Before critically reflecting upon Elvin's "high-level equilibrium
trap", we need a clear idea of what it means to talk about economic
growth across human history. When Gerry Cohen declared in his
brilliant *Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence* (1978),
that "the productive forces tend to develop throughout history", it
was only a moments time before everyone would remind him that not
every society had developed into the capitalist stage. Cohen later
conceded ([1983] 1988) that "a ruling class in secure control of the
production process might sometimes have good reason not to allow
productive innovation and to try to extract more from the immediate
producers without improving existing techniques" (26).
Only a softer version of the "development thesis" could be defended,
namely, one which sees a long-run tendency to productive improvement
across history, but not in each discrete society. He thus borrows
Semenov's persuasive "torch-relay" model, according to which more
advanced societies will at some point stagnate yet pass on (through
influence) their achievements to other ones who then build on them.
Two problems here: 1) it seems, as he well knows, that the productive
forces do not have an inherent, internally generated tendency to develop
without externally induced improvements. Cohen had insisted before
that PFs tend to develop because humans have a *rational imperative*
to overcome scarcity through innovations. But it may be that humans
do not have a natural inclination to innovate, if not for external
influences/pressures, including military competition. 2) Cohen
corners himself into this dilemma because he (wrongly) ties
the development thesis to *innovation* per se, in the sense
of improvements in technology. He deserves every praise for arguing,
against a long Marxist lineage, and in full awareness of the
achievements of neo-classical economics, that any talk about
development supposes a notion of human rationality. But he erred in
indentifying this rationality with the capitalist rationality of
continuous technological improvements. The productive forces do have
a tendency to develop but not intensively. We need to distinguish
extensive and intensive growth.
