分析马克思主义AnalyticalMarxismandtheDivisionofLabour..docVIP

Analytical Marxism and the Division of Labour Renzo Llorente Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus It would be difficult to overstate the importance that Marx attached to the division of labour. Indeed, the topic of the division of labour, which Marx himself once went so far as to call in a certain respect the category of categories of political economy,” is discussed in major texts representing every stage of Marxs intellectual itinerary, from the 1844 Manuscripts to the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Nor is this the only way to gauge the centrality of the division of labour—i.e., occupational specialization--to Marx’s general theoretical perspective: a moment’s reflection on his major intellectual achievements likewise reminds us of the prominence of the division of labour in Marx’s social thought. In his essay Reconsidering Historical Materialism, G. A. Cohen observes that Marx produced at least four sets of ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, an economics, and a vision of the society of the future. ... ...[D]espite great differences in their domains of application, the four doctrines have something important in common. In each doctrine the major emphasis, albeit in a suitably different way, is on the activity of production, and each of the four is, partly for that reason, a materialist doctrine. Something else that the four doctrines have in common—partly on account of this very emphasis on production--is, of course, that each fundamentally rests on certain basic theses concerning the division of labour. Yet, while commentary on Marx’s treatment of the division of labour has often been a major theme in non-analytical accounts of his thought, analytical Marxists have by and large shown little interest in this topic. G.A. Cohen’s work is, in this regard, no exception. Cohen barely addresses the division of labour in Karl Marxs Theory of History (or elsewhere), despite the fact that the division of labour would seem to be