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Varieties of Economic Determinism

The fathers of Soviet Marxism (Plekhanov, Bukharin, and Stalin) interpreted Marx as a technological determinist who saw evolving productive forces as the key to human history from primitive societies to the present day. But most Marxist scholars in the West now turn away from the many technological determinist passages in Marx with embarrassment. Today Marxists deny that social change can be explained by a single set of factors: they see great historical transformations as too complex for that. William Shaw is an American philosopher who, though sympathetic to Marx, prefers the Soviet interpretation. Shaw admits that his technological determinist interpretation is not the only possible one: "Marx's complexity and occasional inconsistency bar me from claiming to have proved my interpretation of historical materialism" (p. 149). Yet he makes a powerful case for his reading of Marx by citing quantities of textual material to back it up. His mastery of the forty-volume Marx-Engels Werke is impressive. At the outset Shaw says that he will not defend Marx's technological determinism but unpack its meaning and "highlight some of its internal difficulties." For several chapters he follows Marx through the infrastructural tunnels of history, lighting up the labyrinths and dead ends with the lamps of formal logic, conceptual analysis, and philosophy of science. In his conclusion he worries that his "pessimistic" observations "should seem to undermine completely the benefits of adopting Marx's perspective," and he laments that Marx's technological determinism is a "deteriorating paradigm." We can't think of a single Marxist historian who uses this paradigm in his or her work. Eric Hobsbawn, Albert Soboul, Richard Lorenz, Marcello Carmagnani, Manuel Lopez Gallo—there you have five Marxist historians, writing in as many languages, not one of whom is a technological determinist. This Marxian paradigm does more than "deteriorate." It writhes in agony, and we think that Shaw's own criticisms give it the coup de grace. Yet he can't face what he has done, and his sympathy with Marx makes him try to revive the paradigm! Marxist economists like Paul Sweezy say that the falling profit rate no longer falls; Marxist sociologists like Ralph Miliband say that the polarization of society into two classes has broken down; and Marxist historians like ourselves say that the law of increasing misery has been falsified by history. Why can't a Marxist philosopher like Shaw admit that technological determinism does not work? Instead, his excellent book winds up claiming that the theory, "despites its problems, offers a plausible vehicle for social and historical research"—although whole chapters he has written show the opposite. If Marxists will balk at Shaw's finding technological determinism in Marx "plausible," their eyes will pop when they read Gerald Cohen's "defense" of Marx. This British philosopher avoids the word "determinism" while defending "what is called a 'technological' interpretation of historical materialism" (p. 29). To find a concept for interpreting Marx, he