In 1978 G.A. Cohen published Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. That this landmark work set out to defend (something like) the orthodox historical materialism of the Second International was surprising enough; that its author situated himself within the `analytical' tradition - and therefore engaged, and sought to defeat, Acton, Plamenatz, Popper et al. on their own methodological terrain - was surprising indeed. It is testimony to Cohen's analytical acuity that, from such unpropitious materials, he fashioned not a mere curio, but arguably the most accomplished defence of `technological determinism' ever produced, and one of the most important works of Marxist philosophy to have emerged from the Anglo-American academy. In fact, its publication heralded the emergence of a sui generis Marxism designated by its progenitors - prominent amongst whom, alongside Cohen, were Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski and Erik Olin Wright - as `Analytical' or `Rational Choice' Marxism. The architects of this new `paradigm' insisted that a necessary condition of Marxism's salvation was its importation into the tradition of analytical philosophical method, `positivist' social science, and - or, at least, so argued Elster, Roemer and Przeworski - that version of rational choice theory originating in the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s and providing neo-classical economics with its definitive axioms. As one commentator observed, `Cohen and his co-thinkers ... casually crossed the supposedly impassable border between Marxism and the academic mainstream in philosophy and social theory.'

After nearly two decades, few Marxist `insights' have survived the attempt to `reconstruct' it. Most of the Marxist heritage - Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Western Marxism and Structuralist Marxism - had been consigned to the Humean flames from the outset. So, too, had Marx's `multiply confused' anatomy of the capitalist mode of production. As for `Marx's theory of history' in its technological determinist incarnation, Cohen has long since confessed to doubts as to its defensibility; few Marxists - even amongst his co-workers - now share the slightest doubts about its indefensibility; and, anyway, Cohen himself no longer considers it to have any purchase upon the crucial problems confronting socialists at the close of the twentieth century. He argues that the pre-history of the historical materialist programme has nothing very interesting to tell us regarding either the constituency, agency and strategy of any prospective transition to socialism, or the motivational and institutional structures of a feasible socialism. Thus, in the introduction to Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (1995), Cohen concedes that

to the extent that Marxism [i.e. Analytical Marxism - MR] is still alive, as ... one may say that it (sort of) is in the work of scholars like John Roemer and Philippe Van Parijs [note the conspicuous absence of Elster - MR], it presents itself as a set of values and a set of designs for realising those values ... Its shell is cracked and crumbling, its soft underbelly is exposed.

However, while conceding the demise of Analytical Marxism, Cohen, in an article originally published in 1990, announces the advent of another new paradigm: `Analytical Semi-Marxism'.

If it is true that the moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality he would laugh, then Analytical Semi-Marxism would have had him in stitches. At the end of a century providing socialists with few occasions for merriment, Cohen declares it high time for a straight-faced engagement with, and development of, the `ethical' or `utopian' socialism decried by Marxism's founders. Marxists could excuse themselves from serious application to normative political philosophy only so long as they had anticipated both the emergence of a working-class movement impelled into class struggle by its material interests, and the advent of an era of material abundance placing humankind, at long last, beyond the `circumstances of justice' and, therefore, the need for theories of justice. The latest news from the Anglophone academy is that the working class has a good deal more to lose than its chains (and, it appears, a good deal less to win than a world), and that `[w]e can no longer sustain Marx's extravagant, pre-Green, materialist optimism'. The `planet earth rebels' against the final elimination of material scarcity. The Marxist explanatory programme in ruins, and - relatedly - socialism relegated from the destiny of humankind to one social blueprint amongst others, `Marxists, or what were Marxists, are impelled into normative political philosophy'.