Oliver Cromwell Cox's understanding of capitalism and the problem of his materialist perspective

Oliver Cromwell Cox rejected the Marxist label his critics appended for politicalideological reasons. As a sociologist with dependency/world system sympathies Cox emphasized economic and political relations between "leading nations" and "backward countries". This article focuses mainly on his contribution to political economy, with special reference to Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Cox showed sympathy for neo-Keynesianism and social democracy, traced capitalism's origin to the thirteenth-century Italian city states, asserted that primitive accumulation and feudalism via Marx are aspects of capitalism, made foreign trade (not commodity production for private capital accumulation) the driving force in capitalism, rejected the Marxist theory of class struggles, socialist revolution, and imperialism, and relied on Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel for theoretical guidance. The absence of any materialist praxis in his highly academic scholarship, which left no discernible impact in terms of intellectual or political following, hardly qualifies him as a Marxist.