It was hard to read Ellen Wood’s article ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’ without mixed feelings.footnote1 The general thrust of her critique is undoubtedly correct: in the hands of Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski et al., the attempt to reinterpret historical materialism along methodological-individualist lines has deprived the theory of much of its specificity and substance. She is also right to set Rational Choice Marxism (rcm) alongside post-structuralism as the two main intellectual tendencies which, in the past decade or so, have provided the reaction against Marxism with a ‘left’ guise. Wood sought, however, not merely to demolish rcm, but to do so in part by demonstrating the existence of another, better version of historical materialism. And here the difficulties begin. For while I share most of her criticisms of rcm (indeed, I’ve made quite a few of them myselffootnote2), her own account of what is distinctive to, and worth defending in, Marxism seems to me seriously inadequate.

This account emerges most clearly where Wood discusses putative candidates for a rcm theory of history (pp. 59–75). She regards it as a tacit acknowledgement of the inadequacy of rcm theories of exploitation and class such as that constructed by Roemer that they should require supplementation by some separate account of the sources of historical change. Two such accounts are considered by Roemer in his book Free to Lose. One, G.A. Cohen’s restatement of orthodox historical materialism, is indeed compatible with Roemer’s static models; but the reason why this is so, namely that the development of the productive forces provides an ‘exogenous cause’ of social change, is indicative of the sense in which Cohen’s is not a proper theory of history, since it invokes to explain social transformations, not the properties internal to the mode of production in question, but rather a ‘transhistorical rationality’ which leads human beings in conditions of scarcity to improve their methods of labour (pp. 69–71). Wood looks with much more favour on the other candidate, provided by the work of Robert Brenner, but argues both that his account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is inconsistent with the idea of any ‘historical necessity for less productive “economic structures” to be followed by more productive ones’, and that it involves a theory of history whose ‘focus’ is ‘on the specificity of every mode of production, its endogenous logic of process, its own “laws of motion”, its characteristic crises—to use Brenner’s formula, its own rules of reproduction’, in both respects sitting ill with rcm’s tendency to rely on explanations derived from transhistorical features of human societies (pp. 68, 70).