Bourgeois Power in Advanced Capitalist Societies

By Ib Gram-Jensen

"Structure, Agency and Theory" challenges common readings of Marx' and Engels' historical materialism and argues the necessity of abandoning their conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations because of its doubtful validity and deterministic implications. Instead another fundamental conception in historical materialism, the interaction between social circumstances and agency as the motive power of history, is accentuated with an emphasis on agents' experiences as a causal factor, arguing its potential in terms of historical explanation, and attempting to spell out some of its strategic implications for revolutionary socialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: May 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9788743037460

Ib Gram-Jensen

Ib Gram-Jensen, born 1953, is an MA in history and social studies. He has previously published Experience and Historical Materialism, Structure, Agency and Theory (in three volumes) and A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays, also dealing with the subject of historical materialism. He lives in Denmark.

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Contents

Part Four – Ch. 1

1. Wider Conclusions: Historical Materialism

Part Four – Ch. 2

2. The Problem of Transformation

Part Four – Ch. 3

3. On the Transformation of the State

Part Four – Ch. 4

4. Concluding Remarks

Afterword

Part Four – Ch. 1

1. Wider Conclusions: Historical Materialism.

a. The Question of Historical Materialism.

Given the failure of Marx’ expectations, and the unpleasant ring determinism has acquired, attempts to disassociate Marx’ analysis of Capital and/or his predictions from determinism or the label of historicism are no matter for surprise.

But the decisive thing [.....] is that Marx’ theory of impoverishment is of an altogether different nature as theory than the theory in the critique of political economy. The statement of the theory of impoverishment in Capital is not part of the logical-dialectical exposition of the concept of capital in ever more concrete form, but rather in the nature of a digression from that exposition. The theory of impoverishment is, if anything, the sweeping statement of a hypothesis, a hypothetical prediction of the development and liquidation on a global scale of the concrete capitalist social relations, whereas the critique of political economy is an abstract exposition of the basic laws of capitalism, an exposition pointing out, if anything, the inner contradictions in capitalism and thus the potential for rupture, but not pronouncing on the actual breakdown of capitalism at all.¹

Emphasising the difference between prediction of natural events inaccessible to human interference on the one hand and prediction of social (and those natural) events which are subjected to such interference on the other also argued in the present text, Cornforth tries to demonstrate, against Popper, that Marx’ predictions are no unconditional prophecy but a straightforward scientific analysis.² Arguing that, The crunch of this whole argument concerns Marx’s conception of the class struggle and of the necessity and inevitability which, he maintained, attaches to it and its outcome, he quotes the letter to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852 in which Marx claims to have established that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;³ Cornforth then offers the following gloss on it:

That "the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat" has the plain meaning that this is the only way in which it can be finished. It cannot but go on until that outcome takes place. From the very circumstances of its existence the working class cannot but continue to oppose exploitation, and the only way it can get rid of what it opposes is by winning political power and using that power to reorganise social relations. And so, apart from what The Communist Manifesto described as the mutual destruction of the contending classes [.....], the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to a classless society is the unavoidable, that is, necessary or inevitable, outcome.⁴

If this does not echo Kautsky, it anticipates Collier, as Cornforth asserts that, to say so and so necessarily happens is not incompatible with saying under other imaginable circumstances something else could have happened.⁵ While his gloss on Marx is not self-evidently incompatible with the relevant passage in Marx’ letter to Weydemeyer, it is not self-evident that Marx intended his words to be read in the sense suggested by Cornforth either: if he meant to say that class struggle will necessarily lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat only in the sense that this dictatorship is the only means of doing away with capitalist exploitation, he could easily have expressed himself far more clearly to that effect. In fact, Cornforth’s argument is rather ambiguous, as he too states that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to classless society are unavoidable (necessary or inevitable) – but then also that,

[.....]. The essential teaching of Marxism for working-class politics is that emancipation from exploitation and class struggle can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx was talking about unavoidable conditions of human action, about the only ways in which unavoidable issues can be finally settled.⁶

In Cornforth too, then, the issue is in effect narrowed down to whether Marx was a fatalist: from the point of view of the working class, Cornforth declares, Marx’ theory is not fatalist at all. It explains the situation, says what to do, and predicts that it will be done.⁷ It is hardly necessary to spell out, once again, Marx’ and Engels’ expectation that the proletariat would be forced to accomplish a socialist transformation. But while the outcome is thus supposed to be brought about by agency, the response of the working class to capitalist development, the historical record so far suggests that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to classless society are not inevitable. There is a tension between Marx’ expectations and predictions on the one hand and the role accorded to agency on the other.

Cornforth fails to consider the possibility that class struggle will be isolated, and the working class fail to organise effectively around its fundamental class interest in a socialist transformation – let alone to accomplish it. While the prediction that the dictatorship of the proletariat will eventuate does indeed imply assumptions on working-class responses, those assumptions have not turned out to be valid: revolutionary-socialist responses have occurred, and may occur in the future, but it cannot be taken for granted that they will effect a transition to socialism and eventually communism.

Apart from Cornforth’s failure to discuss this historical experience, the evidence in other texts than Marx’ letter to Weydemeyer is in any event fatal to his argument. In the Afterword to the second edition of Capital Marx wholeheartedly accepts the statements that the laws ruling the transition from one mode to another are most important of all to him,⁸ and that these laws are not only independent of the will, consciousness and intentions of people, but on the contrary determine their will, consciousness and intentions.⁹ More, he explicitly states that the deciphering of those laws is an integral part and result of the dialectical method he applies to the analysis of the capitalist mode, and describes his relation to Hegelian dialectic in terms that leave no doubt as to its influence on his own conception of the historical process, including the place of capitalism in it, notwithstanding Miliband’s words in the passage quoted in Part One, ch. 2. a above:

The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I have criticised almost 30 years ago, at a time when it was still fashionable. But just as I was composing the first volume of Capital, the dreary, presumptuous and mediocre epigones who now do the talking in educated Germany saw fit to treat Hegel like the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza at the time of Lessing, that is to say as a dead dog. I therefore openly declared myself as a pupil of that great thinker, and even here and there in the chapter on the theory of value flirted with the idiom peculiar to him. The mystification that dialectic suffers at Hegel’s hands in no way prevents him from being the first to expound its general movements extensively and consciously. In him it stands on its head. One has to turn it upside down to discover the rational kernel in the mystical hull.

In its mystified form dialectic became a German fashion because it seemed to transfigure the existing state of things. In its rational shape it is an annoyance and a horror to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen because it also includes the understanding of its negation, its necessary end, in the positive understanding of the existing state of things, sees every form that has come into being in the river of motion, that is according to its transitory side too, refuses to be impressed by anything, is by nature critical and revolutionary.¹⁰

Thus, there is no doubt that Engels describes Marx’ own notion of what he is doing in Capital correctly in Anti-Dühring:

[.....]. Marx merely shows from history, and here states in a summarized form, that just as formerly petty industry by its very development necessarily created the conditions of its own annihilation, i. e. of the expropriation of the small proprietors, so now the capitalist mode of production has likewise itself created the material conditions from which it must perish.¹¹

Thus, by characterizing the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterizes it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law.¹²

In addition to this, there are Marx’ own words on one of the points of the analysis of Capital:

One nation should and can learn from the other. Even when a society has got on the scent of the natural law of its motion – and the ultimate purpose of this work is to disclose the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither skip natural phases of development nor abolish them by decree. But it can shorten and alleviate the birth pangs.¹³

The natural laws of capitalist production constitute "tendencies operating and asserting themselves with inexorable [eherner] necessity."¹⁴ Marx’ approach is that of conceiving of the development of the economic social formation as a process of natural history.¹⁵ All this clearly indicates a determinist cast of his analysis and conclusions: the direction of the historical movement is derivable from the natural laws of capitalist production; the historical movement is, fundamentally, a natural process – analogous to biological development rather than the a-historical regularities of physics and chemistry, according to the commentary quoted above.¹⁶ Hence also the real point indicated by the readings just criticised: the indeterminate status of agency in historical materialism. Agency is definitely a determinant in concrete analyses, but any long-term open-endedness of social development because of it is (implicitly) denied: agents will (be forced to) respond as predicted, by accomplishing a socialist transformation.

This cannot be demonstrated by structural analysis itself, which explicitly abstracts from agency; nor is it founded on any investigation in its own right: ultimately it must be said to be based on Marx’ very approach, his fundamental, prior assumption that social development is, in the last instance, similar to natural development, a process of natural history, although obviously a special kind of such a process (this specificity being due precisely to agency, the fact that human beings reflect on their social existence, and respond to their experiences of their lived reality). And the problem with this fundamental approach is that this assumption is not sustainable: historical development is a unique – and open-ended – kind of process, different from natural development precisely because of the special nature of human agency.

According to the argument above this does not render Marx’ structural analysis of how the dominant mode develops according to its regularities and laws, its immanent logic or incentives in terms of objective circumstances interacting with and determining the ranges of options and horizons of action of its supports, wrong. It is rather that the scope of this analysis is narrower than assumed by Marx, because the process of historical eventuation from the interaction between social circumstances (including the dominant mode) and agency is still open-ended, owing to the irreducible specificity and determinative power of agency. So it is possible to conclude that there is a determinist propensity in Marx, in the sense of the belief that some long-term terminus of human (pre-)history or the development of capitalism, such as a transition to socialism and eventually communism, can be predicted with certainty; and that this belief is inconsistent with the conception of agency suggested in the present text, and – as suggested by Cutler and al.¹⁷ – with the notion of relative autonomy in any substantial sense. It may also be concluded that it seems at odds with empirical history, and that Marx’ general conception of historical materialism, his structural analysis of Capital and his concrete historical analyses were never fully integrated into a consistent theoretical system of paradigm, approach, hypotheses, and substantial investigations at various levels of abstraction.

Determinist conclusions are only possible if agency is reducible to the same predictability in its interaction with objective circumstances as that of the latter interacting without any human interference. The determinism of the movements of celestial bodies according to Newtonian physics comes to mind.¹⁸ Marx and Engels did never, to be sure, explicitly state that agency is reducible to wholly predictable effects of the laws ruling objective social relations and processes. In fact, there are explicit statements to the contrary,¹⁹ as well as the fact that the reduction of agents to character masks in Capital is an explicit act of abstraction – not the mere response to an assumed fact. As we remember, Engels claimed that neither he nor Marx ever claimed more than determination in the last instance for material production and reproduction.²⁰ But the ambiguity remains, as a consistent recognition of the difference between biological development and the process of human history: the irreducibility of that agency the precise eventuation of which within the limits to the possible set by structure and history is unpredictable, would subvert the argument that the transition from one type of society to another may be pronounced inevitable from the structural analysis of the former.

If so, Marx’ very dialectical method is rendered doubtful in terms of prediction, however effective it is in those of analysis and critique of social structure. Again: the precise nature and role of determination and agency surface as pivotal issues, unresolved in the work of Marx and Engels. How much of a difference can agency make in the field of the possible circumscribed by structure? And what is the link between the analysis of Capital and the (supposed) dialectic of forces and relations of production?²¹

This does not mean that anything goes, or that class is irrelevant to the eventuation of experiences and responses. What it does mean is that contrary to Marx’ prediction the demise of capitalism is – unfortunately! – not rendered inevitable by the regularities of the mode itself. Only one alternative to the perpetuation of the capitalist mode holds a genuine promise of human liberation: the transition to socialism and eventually communism, with the working class as the subject of its own liberation and consequent supersession. The sad difference from the orthodox view is that the faith in the inevitability of such a transformation cannot be upheld by any cogent line of reasoning. A socialist transformation remains a possibility – but it cannot, alas, be taken for granted.

What is required is, firstly, to substitute inevitability by potential, and to develop the theoretical means to assess such potential; secondly, to substitute prediction by accounts of actual outcomes; and thirdly, to develop strategic and tactical thinking and practice to realise the potential for revolutionary-socialist policies that exists in advanced capitalism. This will necessarily be a prolonged, collective effort of trial and error in theory and practice which will involve historical analyses informed by structural ones as well as vice versa, and strategic and tactical analyses and practice informed by both.

b. Marxian Historical Materialism.

Meanwhile, what about the hypotheses of historical materialism stated in the 1859 Preface? That is, what may we say about historical materialism as a general hypothesis on history rather than seen through the prism of Marx’ analysis of capitalism, and his expectations about the supersession of the mode? It has been argued sufficiently above that Marx’ expectations were connected with his idea of the dialectic of forces and relations of production. That idea has been restated as follows by Cornforth:

The historical works of Marx himself, and of Marxist historians (as can easily be verified by reading them), do not proceed by trying to show how the later events necessarily followed from the earlier ones in accordance with inexorable laws, but by showing how people, in the development of social production, became involved in certain contradictions and problems. And the basis is always the adaptation of relations of production to forces of production.

It is to this guiding idea that the materialist conception of history owes not only its descriptive-explanatory power as regards the past, but its prescriptive power as regards the present. It is a guide to study of the present in its emergence from the past, so as to conclude what are the historical issues of today and what best to do to develop social relations in order to plan social production to satisfy human needs. Just that is the object of Communist theory and practice.²²

Looking at the overall development of human society from the earliest times, Marxism sees it as the progressive posing and tackling of a series of issues stemming from the development of productive forces, and the adaptation to that development of the relations of production. In many cases, as Marx made clear in his Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, this adaptation has been unsuccessful, and has led to a dead end rather than to further progressive development. The thread of human progress can be traced through those communities which successfully adapted their relations of production to the requirements of developing their productive forces. The overall history of human society is, then, a law-governed process in the sense that it exemplifies this general law of development. It is not, and could not be, a law-governed process in the strict-determinist sense that there are pre-ordained laws which allow nothing to happen except what does happen.²³

Opposing Popper’s accusation that Marx’ views on the development of human society amount to historicism, Cornforth summarises those views as follows:

[.....]. From studying history Marx concluded that men make their history by adapting their production relations to their productive forces. He worked out how we can do this today, made practical proposals for organisation for doing it – and predicted it would be done. As Lenin said, he put sociology on a scientific basis, and so put political policy-making on a scientific basis too.²⁴

Cornforth tends to represent Marx’ idea as an elaborate theory or concept rather than the hypothesis or guiding principle found in the 1859 Preface. The substance of his argument is, in any case, simple enough: human progress – and history – is driven forward by the development of the forces of production, and the adaptation of relations of production to these ever more developed productive forces. Ultimately, therefore, the development of the forces of production is the driving force of history: once the relations of production turn into fetters on the development of the forces of production, they have to be adapted to the latter, or human progress will grind to a halt. This may be considered a formulation of the orthodox Marxist idea of the motive power of the development of human society. It has been challenged from various quarters, and the very notion of this dialectic of forces and relations of production – with the forces as the active, and the relations as the reactive, element – has been criticised. To discuss the question of its validity a little more closely, two more recent restatements and developments of it will be dealt with in sections c and d below.

In the meantime, Marx actually seems to be making three statements relevant to this question in the 15 sentences of the Preface:²⁵ 1. the economic structure (the totality of the relations of production) appropriate to a given stage in the development of the forces of production constitutes the real foundation on which a legal and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond (1st and 2nd sentences). 2. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life (3rd sentence).²⁶ 3. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness (4th sentence). In addition, he makes a distinction in the 9th sentence between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out – the implication being that these ideological forms cannot be determined with the precision of natural science; but (10th sentence) this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, by which Marx means the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.

It is thus necessary to uphold the distinction between a. the general materialistic assumption of the 4th sentence and b. the specific assumption that historical transformations of relations of production are caused by the said conflict, and that this dialectic of forces and relations of production is consequently the motive power of historical development and transformations.

Bearing in mind the hypothetical status of the 15 sentences, the following conclusions on the relationship between Marxian historical materialism and the conception of the process of historical development suggested in the present text are possible:

The notorious superstructure is a notion with a narrow scope, denoting the legal and political forms codifying the real foundation more or less precisely. The issue may be left aside here.

Though the precise relationship, and degree of autonomy, between the mode of production of material life or social existence on the one hand and consciousness on the other is not spelled out, Marx does seem to leave room for some relative autonomy or determination in the last instance.²⁷ His words may seem somewhat ambiguous, but that would seem to be their main drift. There is no basis for contending that the suggested conceptions of structural determination and the interaction between social circumstances and agency are specifically implied by them.

The conception of history suggested in the present text is definitely inconsistent with Marx’ assumption that social transformations result from the dialectic of forces and relations of production, and that this dialectic is bound to eventuate in a transition from capitalism to socialism, an assumption framing the sentences adumbrating the relation between social existence and consciousness.

The conception of that dialectic with the consequent terminus of the prehistory of human society leaves no room for the open-end-edness of history, or for the possibility that the interaction between social circumstances and agency may make a real difference in terms of the maintenance or transformation of capitalism (including what it is transformed into).²⁸

The (unintended) teleological implications of Marx’ conception of this dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of the prehistory of human society²⁹ exclude the above-mentioned (relatively) autonomous role of agency – and raise serious doubts about the validity of the dialectic of forces and relations of production.

The suggested conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency makes the assumption of the abovementioned dialectic superfluous in terms of explaining historical development – and does indeed seemed better suited to account for it.

Marx obviously assumed that the laws and regularities by means of which he could explicate the immanent causal connections of capitalist accumulation are absolute in the sense of determining the actual future of capitalism, so that his final conclusions on the transition from capitalism to socialism can be derived from them and the structural analysis of capitalist accumulation. The analysis of capitalist accumulation demonstrates that it exerts a pressure to develop the forces of production to a degree unparalleled in previous history; but also that this potential for human liberation and the satisfaction of human needs is crippled and distorted in the process because of the exploitative, antagonistic nature of the mode. But obviously this does not in itself demonstrate that the capitalist integument of the forces of production will inevitably be burst asunder, except on the assumptions of the Preface. In other words, another point of the analysis of the logic, or structure, of capitalism seems to be the demonstration that it fits in with the hypothesis on the prehistory of human society sketched in the 15 sentences.

This leaves a gap between structural and historical analysis, as agency is abstracted from in the former, and the historical-materialist hypothesis on the dialectic of forces and relations of production and its terminal point in the supersession of capitalism by socialism is not tested in terms of its relevance to historical analysis. Again, the potential of agency to make a real difference to this course of the prehistory of human society is implicitly denied. Commenting on Marx’ approach to the critique of political economy, Thompson has suggested that,

Insofar as Marx’s categories were anti-categories, Marxism was marked, at a critical stage in its development, by the categories of Political Economy: the chief of which was the notion of the ‘economic’, as a first-order activity, capable of isolation in this way, as the object of a science giving rise to laws whose operation would over-ride second-order activities.³⁰

Capital was not an exercise of a different order to that of mature bourgeois Political Economy, but a total confrontation within that order. As such, it is both the highest achievement of ‘political economy’, and it signals the need for its supersession by historical materialism. To say the former is not to diminish Marx’s achievement, for it is only in the light of that achievement that we are able to make this judgement. But the achievement does not produce historical materialism, it provides the preconditions for its production. A unitary knowledge of society (which is always in motion, hence a historical knowledge) cannot be won from a ‘science’ which, as a presupposition of its discipline, isolates certain kinds of activity only for study, and provides no categories for others. And the structure of Capital remains marked by the categories of his antagonist, notably economy itself. In this sense it is true that in Capital ‘history’ is introduced to provide exemplification and ‘illustration’ for a structure of theory which is not derived from this discipline.³¹

In actual fact it seems that the assumptions of Marxian historical materialism made this approach of political economy congenial to Marx, as did probably also the general climate of social analysis of the period: the preoccupation with developmental laws, and with natural science in general and Darwin in particular as a paradigm. In any event the failure to grasp the specificity of the process of historical development, and to elaborate the corresponding approach and theoretical tools, means that important elements of Marxian theory and the subsequent Marxist tradition must be abandoned: the explanation and prediction of social (pre)history in the 1859 Preface positing the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of history; Marx’ final conclusions from the analysis of Capital; and, generally, the notion of human, social history (or, as the Preface puts it, prehistory) as reducible to the action of laws and regularities, and with a derivable terminus.

Thus, to abandon Marxian historical materialism is also to abandon the certainty that capitalism will indeed at some point in time be superseded by socialism and eventually communism. This is no small price to pay for the possibility of analysing the potential for and the barriers to the organisation of a working-class majority around its fundamental class interest in a socialist transformation, and to develop a workable strategy for the actual accomplishment of that transformation; but it should be obvious that it has to be paid, considering the stakes, and once it is realised how shaky the theoretical foundation of Marxian historical materialism actually is.

Apart from the basic materialist approach to history as such, what remains is, centrally, the analysis and critique of Capital, with its dissection of the antagonistic exploitative nature, the absurd and alienating logic, and the points of rupture and potential for the transition to classless society, and hence for human liberation, of the mode. In spite of everything, Marx’ work remains the major watershed in the socialist tradition, embedding the objective and conception of a transition to classless society firmly in social theory, rather than in the thin air of Utopian blueprints. In its turn, the failure of his expectations and predictions suggests the distance from structural to historical analysis, and their mutual irreducibility and complementarity. Bridging the gap between them left by Marxian historical materialism is a condition of fulfilling the promise in Marx to base the struggle for socialism on a theoretically sound analysis of the social order to be superseded by it.

What are the general implications of bridging the gap? Having outlined the problems involved in Marx’ hypothesis on the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of history,³² Hobsbawm makes the following suggestion:

It seems more useful to make the following two assumptions. First, that the basic elements within a mode of production which tend to destabilize it imply the potentiality rather than the certainty of transformation, but that, depending on the structure of the mode, they also set certain limits to the kind of transformation that is possible. Second, that the mechanisms leading to the transformation of one mode into another may not be exclusively internal to that mode, but may arise from the conjunction and interaction of differently structured societies. In this sense all development is mixed development. Instead of looking only for the specific regional conditions which led to the formation of, say, the peculiar system of classical antiquity in the Mediterranean, or to the transformation of feudalism into capitalism within the manors and cities of western Europe, we ought to look at the various paths which led to the junctions and crossroads at which, at a certain stage of development, these areas found themselves.

This approach – which seems to me perfectly in the spirit of Marx, and for which, if required, some textual authority may be found – makes it easier to explain the coexistence of societies which progress further on the road to capitalism and those which, until penetrated and conquered by capitalism, failed to develop in that way.³³

It may be added that while it is Marx’ view stated in the 1859 Preface that, within each mode, [.....] there is a ‘basic contradiction’ which generates the dynamic and the forces that will lead to its transformation,³⁴ Hobsbawm’s alternative approach is compatible with, and justified by, the suggested conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency. In addition, and to put it very briefly, bridging the gap also involves the translation of the categories of the structural analysis into those of historical analysis: to apply them to the task of accounting for the way in which the lived reality of advanced capitalism has been handled, and how the interaction between social circumstances including the regularities of capitalist accumulation on the one hand and agency on the other produced specific outcomes.

In other words, rather than trying to derive the process of history from the categories of structural analysis, these laws or regularities are to be used as analytical tools for historical analysis, and taken not as absolute but as setting limits and exerting pressures on the process of eventuation, in their interaction with each other and agency. Their relevance in this context must be assessed in terms of their usefulness to the historical explanation of actual processes and outcomes. The complementarity of structural and historical analysis is caused precisely by the impossibility of a continuous passage from the former to the latter (or vice versa): the ensemble of determinants, and the logic of the process that is to be grasped, are different, and the conceptual tools have to be used in different ways.

c. Laibman on Deep History.

In his Deep History, Laibman attempts to elaborate historical materialism, and to overcome what he sees as a

[.....] continual alternation between a theory of evolution that appears to lack empirical foundations and to emanate only from its implied political implications, on the one hand, and a tangle of formless empirical material, acceptable to academia but with no useful broader implications, on the other.

[.....]. I posit levels of abstraction, and arrange these into a hierarchy, so that at the highest level we find the abstract social totality (AST) and at a lower level the (more) concrete social formation reflecting geoclimatic and developmental variation. [.....] At still lower levels numerous contingent and accidental factors, including the personalities and capacities of individuals, come into play and infuse variety into the picture, which thus approaches the concreteness of the actual historical record.³⁵

Laibman declares that he does not want to eat his cake and have it by using this distinction to advance an abstract theory of development impervious to empirical falsification facing historical data uninformed by theory.³⁶ But in another sense he is trying to have it both ways, recognising that the growth of productive forces (PFs) may be blocked, or regress, in concrete social formations,³⁷ and at the same time positing that,

[.....]. The key to the ladder of social evolution is, at bottom, the erratic but ultimately unidirectional growth of the PFs, passing from a general level of scarcity that dictates egalitarian and communal organization, through a middle range in which development can only be secured by means of the antagonistic class principle, and on to a higher level of abundance at which only a return to egalitarian and solidaristic organization, but now based on individuation and conscious democracy, can assure continued technical and social development.³⁸

The point is indeed made unmistakably clear from the very last words of the text:

[.....]. The final meaning of the PF-PR model is this: development of the productive forces must, sooner or later, bring in its train a level of living standards that is incompatible with exploitative and antagonistic social relations. The eventual transition to the higher stage of communism, far from being just a creative product of the imagination, is the embodiment of this central direction in social development.

I once suggested this formulation of an answer to the question of inevitability in social evolution: Communism is inevitable because it is possible (Laibman 1984, 1992, ch. 12). Inevitability is clearly conditional – upon survival, which is not guaranteed (as I have insisted throughout this book). But the line of development is increasingly clear.³⁹

Laibman posits the same motive power of the transitions from one stage of human (pre)history to the other as Marx did in the 15 sentences of the 1859 Preface: the dialectic of forces and relations of production.⁴⁰ That hypothesis has to be maintained in a strong sense if it is to predict future historical development. In spite of the stated possibility of stagnation or regress, the unidirectionality of historical development and the inevitability of communism are only considered conditional on one thing: that the danger of nuclear or ecological destruction constituted by modern productive forces in their classantagonistic capitalist shell is averted.⁴¹ In effect Laibman denies any real consequences that might seem to be implied by his words that,

[.....]. The determinate ladder of theoretical stages – assuming it exists, an assumption that cannot be separated from confirmation of its ongoing extraction from the raw material of history – occurs only at the level of the AST. As soon as we depart from this level and examine social formations at more concrete levels, variety in external conditions and consequent variations in pace and detailed features of development are introduced. We might say that the AST would be directly visible only on a planet with one continent, with no mountains, rivers, narrow isthmuses, or any other barriers to communication and diffusion of cultural traits, and a common climate, flora, fauna, and so on. Our world clearly diverges in momentous ways from this abstraction, and that fact determines the enormous variety of paths and rates of development of human groups evolving in relative isolation from one another. [.....]⁴²

It remains to be noted that Laibman does not systematically consider the indeterminacy – or open-endedness of history – ascribable to agency. He posits that, "Determinacy at the AST level does not exist in spite of human will and agency, but rather because of them".⁴³ But if the indeterminacy (or open-endedness) of agency in terms of the relationship between agents’ positions in relations of production and exploitation, and their objective interests, on the one hand and their practice on the other is accepted, how can a transformation of relations of production that have turned into fetters on the growth of forces of production, and the transition to a definite stage of development at that, be predicted even at the level of the AST? With structural determination in the sense adopted in the present text, an "absolutely determinate ladder" of stages⁴⁴ cannot be taken for granted: while it is not any transformation that is possible from a given mode or type of society, the number of possible ones is not necessarily down to just one. And hence the possibility that feudalism did not, perhaps, have to supersede slavery, while, perhaps, capitalism did not have to come into being to supersede feudalism, even at the level of the AST,⁴⁵ must be taken seriously.

Laibman wants to defend Marx’ approach to historical materialism, and to avoid the extremes of inchoate empirical history and (rigid) determinism; in effect, however, the difference that may be made by empirical history is, barring nuclear or ecological disaster, reduced to ultimately inconsequential oscillations around the course of deep history.⁴⁶

The historical tendency of productive forces to grow (other things being equal) is both manifest – but radically accentuated by capitalism – and easily accounted for. By improving productive forces agents are able to add to their material wealth and/or diminish their toil;⁴⁷ and once new technology (in the widest sense) has been introduced, it may be imitated and passed on to posterity.⁴⁸ The critical point is, again, whether such a tendency can be assumed to be a motive power of history strong enough to overcome external or contingent conditions. Or, to put it in a less abstract way: if this growth may for a variety of reasons be blocked or regress in any social formation,⁴⁹ how can it be taken for granted that it will cause relations of production turning into fetters on it to be burst asunder? As Hobsbawm observes,

[.....]. The core of Marx’s argument in this respect is that revolution must come because the forces of production have reached, or must reach, a point at which they are incompatible with the ‘capitalist integument’ of relations of production. But if it can be shown that in other societies there has been no trend for the material forces to grow, or that their growth has been controlled, sidetracked or otherwise prevented by the force of social organization and superstructure from causing revolution in the sense of the 1859 Preface, then why should not the same occur in bourgeois society?⁵⁰

Levine & Wright have pointed to a similar problem in Cohen, and this problem is in fact also to be found in Laibman: the Development Thesis/Development Principle⁵¹ is supported by transhistorical claims about rationality and scarcity,⁵² while the question of class interests and class capacities in concrete social circumstances in different modes of production and types of societies is ignored.⁵³ Citing European feudalism and classical China, they conclude that incompatibility between forces and relations of production

[.....] leads to contradiction only if there exist class actors capable of being bearers of a new society, a new social form that would liberate the development of the forces of production. Whether or not such a new ruling class exists or will be generated depends not upon a dynamic vested in the forces of production, but in the specific historical forms of the social relations of production.⁵⁴

To conclude: Laibman makes the same mistake as Marx in making historical predictions from an abstract, and effectively counterfactual, analysis. Moreover, the abstraction from (the indeterminacy or open-endedness of history owing to) agency is the most critical point: geographical barriers and differences of climate are one thing – the variety of experiences and responses articulated from lived reality is another. Abstracted from as external or contingent factors at the higher level of analysis, they are nevertheless determinants of actual historical processes. And thus it cannot simply be taken for granted that outcomes derived at the abstract level will actually eventuate – or, to put it at a less exalted theoretical level, if your grandmother does not have wheels, she is not likely to be a Greyhound bus.⁵⁵

So Laibman’s deep history is a mirage, unless understood in the trivial sense that a general trend or motive power of history is unlikely to reveal itself (if it does indeed exist) immediately in the welter of empirical phenomena. To demonstrate that it is valid in the sense he conceives it, Laibman would have to demonstrate that every transition from one mode and type of society to another on which there is sufficient evidence is ascribable to the dialectic of the forces and relations of production posited by Marx, and that this dialectic has led to such transitions whenever relations of production can be shown to have become fetters on the growth of productive forces. In the absence of such a demonstration, the notion of a deep history determining the direction of the empirical one remains a mere hypothesis – exactly like that sketched by Marx in the 1859 Preface which the argument on deep history was supposed to support.

The tension in Marx’ and Engels’ conception is brought out by the fact that teleological premises could (passing over their own immanent weaknesses for the moment) override blockage and regress, positing communism as the eventual telos of the prehistory of human society, no matter what twists and turns the latter may take empirically.⁵⁶ Neither Marx and Engels, nor Laibman argue in those terms, however, Marx and Engels positing that agents will accomplish a historical transformation rather than forfeiting the fruits of civilisation, forced by distress or alienation or under penalty of their own destruction. And their expectations and predictions in such terms are contradicted by empirical occurrences of blockage or regress.

d. Cohen’s Defence of Marxian Historical Materialism.

It may be argued that Laibman is in effect re-stating Marx’ notion of historical materialism, merely putting the course of development posited in the 1859 Preface at some distance from empirical history in order to take due account of the facts of blockage, regress and the failure of Marx’ expectations to come true so far. Cohen has attempted a more elaborate defence of the [.....] traditional conception in which history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth,⁵⁷ as a primacy thesis that, The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces, associated with the development thesis stating that, The productive forces tend to develop throughout history.⁵⁸ Cohen supports the latter on the assumption that human beings are (somewhat) rational, that their historical situation is one of scarcity, and that their intelligence allows them to improve their productive powers.⁵⁹ Conceding that the growth of forces of production may be blocked or regress,⁶⁰ he admits, however, that the development thesis does not allow one to assume that the tendency of productive forces to develop is necessarily strong enough to support the claim of the primacy thesis that relations of production restraining that development will be transformed:

Now some Marxists who accept the primacy of the forces are content to equate it with the constraint they impose on the production relations. But that is unsatisfactory. For the constraint is symmetrical. If high technology rules out slavery, then slavery rules out high technology. Something must be added to mutual constraint to establish the primacy of the forces.⁶¹

Cohen makes a distinction between normal and pathological cases, and hence between historical theory and historical pathology,⁶² foreshadowing Laibman’s between deep and empirical history. But the mere labelling of cases confounding the development thesis as pathological does not make them any less real, nor does it exclude the possibility that any mode or social formation, including capitalism and capitalist societies, may turn out to be pathological. In effect Cohen, too, ends up positing that the development and primacy theses are valid except when they are not. The objections to Cohen’s argument apply to that of Laibman, too, and may be summarised as follows:

Firstly, it is possible to make a distinction between normal and pathological in medicine, biology etcetera, but it must to some extent be based on criteria of wanted and unwanted, or, in the present context, on that of being consistent with the theory one wants to defend – that is, in terms of causality it must be somewhat arbitrary. Cohen acknowledges the problem,⁶³ but his definition of a normal development as one uninterrupted by chance events and external causes such as natural disasters and invasion – so much like Laibman’s distinction between deep and empirical history – does not solve the problem, partly because he admits the possibility of internal causes of stagnation or regress,⁶⁴ partly because even the external ones suggest that the tendency of forces of production to grow is no inexorable law: if external factors may be strong enough to counteract it, it is arbitrary simply to posit that internal ones cannot, at least in normal circumstances.

Secondly, both normal and pathological cases must be accounted for by the same science or theory; medicine etcetera must encompass both as parts of their total objects, and so must social theory. Thirdly, as noted by Evans laws are not the same as generalizations:⁶⁵ the law does not allow for any exceptions; the generalisation does, but then it does not, of course, allow one to make unqualified predictions. And fourthly, just