Matt McManus
January 2026
This animus towards other traditions of Marxist thought has been especially sharp when directed against “analytical Marxism.” Entire books like Analytical Marxism: A Critique have been written claiming that if “Analytical Marxism represents Marxism’s most consummate expression, then Marxism is finished; if it represents the best hope for the revival of socialism, then it provides socialists with no grounds for optimism, and little grounds for hope.” Ouch. In his recent A Social History of Analytical Philosophy Christopher Schuringa judges the entirety of analytical philosophy to be little more than the ideological handmaiden of bourgeois empiricism and conformism. Echoing these accusations, in a positive review of Schuringa’s book Neil Vallelly argues analytical philosopher’s engagement with radical traditions like Marxism only ever defang them because “liberalism’s common sense always wins the day.”
Singled out for special ire is self-described Marxist and socialist philosopher G.A Cohen, whose very existence as an analytical Marxist and socialist troubles the thrust of Schuringa’s argument. Schuringa dismisses Cohen’s analytical Marxism in little more than 2 pages as defending “liberal marketization” for incorporating insights from non-Marxist economic traditions. He claims that Cohen’s seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History is “useless in explaining capitalism” and that his socialism eventually boiled down to a “purely moral form of explanation” which is lumped together with “traditional liberal-bourgeois” modes of philosophizing.
There is a lot to criticize Cohen’s analytical Marxism for. But I think sweeping rejections are going way too far and missing the important contributions Cohen and other analytical Marxists have made. Here I want to make the case there is a lot to defend about Cohen’s socialist philosophy specifically and analytical Marxism generally which deserves two if not three cheers for their contributions.
Analyzing Analytical Philosophy
Cohen was born in 1941 and grew up in a Jewish communist household. He went onto become a renowned philosopher at Oxford before passing away in 2009.
In her recent guide G.A Cohen, Christine Sypnowich describes Cohen’s experiences at Oxford as formative to his shift to doing Marxist philosophy using to the tools of analytical philosophy. What exactly constitutes analytical, as compared to continental, philosophy is the subject of intense debate. Critics like Schuringa claim analytical philosophers are united by their commitment to a kind of bourgeois empiricist epistemology and an aligned liberal politics of common sense. But as even leftist critics have pointed out that’s rather hard to square with the actual history of the tradition. Analytical philosophers have been famously willing to contemplate notably eccentric ideas ranging from the plausibility of panpsychism to the metaphysical possibility that there are alternative worlds. Epistemologically one can find Kantians, Hegelians, arch-skeptics, empirical realists and stranger things still. Politically analytical philosophy is also notably diverse. Of course it includes pro-capitalists from Robert Nozick to Jason Brennan. But one can also find socialists, Marxists, radical altruists, Catholics, communitarians and arch reactionaries who’ve written in an analytical vein.
This leads to the conclusion that what distinguishes analytical philosophy is less a core set of substantive concerns than a style of presentation and argumentation. Continental philosophers tend to be more comfortable with writing in a more obscure manner. By contrast analytical philosophers above all prize clarity of expression and elucidation as paramount virtues.
There are reasons to be critical of this emphasis on clarity at all costs. I think analytical philosophers (including Cohen at points) often confuse continental philosophers discussing a problem which is genuinely ambiguous with consciously choosing to write in an obscure way. Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno have all been maligned in this way; although analytical philosophers have been ever more receptive to acknowledging their insights. But more importantly I think Adorno is right that making a fetish out of lucidity can risk philosophy becoming little more than an uncritical mirror of status quo thinking. Oftentimes producing genuinely new and challenging ideas will require writing in a way that bucks convention; the form of language has to be reworked to express the novel content adequately. This should be rejected for both philosophical and political reasons; philosophers should aspire to challenge doxa where it is untrue, and especially where it is not only untrue but props up ideological distortions. If doing this means writing in a way that takes work to unpack then so be it.
But on the other hand, analytical philosophers also have a point that needless obscurity gets in the way of philosophical edification. One should add it also gets in the way of political mobilization. From a Marxist standpoint I think we should be very wary of modes of thinking which traffic in abstract speculations and aestheticized self-aggrandizement. The fact that something seems edgy and contrarian does not make it genuinely radical, as the recent history of far right thinking well demonstrates. Not only does excess speculation disconnect us from materialist realism; it also creates the impression of philosophy as needlessly insular and uninterested in engaging ordinary people.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting a boilermaker in Sarnia, Ontario is more likely to pick up and enjoy Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense than Derrida’s Specters for Marx. But I do think that requiring we leftists to think carefully about how to articulate an idea clearly and forcefully helps build a rhetorical skill set that is eminently useful when trying to do more public facing philosophy intended to advance socialist causes. There’s a reason Marx’s journalism for the New York Tribune and his letters for the International Workingmen’s Association read a lot more like J.S Mill than George Hegel. And accessible lucidity is probably at least one of the reasons Cohen’s work remains a constant touchstone for many on the left.
No Bullshit Socialism?
Cohen was unabashed about his own commitment to the analytical style. He became convinced that too many Marxist philosophers wrote in a needlessly cloudy way that occluded the fluffiness of their arguments. In Sypnowich’s telling Cohen concluded that a lot of Marxist theory peddled in “bullshit”; a kind of “unclarifiable unclarity,’ a conception that makes no claims about the motives of the bullshitter-for example, insincerity or bluffing-but rather focuses on the bullshit itself as a kind of nonsense.”
This lapsing into insincerity and bluffing extended to the way too many Marxist thinkers tended to engage other philosophical traditions. Rather than unpacking and arguing against the substance of rival views, very often Marxists would dismiss them as reflecting an ideological standpoint. Schuringa’s work itself often moves in this direction, where the arguments of Russell and Quine and Cohen aren’t so much rebutted as put down. Or when engaging in political debates with libertarians and liberals, Marxists would appeal to the “scientific” status of their predictions. They’d insist that in the long run the desirability or not of socialism was irrelevant, since its triumph was preordained by history’s laws of motion. Cohen referred to this as an “obstetric” vision of history, and in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality he criticized such “Marxist inevitabilitarian” claims as letting socialists off the hook too easily. It means that socialists didn’t have to bother with working out moral arguments about the superiority of socialism to capitalism, let alone make a plausible case for its realism. Indeed trying to do either could be rapidly dismissed as an unscientific form of utopianism, writing recipe books for the cook shops of the future. But as Cohen pointed out, this evasion became a very serious intellectual weakness for the socialist cause by the 1990s. Given that only a few hardened believers still thought socialism was inevitable no matter what anyone thought or wanted, actually bringing socialism into being about would require convincing large numbers of people to choose socialism as their preferred future.
What became called “Analytical Marxism” or “No Bullshit Marxism” was in fact quite an internally diverse, even eccentric, tradition. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, Cohen et al’s commitment to clarity of argumentation would require being transparent about potential weaknesses within core Marxist doctrines. Where such weaknesses emerged, it would be necessary to reconstruct Marxism by incorporating non-Marxist ideas and arguments; such as those developed in rival social scientific and philosophical traditions. This contributed to a notably undogmatic attitude towards Marxism. Secondly, they recognized that arguing constructively against pro-capitalists would involve more than waving away their views as ideology or periodizing them as part of a reigning historical discourse. It would also require reading the works of capitalism’s most able defenders carefully, acknowledging where they had a point and then rebutting their points systematically while in turn arguing for the superiority of socialists positions normatively and empirically. On this second front Cohen has been acclaimed as uniquely successful; his longstanding debates with philosophical luminaries like the libertarian Robert Nozick and left-liberals like Ronald Dworkin are widely considered models of critical engagement. He did a lot to increase the prestige of socialism by convincing thoughtful liberals and libertarians of its plausibility.
Historical Materialism Rides Again
Cohen bucked 20th century analytical philosopher’s reputation for disdaining continental thinking, so long as he thought it was insightful. His writings on Hegel and Feuerbach are by and large respectful, and he was never one to shy away from asking religious and ontological questions.
Never the less his most impactful work, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, is very much the work of an analytical philosopher. There is a perhaps intentional irony to this, since Marx’s own theory of history without a doubt one of the most obviously “continental” features of his writings; in Capital Volume I Marx even called himself a “pupil” of Hegel, that mighty thinker. All this showcases the ambition of Cohen’s reconstruction of the theory of history, which was received with widespread acclaim. Even conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands described Cohen’s book as giving the “only plausible answer” to the “fascinating question” of how to make sense of Marx’s theory.
Cohen’s defense of historical materialism leans heavily on the magnificent elevator pitch Marx gives of his theory in the preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
On Cohen’s reading it is the productive forces that assume primacy in Marx’s theory of history. Their organization is governed by production relations which compose the economic structure of society; indeed Cohen insists “that production relations alone serve to constitute the economic structure.” Applying a functional mode of explanations which accounts for causes in terms of effects, Cohen reads Marx as saying that at any given time the economic structure corresponds to the achieved level of the productive forces…the structure provides maximum scope for the fruitful use and development of the forces and obtains because it provides such scope.” Or as he puts it elsewhere “production relations have the character they do because, in virtue of that character, they promote the development of the productive forces.” A change in the overall mode of production, say from feudalism to capitalism, occurs when production relations enable such a radical improvement in productive forces that those same relations then become handicaps. Once feudal relations had enabled the development and widespread adoption of the spinning genny, the printing press etc they in turn became shackles on their most efficient use.
For all its acclaim Cohen’s reading of Marx has come in for severe scrutiny, He has been accused of techno-determinism-what Tom Mayer in Analytical Marxism calls the technologically determinist version of historical materialism-because of the centrality placed on the development of productive forces. In Analytical Marxism: A Critique Roberts accuses Cohen of jettisoning too much of Marx’s own thinking in his reconstruction. He snarls that “Cohen’s recent efforts to revise and defend orthodox historical materialism serve to dramatize the inadequacies of this version of Marxism.” In the otherwise far more laudatory The Political Philosophy of G.A Cohen Nicholas Vrousalis acknowledges Cohen’s position has generated “numerous criticisms”-most notably for “downplaying the significance of class struggle” and once more for “overplaying the significance of the productive forces.”
Cohen never abandoned his commitment to historical materialism. But in the revised version of Karl Marx’s Theory of History Cohen softened the sharp edge of many of his claims. This included offering a gentle critique of Marx for being committed to a form of “inclusive historical materialism” which held that most, if not all, social institutions, beliefs and human action “beyond production and the economy, are, in their large lines, explained by material and/or economic changes.” By contrast Cohen held that he was now defending a “restricted historical materialism” much more “modest in reach.” This form of historical materialism doesn’t purport to explain religious, cultural, political etc. developments by reference to the economy, even if it could provide some insight into them from an economic perspective. It was limited to being a “theory about the course of material development itself, rather than about the relationship between that development and other developments.” While a sensible move this purchases plausibility at the expense of explanatory sweep, which can’t but feel like a “retreat” from Marx’s own tectonic ambitions.
There is much to be critical of in Cohen’s reading of Marx that bears on some of the more general criticisms of analytical Marxism. In fairness I think Cohen was right to be critical of Marx for ambiguity on many points. And it sadly remains important to stress that Marx’s works aren’t holy writ. Whether Cohen broke from Marx’s own view is something we should be grateful for if it turns out he corrected a serious error. But I think Cohen’s deepening wariness of his own reconstruction, coupled with his turn to moral philosophy as a preferred vehicle for advancing the socialist cause, is telling.
I‘d argue David Harvey’s rendering of Marx’s theory of history and historical change in Reading Marx’s Capital and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is both more exegetically faithful and ultimately more philosophically satisfying than Cohen’s. Harvey notes how Marx’s philosophy is often misunderstood since readers assume he is telling a causal story; very much like the one Cohen reconstructs. In fact what makes Marx’s dialectical materialism complex is how it eschews uni-directional, mechanical causation for a vision of the social form as a dynamic totality of mutually constitutive relations and practices which in turn metabolically relate to nature. This totality is a unity out of particularity. These mutually constitutive relations continuously influence the others and are influenced in turn.
On this view capitalism doesn’t “cause” religion any more than Protestantism birthed the spirit of capitalism before there were even capitalists. At any given time one aspect of the totality may assume a determinative primacy over the others, and any Marxist will have to be particularly sensitive to forces and relations of production. But this doesn’t mean, for instance, that nature is an inert collection of stuff that is just technologically manipulated by capital. Or that cultural forces are simple reflections of economic relations. Harvey’s rendering of Marx does better justice to the enormous richness of the latter’s view than Cohen’s elegant, but often cold and delineated take.
Freedom and Socialist Community
It’s as a—and perhaps the—political and moral theorist of socialism that Cohen shines most brightly. This is an issue that has received increasing attention-I think deservedly since even thinking strategically the normative case for socialism is often one of the most compelling for ordinary people. Moral philosophers like the late, great Alasdair MacIntyre are enjoying a long overdue renaissance of attention on the left. Marx’s moral philosophy has been systematically reconstructed in Vanessa Wills’ Marx’s Ethical Vision. In her Damage magazine essay “The Need For a Socialist Morality” Ana Mara Cisneros draws on MacIntyre to chide the left for failing to “realize that their politics depend on their views about morality, and by failing to recognize this truth, they have implicitly adopted a moral picture that is both incoherent and incompatible with leftist ideals.”
Cohen argued for socialist approaches to numerous core moral principles, though it is not clear how all are meant to fit systematically together. Unlike Robert Nozick or John Rawls, there is no unified Cohen-ian system. As Nicholas Vrousalis put it in The Political Philosophy of G.A Cohen Cohen’s contribution does not “consist in building a single army of mutually reinforcing ideas and have it parade over the dead bodies of its defeated opponents.” Nevertheless there is considerable overlap between the principles Cohen advocated, including freedom, non-exploitation, community, and above all, equality.
Cohen insisted that capitalism inhibited human freedom in important ways. He was especially keen to push this charge against Nozick and other libertarians, who insisted capitalism was the fullest realization of human freedom. In Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, Cohen bitingly remarks that the kind of freedom Nozick really cared about was the liberty of a rich man to light a cigar with a five dollar bill in front of a starving child, who in turn had no grounds to object to what the Monopoly Man chose to do with his private resources. In “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Cohen shows why workers under capitalism remain unfree, given that they have no choice but to sell their labor to capitalists or starve. He noted that people often defended this arrangement by pointing out that proletarians needn’t remain in this condition. They might be able to escape it through a combination of hard work and luck. Cohen asked us to consider the following thought experiment:
Ten people are placed in a room, the only exit from which is a huge and heavy locked door. At various distances from each lies a single heavy key. Whoever picks up this key—and each is physically able, with varying degrees of effort, to do so—and takes it to the door will find, after considerable self-application, a way to open the door and leave the room. But if he does so he alone will be able to leave it. Photoelectric devices installed by a jailer ensure that it will open only just enough to permit one exit. Then it will close, and no one inside the room will be able to open it again.
Would we say that those people locked in the room are all “free,” since any one of them might be able to escape? Probably not without bastardizing the meaning of freedom. But as Cohen notes, the same must then be said in response to those who claim that workers are free under capitalism even though most of them have no choice but to sell their labor to survive. In his recent work of analytical Marxism, How Capitalism Ends, Steve Paxton builds on Cohen to make a similar kind of argument about property. For many pro-capitalist thinkers, property is intrinsically related to freedom, and taking away the property one has acquired through free exchange harms liberty. But on that logic, as Paxton notes, capitalism is a notably unfree social order since so many people don’t in fact own any meaningful property outside of their labor power. By the system’s own reasoning conflating property with freedom large numbers of propertyless or near propertyless individuals must be very unfree indeed, meaning they have little to lose but their chains.
In his swan song Why Not Socialism? Cohen argues that we “cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make, and keep, say, ten times as much money as I do, because my life will then labor under challenges that you will never face, challenges that you could help me cope with, but do not, because you keep your money.” He illustrates this by asking us to imagine a hypothetical camping trip. On one trip the campers refuse to share their food, goods, or (let’s get real) beers, smokes, and joints unless others directly reciprocate as part of an exchange. The same applies to dividing up work. Cohen notes that this instrumentalizing ethic corrodes the sense of community the camping trip is purportedly all about. Instead he proposes a socialist principle of each person doing their bit to contribute to the enjoyment of their fellows. The free development of each camper would then become a condition for the free development of the others.
This would be combined with what Cohen called “socialist equality of opportunity” which would seek to eliminate all the unchosen disadvantages which individuals are subject to throughout their life. Socialist equality of opportunity would go well beyond “bourgeois” formal equality of opportunity, which only gives all individuals an equal legal right to pursue opportunity. It would even go beyond admirable “left liberal” equality of opportunity, which seeks to correct for unfair conditions of birth and upbringing. This leads us to the core of Cohen’s moral and political philosophy in egalitarianism.
The Centrality of Equality
It was the principle of equality to which Cohen was dedicated above all others. In Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen argues that we should be egalitarians the whole way down, including in our interpersonal actions. While no one should be forced to be altruistic, Cohen argues against John Rawls that it is not enough for the basic structure of society to incentivize individuals to work hard so that downstream the least-well-off benefit. Instead, we should internalize a commitment to equality in our personal morality, being committed to egalitarian distributive justice in most every sphere of life. It very much rejects the strong edges of individualistic bourgeois society for one that borders on the self-sacrificing.
This is an extraordinarily demanding standard which Cohen is aware most of us would not be able to live up to. In the latter half of the book he defends his thesis in part by grafting egalitarian morality to an essentially Platonic meta-ethics, which stresses that our moral obligations shouldn’t be dependent on facts about society or human nature. Whether it is easy or not, we should still set out to treat people equally.
How Cohen’s transhistorical meta-ethics and commitment to equality can fit with a Marxist theory of history and materialism is mysterious, and that mystery is not theoretically insignificant for those of us who admire him. Till near the end of his life Cohen worked on revising and improving his seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. The book reworks and defends a version of Marx’s theory of history, which Cohen continued to endorse even as he argued the explanatory aspirations of historical materialism had to be increasingly restrained. Cohen continued to defend historical materialism as a descriptive account of history and economic development even while arguing for an increasingly transhistorical and fact independent concept of morality that applied well beyond governing social forces.
There is nothing logically incompatible between being committed to a restricted version of historical materialism that describes the development of the social form while holding a view of morality as immaterial principles which transcend history. But needless to say, the latter runs very much against the grain of Marxist thinking. As Cohen notes, plenty of Marxists have rejected the idea that moral theory is valuable, tout court. Meanwhile, those of us who do move into talking about Marx’s ethical thinking usually describe him as a closet Aristotelian or Hegelian. Even if one accepts that historical materialism can’t and shouldn’t explain the nature of capital-M objective morality (as distinguished from mere ideology), most Marxists would think that moral norms should reflect enduring material facts about the human condition and society. On this reading, Marxist ethics have to account for how facts about human nature and society change over history and then demonstrate why and how socialism will enable our flourishing more completely than previous social forms.
This is very different from the transhistorical-even transcendent- morality Cohen eventually comes down on. And while it might not be logically impossible to defend historical materialist description and moral Platonism it would be a very tough synthesis to enact successfully, let alone gracefully. Ironically, Cohen’s liberal-socialist counterpart, Rawls, developed a moral theory which—by making the “basic structure” of society to be the key subject of justice, sign with taking material incentives and the limits of human altruism seriously—seems more responsive to the real world. Needless to say I believe Rawls’ liberal socialist position is a more plausible one for socialists. A combination of Marxist methodological collectivism and Rawlsian normative individualism is the right way forward for socialist moral theory.
An Enduring Division in the Socialist Soul
Cohen’s was in many ways a paradoxical place for a Marxist and a socialist to end up, though it teaches us something important. Cohen captured something important about an enduring division in the socialist soul—a division which showcases how odd it is for authors like Schuringa to portray a defender of an enormously transhistorical morality as a mere mouthpiece for red-tinted bourgeois common sense. There is a sense in which socialists have always been compelled to a kind of transhistorical moral sensibility, since even hardened materialists committed to socialism agitate for a society which they often acknowledge has never existed before-but will none the less be freer and more equal than what has come before. Beyond that it is surpassing odd for Schuringa and others to characterize Cohen as a closeted bourgeois thinker when his personalized egalitarianism is much more demandingly radical than even orthodox Marxism, which demands transformative social changes without insisting that these be accompanied by egalitarian soulcraft.
Cohen defended both a ruthlessly clear-eyed understanding of power, history, and struggle, while at the same time remaining committed to idealizing moral ambitions about finally securing well-being and full, free development for each and all. Cohen staunchly maintains these goals despite there having never been a society in history that has come close to realizing this ideal. This is of course the situation ambitious socialists like Marx perennially find themselves in: simultaneously ruthlessly describing a long history of exploitation and domination without illusion while positing that in the end a better world remains possible.
Like most other generative tensions, this one is simultaneously responsible for some of the worst and best socialist insights. At its worst, it tends to produce a lot of the “bullshit” Cohen and his cohort were keen to rebut. At its best—going back to Marx himself—this generative tension has inspired enormously creative and energetic work. Moral hope is not an opium that tranquilizes. It is a beautiful dream remembered when wide awake. Such dreams sustain life when the real world darkens.