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ABSTRACT:
The Marxist tradition consists of a distinctive combination of social and historical theory, socialist values and political practice, with secular materialist underpinnings. The theory of history inspired by G. A. Cohen's work retains its vitality as a research program, and the socialist value base is also in reasonable shape. Any recovery of the tradition needs however to confront the negative legacy of Marxism's historical past. The theory of history does influence socialist political practice, as has been assumed by most Marxists but denied by Cohen. This influence is not necessarily conducive to classical socialist goals, however, and a considerable tension exists between the most defensible version of historical materialism and socialism's antimarket values.
KARL MARX'S THEORY OF HISTORY, alias KMTH (Cohen, 2000a), was the founding publication of what came to be known as Analytical Marxism, and remains its most significant single work. It seems appropriate therefore in a collection designed to address the work and its author to attempt some assessment of the theoretical developments inspired by the book, and the broader context in which these have occurred. This assessment is avowedly partial, since I have lived within the intellectual ambit of this work for most of my adult life. And the paper is also an essay in recovery. I wish to open out the debate on what kind of continuation project of Marxism (if any) is possible at the beginning of the 21st century, focusing at the end of the paper on the relationship (if any) between the theory of history and political practice.
The Contribution of KMTH
KMTH is famously subtitled "a defense." But there is an old joke, ascribed to Gerald Dworkin, that the book should have been titled Karl Marx's Defence of History: A Theory. The jest makes the point that the book involved a forensic reconstruction of the theory for the purpose of mounting a defense, and it was the technique and quality of the reconstruction - breathtaking by the intellectual standards prevalent in the Marx-critique of its time - that ensured the book's immediate impact, and part of its enduring influence. The defense was nevertheless in the first instance a defense of the intellectual coherence of the Marxian doctrine, mounted against a battery of received criticism of...