comment

Ellen Meiksins Wood

Explaining Everything or Nothing?

Alan Carling accuses me of everythingismthat is, of believing that

you need a complete explanation of something before you can have
any explanation of something. Do I really? I thought I was stating a
rather more modest requirement, namely that a paradigm like RCM,
which claims to improve on, indeed to replace, classical Marxism,
ought to add more than it subtracts from existing explanations. It
was, after all, not I who made extravagant claims for RCM, that it is
now only within the rational-choice context that some of the leading
questions on the classical agenda of Marxist theoryhistorical expla-
nation and the delineation of social form, the collective dynamics of
class struggle, the evolution and evaluation of capitalismcan be
fruitfully discussed.1 If Carling now wants drastically to modify those
claims, by effectively conceding my principal argument that all the
important theoretical and empirical work needs to be done in
advance of applying the RCM model, then thats fine with me.
I do not think, however, that Carling realizes the extent of the conces-
sions he has made. He writes that he is happy to second my criticism
that rational-choice explanation does not, as he puts it, explain what
it treats as a presupposition of its explanations. He continues: and
since the presuppositions often include (1) the preferences of the actor
and (2) the social context in which the actor acts, rational-choice
explanation often does not explain either the preferences or the social
context of the actor. Surely this is a huge concession which leaves very
little of RCMs pretensions intact.
Rational Choice Marxism, if it is to make good its claims as some-
thing more than a very modest and limited parenthesis in the large
corpus of Marxist theory, must be distinguished by more than the
simple assumption that people (often) act reasonably. This much is
assumed by classical Marxismas is clear from Marxs own analysis
of capitalism, for example. But the core of any social explanation that
centres on rational agency must then consist of specifying and explain-
ing the social structures which set the terms of what is reasonable and
preferable in any given context, and illuminating the different criteria
of reasonableness or eligibility established by different systems of
1 Alan Carling, Rational Choice Marxism, NLR 160, NovemberDecember 1986,
p. 55.

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social relations. Carling now acknowledges that RCM is not much use
in that respect, since it simply assumes the structures that need to be
explained. (I also argued that RCM actually detracts from Marxisms
ability to construct such explanations.) He concedes that the hard
work must be done in advance by some other means, but it is not
clear to me what he thinks RCM adds to these prior theoretical and
empirical accounts of structures and preferencesapart from their
translation into formal models which themselves play no role in the
construction of the explanation, and probably mystify more than they
clarify. It is not clear, in other words, what he thinks is left for the
rational-choice model to explain, once it assumes a given set of struc-
tures and preferences.
Carling might claim that RCM has the advantage of giving higher prior-
ity to the individual, but is that really true? RCMs characteristic pro-
cedure is to impute preferences and structures, in the form of resources
or assets, to abstract individuals, in effect deducing their motiva-
tions from the structures or macroprocesses themselves. The individ-
ual thus becomes, as I argued before, little more than an embodied
structure. In fact, RCM explanations are even further abstracted from
individual rationality and agency by the tendency, especially visible in
Roemer (in contrast to classical Marxism) to impose a transhistorical
rationality, derived from capitalism, on all actors irrespective of
their specific historical contexts. Even at lower levels of abstraction, in
the study of particular empirical phenomena, rational-choice explana-
tions typically derive whatever explanatory power they have not from
the application of the rational-choice model but from a specification
of the context in which the relevant choices are made.
If Every Textbook Contained Roemers Proof . . .

One major question I set out to answer in my text was whether, even
if we grant Roemer his moral argument against capitalism, the price
he exacts for it is worth paying. What effect, I ask, does it have on
Marxist theory as a whole? Carling simply misreads the question. Are
you kidding? he asks indignantly. Would it not make a big difference
if every neoclassical economic textbook contained a proof of capital-
isms exploitative character? Evidently he takes my question to be a
rhetorical one, meaning that I am denying the huge effects of
Roemers moral argumentwhen, of course, my contention is quite
the opposite: that Roemers argument does indeed, and profoundly,
affect his whole project of reconstructing Marxism, by undermining
its explanatory power.
But since Carling has asked me a question, let me briefly try to answer
it. Economists, it is true, tend to lag behind the rest of the world in
acknowledging social realities, preferring to deal with abstract and
formalistic models which have little to do with the substance of social
life. In that sense, it would, of course, be very nice if economics text-
books contained a Roemerian proof. But would it make as much
difference as Carling thinks? Conventional sociology, for example, has
long been ready to acknowledge that inequality breeds inequality.
Max Weber, after all, knew all about the consequences of unequal
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market chances, and standard sociology textbooks dealing with
stratification freely acknowledge these Weberian insights. Does
Roemer really go beyond this?
There are now many even on the left (see Gran Therborns article in
Marxism Today some time ago2) who question the relevance of
exploitation as an organizing category in the analysis of advanced
capitalist societies. They are hardly likely to be convinced by formal-
istic mathematical proofs. Indeed, they would probably dismiss the
relevance of the concept precisely on the grounds that in prosperous
Western capitalisms exploitation has little meaning except as an
abstract mathematical formula. This is, to be sure, an inexcusably
sanguine view of capitalist prosperity, given the current, and growing,
extent of poverty, homelessness and despair in advanced capitalist
societies (not to mention the wastefulness and destructiveness of capi-
talism even at its best); but the proponents of this view are unlikely to
be shaken by yet more mathematicsand apologists for capitalism
even less so. If theories of exploitation are to be convincing, they need
to be capable of explaining somethingfor example, the systemic logic
and crises of capitalism which produce not only poverty and degrad-
ation but also waste, destruction, despoliation of the environment, the
debasement of culture, and other consequences that deeply affect the
lives even of those who are not materially disadvantaged by the sys-
tem. Whatever Roemers model may tell us about exploitation as a
moral problem, it detaches the theory of exploitation from any
explanation of capitalism as a specific social system of production and
accumulation; indeed it discards the very features of Marxist theory
that allow it to deal with exploitation as a social relation and the
driving mechanism of the capitalist system.
But if my principal theme was the explanatory weakness of RCM, it
also needs to be added that the moral force of Roemers theory is
itself pretty weak. A theoretical paradigm that asks us to view the
transition from feudalism to capitalism as a benign interlude, during
which serfs were offered a choice between the blandishments of feudal
lords and the seductions of capitalists holding out the benefits of a
proletarian condition, is hardly equipped to expose the harsher reali-
ties of capitalism. How much would Roemers moral indictment of
capitalism mean to, say, Eastern European advocates of the market
economy?
Begging the Questions of HistoryAgain
It is Carlings privilege to claim that he understands Robert Brenner
better than I do, but does he really want to claim a better understand-
ing than Brenner has of himself? At any rate, until Carling spells out
his argument as he promises to do in his forthcoming book, I am
obliged to suppose that, in order to pin the RCM label on Brenner who
has explicitly refused it, Carling will have to define RCM with even less
specificity than he has so far, even repudiating the methodological
individualism which Roemer and others have regarded as an essential
feature. Who knows? If RCM is defined loosely enoughfor example,
2
Gran Therborn, Vorsprung durch Rethink, Marxism Today, February 1989, p. 28.

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if it simply requires accepting that some regular social patterns are
produced by people behaving reasonably in any given contexteven
I might qualify.
On the more substantive issue of Brenners theory of history and Carl-
ings attempt to reconcile Brenner with G.A. Cohen: Carling confirms
in spades my conviction that RCM cannot explain history without
assuming the very thing that needs to be explained. As I understand
it, his argument proceeds as follows: (1) Brenner depicts feudalism as
fundamentally static; (2) he therefore needs capitalism to get develop-
ment going; (3) he therefore needs Cohens functional explanation,
which, applied to Brenners account of English development, would
suggest that the specific conditions that compelled England to get
development going had to occur; or more specifically, that if this par-
ticular England had not existed, there would have been another one
(There will always be an England, Carling wittily observes).
The leaps in this argument are truly prodigious. First, Brenner does
not say that feudalism had no dynamic of its own, only that it had no
systemic impulse to increase productivity by technical innovation
(which is not, by the way, the same as saying that no technological
innovations occurred). Indeed, his whole argument concerning the
transition is predicated on the specific dynamic, the laws of motion,
set in train by feudal property relations. Second, the proposition that
feudalism fetters the development of the forces of production; capi-
talism fosters their development does not mean that the development
of productive forces is the motor of history, nor does it mean that
capitalism had to occur, or that there had to be an England. It is com-
pletely unwarranted to jump from the unexceptionable proposition
that capitalism uniquely fosters technological development to the con-
tention that capitalism developed because it fosters technological devel-
opment, or the even stronger claim that capitalism had to develop
because history somehow requires the development of productive
forces, or because less productive systems are necessarily followed by
more productive ones. (If fostering the development of productive
forces is the only principle of historical motion that Carling recog-
nizes, and if the failure to foster such development means, by defini-
tion, stagnation, how would he explain historical transformations
which did not take the form of advancing technical development
say, the decline of imperial Rome? But more on this later, in reply to
Alex Callinicos.)
In short, Brenner has no need of Cohen. We need Cohen only if we
start with Cohen, that is, only if we begin, as Carling does, with the
assumption that the development of productive forces is the only
available principle of historical movement from one mode of produc-
tion to another, only if we assume the very thing that needs to be
demonstrated. I cannot deny with absolute certainty that if there had
not been one England there would have been another. Maybe there
would have been. But we cannot simply assume it, and we certainly
cannot allow the assumption to serve as a substitute for historical
explanation. For that matter, we can do very nicely without the
assumption that there will always be an England. There is, and
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could be, no evidence to support such a completely non-falsifiable
proposition; and why do we need it anyway? Why is it not enough to
say that there was an England? It is certainly reasonable to argue that,
once capitalism had established itself, its spread was inevitable,
because of its specific drive and capacity for self-expansion. But this
says nothing about the necessity of its emergence, or even about the
mechanisms by which it occurred.
Brenner seeks the moving force for the transition from feudalism
within the dynamic of feudalism itself, not by reading capitalist prin-
ciples and motivations back into history, nor by assuming some trans-
historical general theory of motion. Carlingnot surprisingly, given
the static quality of RCMs non-relational theory of exploitation
apparently cannot accept that the contradictions within a specific
structure of social relations, with its own specific forms of activity,
can set in motion a transformation into another social form. This is
why he cannot accept that Brenners special theory of feudalism can
explain the transition without extraneous and circular assumptions
derived from the general theory of technological determinism. Here
we have the perfect illustration of my central argument about RCMs
approach to history, about its irreducible need to assume the very
thing that has to be explained.
On Markets and Other Matters

On politics: I am awareand stated clearlythat there is a range of

political views among RCMists. I am also aware that Roemer dislikes
capitalism and has strongly criticized it. It is, I think, the greatest
virtue of his work that he regards the critique of capitalism as a pri-
mary task of socialist theory, at a time when so many on the left have
abandoned that project. But my argument was that the weakness of
the RCM paradigm as a basis for criticizing capitalism is most strik-
ingly illustrated by the fact that the one major exponent of the para-
digm who has most systematically attacked capitalism has erected
such a weak barrier against right-wing triumphalism, because his
hands are tied by the narrowly formalistic requirements of the model and
its subjection to the conceptual demands of neoclassical economics.
Carling takes exception to my statement that he himself effectively
presents socialism as if it were simply a quantitative improvement, an
extension of capitalist freedom and equality. I shall accept his insist-
ence that he did not intend to lump equality together with freedom as
a good partially provided by capitalism, though he repeatedly pairs
them in precisely this way3 (and though he could legitimately argue
that capitalism does advance equality in much the same ways and
degrees that it advances freedom, by discarding extra-economic and
prescriptive determinants). At any rate, my argument had to do spe-
cifically with his treatment of the market as a sphere of freedom, and
on this score he made it very clear that socialism should be conceived
as offering a wider distribution of this capitalist good. I objected to
his formulation not because it acknowledges some kind of (limited)
3
See, for example, Carling, Rational Choice Marxism, p. 33.

120
truth in capitalisms claim to freedom and equality, nor even because
it maintains that the capitalist market offers certain choices. My
objection is rather that his account of the market is uncritical and one-
sided, that the market appears there above allindeed onlyas a
sphere of freedom and not also a compulsion, a system of coercion.
Even if we leave aside the typical function of the capitalist market as
an instrument of power for large multinational capital, what about its
imperatives of competition, profitability, and the commodification of
all social values and relationships? Are these not compulsions which
determine the disposition of people and resources in ways antithetical
to freedom, democracy and self-determination as conceived by the
socialist project? There is nothing ambiguous about Carlings asser-
tion that, while the workplace and the state are spheres of coercion,
the marketplace really is a free space?4 This is an extraordinary pro-
position coming from someone who claims a better insight into the
operations of capitalism than is possessed by classical Marxism. And
if our account of capitalist coercion is inadequate, on what basis will
we construct our conception of socialist emancipation? Now, more
than ever, we need to be clear about this, when advocates of marketiz-
ation, East and West, identify freedom and democracy with the capi-
talist market, and are studiously evasive about its compulsions or
about how they propose to separate out its freedoms and choices from
its restrictions and coercions (when they are not openly embracing the
market because of its coercions).
Finally, a very short comment on the rational actor. Here Carling
just invents an argument for me and then proceeds to knock down his
own straw man. I have no difficulty regarding, say, feudal lords or
peasants as rational actors. Nor do I, as Carling suggests, criticize
RCM on the specious grounds that the idea of a rational actor is
somehow reactionary. I do object to RCMs tendency to universalize a
particular form of rationality specific to capitalism, but I also main-
tain that the RCM claim to give centre stage to the rational actor is
largely spurious. The rational individual, with all his/her assets,
turns out to be an embodied structure, and even (especially in Roe-
mers account of history) the carrier of universal historical laws, the
transhistorical logic of technological determinism.
What all this amounts to is that Alan Carling has failed to answer any
one of my principal criticisms of Rational Choice Marxism: about its
explanatory weakness (which he apparently concedes), about its
question-begging and circular conception of history (which he simply
reproduces), and about the explanatory price we are asked to pay for
the meagre benefits of a moral argument too weak to withstand the
onslaughts of capitalist triumphalism (which he just ignores). It is,
again, to Roemers credit that, against the prevailing tide, he still
4
Ibid., p. 36. Carling refers, more or less dismissively, to the view that what passes
for freedom under capitalism is a covert form of oppression (Rational Choice Marx-
ism, p. 33); but, curiously, he has in mind only the manipulation of consumer
demand, and takes no account of the more fundamental ways in which the capitalist
market determines human lives and relationships, through the disposition of labour
and resources, the imperatives of competition not only among capitalists but also
among workers, and the commodification of all social life.

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regards the critique of capitalism as a major intellectual project for
the left. But we need something a good deal more powerful than RCM
as a basis for criticizing capitalismespecially now, when apologists
for capitalism are not only declaring its final victory (as if it were no
longer producing massive poverty, destruction of the environment,
violent crime and cultural degradation) but even announcing the end
of history altogether. Now, more than ever, we need something which
does indeed creatively improve on classical Marxism. Nothing Carl-
ing has said persuades me that RCM is itor, for that matter, that we
gain from it more than we lose.

A Few Observations in Response to Alex Callinicos:

Forces and Relations of Production
In challenging Carlings account of history, I asked what he would
make of historical changes that did not take the form of advancing the
forces of production, for example, the collapse of classical antiquity.
A similar question might be put to Alex Callinicos, the more so as he
cites the decline of Rome as a prime example against my version of
historical materialism. I do not intend to debate ancient history with
him, but the example is instructive and provides a useful point of
entry into his interpretation of historical materialism.

Callinicos seems to have little sympathy for crude technological deter-

minism (though it is not always clear how his own position differs
from it). Instead, he castigates me for paying insufficient attention to
the principle of contradiction, specifically the contradiction between
forces and relations of production as the chief mechanism of major
social transformations. The Roman case is meant to illustrate how
such systemic contradictions (as distinct from some voluntaristic
agency like class struggle) produce historical change.

What, then, does the contradiction between forces and relations

mean? It is not entirely clear what Callinicos wants it to mean, since
his statement of the principle does not coincide with the historical
examples he invokes to illustrate it. The explicitly stated principle, at
any rate, has to do with dynamic impulses created by the development
of productive forces: forces of production tend to develop, he argues;
at some point, they come up against the limits imposed by production
relations which make further development impossible; this contradic-
tion compels productive forces to break through the restrictive integu-
ment, requiring relations of production to change and allowing forces
to advance.

But what actually happens in the Roman case, as Callinicos himself

understands it (via Geoffrey de Ste Croix as summarized by Perry
Anderson)? Here is the systemic contradiction described by Anderson,
interpreting Ste Croix: a decline in the supply of slave labour
consequent on low rates of internal reproduction, leading to offsetting
attempts at slave-breeding, decreasing the rate of exploitation, which
then necessitated complementary depression of free labour to sustain
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overall levels of surplus extraction.5 Whether or not this is an adequate
explanation of the transition from antiquity to feudalism, what does it
tell us about the meaning of the contradiction that Callinicos has in
mind? Here we have a case where the primary appropriating class
reached the limits of surplus extraction and sought to compensate for
a declining rate of exploitation by depressing the condition of peasant
producers in order to widen the range of its appropriative powers.
This was not a case where dynamic forces taxed the limits of restrict-
ive relations. If productive forces were fettered, it is not in the sense
that their inherent tendency to develop was thwarted, but rather that
such a tendency was largely absent, or very weak, in the prevailing
production relations, which encouraged the extension of extra-
economic surplus extraction instead of the improvement of labour
productivity. Nor can it be said that production relations were com-
pelled to assume a new form more conducive to the development of
productive forces. On the contrary, it was more a matter of relations
of production adapting to the limits of productive forces, a reorganiza-
tion of surplus extraction to accommodate the limitations of produc-
tion. As the imperial infrastructureits cities, its road systems, its
wealth, its populationdisintegrated, and as the empire became
increasingly vulnerable to barbarian invasions (by peoples with less
developed productive forces), the apparatus of surplus appropriation
was effectively scaled down to the level of existing productive forces.

Although evidence is sparse, it can even be argued (as Marx and

Engels, incidentally, did argue, for example in The German Ideology),
that the result was a destruction of productive forces, a regression from
the development of Roman antiquity. At any rate, long after the cri-
sis, indeed after the better part of a millennium, the level of material
life remained very low; and economic growth, when it did occur, for a
long time was based not so much on the improvement of productivity
as on the extra-economic logic of a war economy, the logic of coer-
cive appropriation and pillage.6 Feudalism did eventually bring
about technical developments (though their extent remains a subject
of controversy); but by this time, surely, the causal thread between the
crisis of antiquity and the development of productive forces has worn
rather thin. The connections would be exceedingly tenuous even if
Callinicos were to reverse the order of causality, from his claim that
developing productive forces strain the fetters of restrictive produc-
tion relations, to an argument that production relations change to
encourage the advancement of stagnant productive forces. If we are
prepared to accept this kind of timescale, we can probably claim a
direct causal link between almost any two widely separated historical
episodes, without regard to the duration and complexity of interven-
ing processes; but how informative would such a causal explanation
be? And it still remains a question whether the availability (which
by no means guaranteed the widespread utilization7) of technical
5
Perry Anderson, Class Struggle in the Ancient World, History Workshop Journal 16,
Autumn 1983, p. 68.
6
See, for example, Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, Ithaca
1974, p. 269.
7
See Robert Brenner, The Brenner Debate, Cambridge 1985, pp. 32, 233.

123
innovations when they did occur determined social changethe more
so as differences in the rate and direction of social transforma-
tions between, say, England (where agrarian capitalism eventually
emerged) and France (where agrarian stagnation eventually set in)
simply did not correspond to differences in their respective feudal
technologies.

Contradictions and Rules for Reproduction

We can certainly call the Roman pattern an example of the contradic-

tion between forces and relations of production; but if we do, we must
mean something different from even the weakest formulation to
which Callinicos subscribes, quoting Erik Olin Wright, namely 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. (n.
20) Although Wright hedges this proposition about with many dis-
claimers about the weakness of the impulse, in Callinicoss interpret-
ation it clearly implies that historical movement is generated by the
developmental impulse of productive forces. He maintains that 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.
This means, unambiguously, that it is the advance of productive
forces which impels history forward. Yet Callinicos cites as a prime
example the case of Rome, where the contradiction served as a
mechanism of change not because forces were developing beyond the
capacity of existing relations, nor even by bringing about an enabling
transformation of social relations which had the effect of shifting stag-
nant forces of production, but, on the contrary, by compelling rela-
tions to sink to the level of productive forces. To accommodate this
example, then, we would have to include among the possible out-
comes of the contradiction the adaptation of production relations to
the fetters of productive forces, and perhaps even the destruction of
those forces.

These difficulties cannot be overcome simply by adopting some ver-

sion of Cohens functional explanation, which allows a temporal
priority to changes in production relations as long as we assume that
the underlying reason for such changes is the need to advance the
forces of production. This kind of explanation works as a general
account of history only if, as I have argued on other occasions, we are
prepared to interpret it with such vacuous generality as to include
every possibility from the revolutionary improvement of productive
forces to their stagnation, even regression. This is not, of course, to
deny that technical innovations occurred in pre-capitalist societies,
or even that there were incremental and cumulative developments.
The question is whether these developments constituted the dynamic
force that motivated historical changeeither (causally) before or
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(functionally) after the fact.8 This is not an issue that can be resolved
by invoking a priori, universalistic and question-begging assumptions
about the progressive directionality of history.
It would be better not to talk about the forces of production as if they
represented an autonomous principle of historical movement, some-
how external to any given system of social relations. Even if over the
long term there is a cumulative directionality in the progress of
human knowledge and technology, the cumulative continuities of his-
tory do not alter the fact that each distinct mode of production has its
own specific connections between forces and relations of production,
its own specific contradictionsor perhaps we should say, to use
Brenners formulation, its own specific rules for reproduction. Let
us take the Roman case (as described by Callinicos). What is at stake
here is a crisis of appropriation. What makes it a crisis is not that
sluggish production relations restrict the further development of
(more or less) dynamic productive forces. It is rather that, within the
limits of existing conditions, within the prevailing ensemble of pro-
ductive forces and relations, the principal classes can no longer suc-
cessfully pursue their normal strategies of self-reproduction. (Class
struggle enters into the process here, and not simply at the point of
transition, since strategies of reproduction are determined not in iso-
lation but in relations between appropriators and producers.) When
they reach their viable limits, the strategies are likely to change. This
does not, however, necessarily imply the adoption of strategies more
conducive to the advancement of productive forces. In pre-capitalist
societies generally, the outcome is more likely to be an adjustment in
the scope and methods of surplus extraction, or a reorganization of
the extra-economic forces which constitute the power of appropria-
tion, whether by direct exploitation or by pillage and war: the state,
the military apparatus, and so on. (This also means, incidentally,
that the advantage which any particular society may have in relation
to others need not be directly proportional to the level of its pro-
ductive forces.9 We cannot generalize throughout history the rules
of international capitalist competition which give the competitive
advantage to more productive economiesthough even here, geo-
political or military superiority may not neatly coincide with product-
ivity. In pre-capitalist societies, the effective organization of extra-
economic resources is likely to be decisive.) The available productive
capacities certainly establish the limits of the possible, but to say this
8 Callinicos seems not to understand the difference between propositions having to do
with the occurrence of technical innovations and those concerning the dynamics of
historical change. For example, he accuses Brenner of acknowledging no differences in
levels of development among various pre-capitalist societies, but he cites a passage
which says nothing of the kind. Brenners argument is not that all pre-capitalist socie-
ties are on the same level of technological development, but rather that their various
property relations have in common a tendency to encourage the expansion of extra-
economic surplus extraction rather than the improvement of labour productivity. This
is why (see, for example, the passages cited in note 7 on p. 112 above) any failures to
improve agricultural productivity in such cases may have less to do with the unavail-
ability of new techniques than with the under-utilization even of existing technologies.
9
This point relates to the argument put forward by Christopher Bertram in Inter-
national Competition in Historical Materialism, NLR 183, SeptemberOctober 1990,
pp. 116128.

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is not to say either that less productive systems must necessarily be
followed by more productive ones, or even that the developmental
impulses of productive forces determine the necessity and direction of
historical change.

The Specificity of Capitalism

This is precisely the reason for insisting on the specificity of capital-

ism, as distinct from other modes of production, and especially the
specificity of its relationship between forces and relations of produc-
tion. The transition to capitalism is historically unique because it
represents the first case in which a crisis in strategies of reproduction
produced not simply a transformation in modes of appropriation but
a process the result of which was a wholly new and continuous drive
to revolutionize the forces of production. It is specifically in capital-
ism that the dynamic impulse of productive forces can be regarded as
a primary mechanism of social change. Capitalism is also unique in
its particular systemic contradictions between forces and relations of
production: its unprecedented drive to develop and socialize the
forces of productionnot least in the form of the working class
constantly comes up against the limits of its primary purpose, the self-
expansion of capital, which is sometimes impelled even to destroy
productive capacities (as Thatchers Britain has reason to know).
Socialism can no doubt be understood as building upon the develop-
ments of capitalism, while resolving its specific contradictions; but to
acknowledge the specificity of capitalism is at the same time to insist
on the specificity of socialism, not simply as an extension of, or an
improvement upon, capitalism but as a system of social relations with
an inherent logic of its owna system not driven by the imperatives
of accumulation and so-called growth, with their attendant waste,
destruction and ecological devastation; a system whose values and
creative impulses are not circumscribed by constricted notions of
technological progress.

Callinicos thinks my version of historical materialism is too voluntaris-

tic, too insensitive to objective determinations and structural contradic-
tions. But we can recognize the particular structural contradictions of
pre-capitalist societies, or capitalisms own specific laws of motion
and propensity to crisis, without reading the crises and contradictions
of capitalism back into all history.10 The issue of voluntarism, which
Callinicos regularly throws in my face (in what has become a more or
less annual fixture), is a red herring, because the dispute between us is
not about whether class struggle occurs within a framework of object-
ive determinations and structural contradictions, but rather about
the particular nature of those determinations and contradictions
themselves. If Callinicos is worried that my version of historical
materialism tends toward a collapse into social democracy, he
10
Incidentally, I did not, as Callinicos suggests, concede to Rational Choice Marxism
its critique of the labour theory of value. On the contrary, I argued that, if we concede
to Roemer his alternative theory of exploitation as a moral argument against capital-
ism, the theory is deprived of any explanatory power, any capacity to explain capital-
isms laws of motion, including its crises.

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should keep in mind that the classic social democratic argument rests
on a generalization of capitalist principles, a tendency to turn the his-
torically specific laws of motion of one mode of production into a
general law of nature, a refusal to acknowledge the specificity of capi-
talism and its systemic contradictions.
I suspect that Callinicoss chief motivation is a desire to rescue, if not
technological determinism, then some weaker form of historical uni-
linearism, according to which all history, sooner or later, must follow
a single inexorable logic leading to capitalismthe ultimate outcome
of which will be socialism. That this is his intention is suggested by his
invocation of various problematic and question-begging formulae
which have the effect of uncritically inscribing capitalism (and its
supersession) in the universal laws of history. For example, he takes
issue with George Comninels Rethinking the French Revolution (Verso,
London 1987) on the grounds that his distinction between capitalist
appropriation and commercial profit-taking fails to take into account
the extent to which early modern merchant capitalism . . . provided a
framework for the emergence of what Lenin called transitional
forms . The problem here is that the coupling of merchant with
capitalism begs the central question, assuming precisely what needs
to be demonstrated, that mercantile activity as such contains an
impulse toward capitalism, and that no distinctions need to be made
between cases where commercial profit-taking does imply capitalism,
with its systemic logic of accumulation, and those where it does not.
Unlike Comninel, Callinicos ignores the prevailing context of property
relations within which these activities take place. This is Pirenne et
al.the identification of capitalism with trade and its generalization
throughout all historyall over again.
The concept of proto-industrialization is equally problematic, sug-
gesting that the spread of rural industry somehow contained within
itself the germs of industrial capitalism. Again, no account is taken
here of the differences between, on the one hand, a self limiting rural
industry still constrained by pre-capitalist social relations and show-
ing no sign of a capacity to overcome those traditional restrictions,
and, on the other hand, the specific case of England, whose already
transformed economy, based on agrarian capitalism, was unique in
its capacity to break through these age-old limitations, its ability to
sustain continuing industrial and overall economic growth in the face
of the crisis and stagnation of the traditionally predominant cloth
export industry.11 Perhaps Callinicos could, if he tried, really demon-
strate that rural industry in, say, France contained the seeds of capi-
talismnot just the possibility of capitalism, given some external
impulse (such as prior developments in, and competitive pressures
from, England), but an internal impulse toward it. He is not, how-
ever, entitled simply to conceptualize the problem away by using lan-
guage loaded with the very presuppositions that are in question.
I can sympathize with the wish to recapture history for socialism at a
time of general retreat from the socialist project. I do actually think
11
Brenner, The Brenner Debate, p. 325.

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that history is on our sidebut not in the sense that socialism has
been inscribed in the inexorable laws of progress since the dawn of
history, or that its coming is inevitable. For me, it is more a matter of
the historically specific and unique possibilities and tensions created
by capitalism which have put socialism on the agenda and produced
the conditions for bringing it about. Even in Eastern Europe, where
there are already signs of a return to old contradictions and class con-
flicts as the discipline of the market takes hold, there may yet be an
opportunity for the first time to test the proposition that the condi-
tions of socialist emancipation reside in the specific contradictions of
capitalism.

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