Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016)

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4598
Date Written:  2016-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21377

Remembering Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In her path-breaking article on "The Separation of the Economic and Political in Capitalism," published in New Left Review (May-June 1981), Ellen argued that Marxism could not realize its enormous potential as a tool for understanding society and politics historically, so long as it remained hobbled by an ultimate commitment to an economic, indeed technological, determinism.

Here Ellen's main target was the then most rigorous available version of Marxist theory, which had been put forward by Gerald Cohen in his celebrated work Karl Marx's Theory of History. Ellen argues that the fundamental weakness of Cohen's account is to be found in his very point of departure, which is that the productive forces inevitably advance... and bring about the rise of relations of production that nurture the forces of production’s further development.

Wood's point is that, on the contrary, the only way to found a viable historical materialism is to understand the causal chain the other way round, viewing historically developed social-property relations or relations of production as determining the material development of the forces of production.