Download MARXISM

 Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview
and method of socioeconomic analysis based on a
materialist interpretation of historical development, a
dialectical view of social change, and an analysis of
class-relations within society and their application in
the analysis and critique of the development of
capitalism.
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
 Marxist analyses and methodologies have influenced
multiple political ideologies and social movements
throughout history.
 Marxism is based on a materialist understanding of
societal development, taking at its starting point the
necessary economic activities required by human
society to provide for its material needs.
 The form of economic organization, or mode of
production, is understood to be the basis from which
the majority of other social phenomena — including
social relations, political and legal systems, morality
and ideology — arise.
 These social relations form the superstructure, for
which the economic system forms the base.
 As the forces of production improve, existing forms of
social organization become inefficient further
progress. These inefficiencies manifest themselves as
social contradictions in the form of class struggle.
 According to Marxist analysis, class conflict within
capitalism arises because of the contradictions
between highly-productive mechanized and socialized
production performed by the proletariat, and private
ownership and private appropriation of the surplus
product in the form of surplus value by a small
minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie.
 As the contradiction becomes apparent to the
proletariat, social unrest between the two antagonistic
classes intensifies, culminating in a social revolution.
 The long-term outcome of this revolution would be the
establishment of socialism - a socioeconomic system based
on common ownership of the means of production,
distribution based on one's contribution, and production
organized directly for use.
 Marx argued that, as the productive forces and technology
continued to advance, socialism would eventually give way
to a communist stage of social development.
 Communism would be a classless, stateless, moneyless
society based on common ownership and the principle of
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs".
 Marxism has traditionally been seen as the principal
critical or radical alternative to mainstream realist and
liberal thinking.
 According to Marxists,
both realism and liberalism/idealism are simply selfserving ideologies introduced by the economic elites
to defend and justify global inequality.
 Instead, class is the fundamental unit of analysis of
international relations, and the international system
has been constructed by the upper classes and the
wealthiest nations in order to protect and defend their
interests.
 Marxists view the international system as an
integrated capitalist system in pursuit of capital
accumulation.
 Thus, the period of colonialism brought in sources for
raw materials and captive markets for exports, while
decolonialization brought new opportunities in the
form of dependence.
 The core of Marxism is a philosophy of history that
outlines why capitalism is doomed and why socialism
and eventually communism are destined to replace it.
 This philosophy is based on the ‘materialist
conception of history’, the belief that economic factors
are the ultimately determining force in human history.
 The world is divided not into politically determined
nations but into economically determined classes.
Consequently, politics does not supercede economics,
but rather economics trumps politics.
 Historical materialism has focused its attention on
capitalism as a material way of life, a group of social
relations .
 Marxism has much to say about historically evolving
structures and practices which have crossed national
boundaries and linked the domestic and the
international, the economic and the political – much
to say, in short, about the social production of global
politics.
 Historical materialism suggests that states and systems
of interstate and transnational power relations are
embedded in and (re-)produced through systems of
relations that encompass (among other things) the
social organization of production. The latter is itself
structured according to relations of class, and is an
object of contestation among social classes, state
managers, and other historically situated political
agents.
 Thus politics is not limited with the formally public sphere
of the modern state, but infuses the economic sphere as
well.
 The point here, is not to reconstruct global politics on the
basis of an economic reductionism in which all causality is
seen as emanating from an already constituted,
foundational economic sphere, but rather to argue
something very nearly the opposite – that politics and
political struggle are essential aspects of the processes by
which all social structures are (re-)produced, and hence
that the analytical separation of political from economic
life – as well as domestic and international aspects of these
– represents a false dichotomy which obscures much of
potential political importance.
 The main theme in Marx’s materialist conception of
history is that individuals must first satisfy their most
basic physical or material needs before they can do
anything else.
 In practice, this has meant the mass of humanity, in
order to survive, has had to surrender control of its
labour power to those that own the instruments of
production.
 Given the basic reality of property relations, the dominant
classes throughout history have been able to exploit the
subordinate classes but this had always led to class conflict.
 Marx believed that class struggle had been the principal
form of conflict in the whole of human history.
 Political revolution had been the main agent of historical
development while technological innovation had been the
driving-force behind social change. Marx wrote that history
was the continuous transformation of human nature.
 Put differently, human beings do not only modify nature by
working on it; they also change themselves and develop
new hopes and needs.
 The history of the development of the human species
could be understood only by tracing the development
of the dominant modes of production which, in the
West, included primitive communism, slave societies,
feudalism and capitalism which would soon be
replaced by socialism on an international scale.
 In line with his belief that history revolves around the
labour process, Marx observed that freedom and
equality under capitalism mean that bourgeois and
proletarian enter into a labour contract as legal equals,
but massive social inequalities place workers at the
mercy of the bourgeoisie and reduce their freedom
and equality.
 He took the view that proletarian organizations were
developing an understanding of how socialism could
make good the claims to freedom and equality which
were already present in capitalist societies.
 For Marx, global capitalist crisis was the recurrent
danger. Consequently, the idea of ‘socialism in one
country’ was irrelevant in his view in the context of
capitalist globalization.
 Human freedom could be achieved only through
universal solidarity and cooperation to remake world
society as a whole.
 This is one reason why Marx had little to say about
relations between states, but focused instead on the
significance of capitalist globalization for the struggle
to realize equality and freedom.
 Realists have argued that members of the proletariat
concluded during the First World War that they had
more in common with their own national bourgeoisie
than with the working classes of other countries.
 The argument was that no-one with a good
understanding of nationalism, the state and war
should have been even surprised by this turn of events,
yet many socialists were dismayed by the actions of the
European proletariat.
 For realists, the failure to anticipate this outcome
demonstrates the central flaw in Marxism – its
economic reductionism, as manifested in the belief
that understanding capitalism would explain the
mysteries of the modern world and its unprecedented
political opportunities.
 This is one of the most famous criticisms of Marxism
within the study of international relations.
 There are three points to make about it.
 First, although Marx and Engels were clearly aware of
the globalization of economic and social life, they
believed that class conflict within separate, but not
autonomous, societies would trigger the great political
revolutions of the time. Their assumption was that
revolution would quickly spread from the society in
which it first erupted to all other leading capitalist
societies.
 According to this view of the world, capitalism
provides an illusion created by geographical
boundaries separating peoples governed by different
political systems. It has been argued that the relatively
peaceful nature of the international system in the
middle of the nineteenth century encouraged such
beliefs; the theory of the state gave way to theories of
society and the economy.
 Marx also argued that relations between states were
important but ‘secondary’ forces in human affairs when
compared with modes of production and their laws of
development.
 In a letter to Annenkov, Marx asked whether ‘the whole
organisation of nations, and all their international
relations [is] anything else than the expression of a
particular division of labour. And must not these change
when the division of labour changes?’. This is a question
rather than an answer yet many have argued – Waltz is an
example – that Marxism largely ignored geopolitics,
nationalism and war.
 Marx believed that capitalist globalization and class
conflict would determine the fate of the modern world.
 Second, Marx and Engels were forced to reconsider
their ideas about the nation because of the importance
of nationalism in the 1848 revolutions and its growing
political influence later in the century.
 These remarks indicate that while Marx and Engels
were primarily concerned with the class structure of
capitalist societies, they were well aware of the
persistence of ancient hostilities between national
groups – but they almost certainly continued to believe
that national differences would eventually decline in
importance and might even disappear altogether.
 Third, as Gallie has noted, those interesting comments
about nationalism, the state and war did not lead Marx
and Engels to rework their early statements about the
explanatory power of historical materialism.
 An unhelpful distinction between the economic base
and the legal, political and ideological superstructure
of society remained central to most summaries of the
perspective.
 Too often, the state was regarded as an instrument of
the ruling class, although it was thought capable of
providing some degree of autonomy from the ruling
class in unusual political circumstances.
 However, Marxism is a very broad field, which
encompasses, as far as international theory is concerned,
two contrasting tendencies. The first of these gives primary
attention to economic analysis, and is mainly concerned
with exposing capitalism as a system of class oppression
that operates on national and international levels. This
applies to classical Marxism and to most forms of neoMarxism.
 Two of the most important Marxist-derived bodies of
theory in international relations are world-systems theory
(led by Immanuel Wallerstein) and dependency theory.
 More recent neo-Marxist work in international relations is
led by scholars such as Robert Cox, but is classified
separately as Critical Theory or neo-Gramscianism.
 The second tendency places greater emphasis on the
ideological and cultural dimension of oppression, and
has come to embrace a post-positivist, and therefore
post-Marxist, mode of theorizing. This applies to what
has been called ‘critical theory’, as influenced by the
ideas of Gramsci and the so-called Frankfurt School.
 The most successful IR theory derived directly from
Marxism is Immanuel Wallersten's world-systems
theory. According to Wallerstein, the "First World" and
"Third World" are merely components of a larger
world system which originated in 16th-century
European colonialism.
 World-systems theory suggested that the world
economy is best understood as an interlocking
capitalist system which exemplifies, at international
level, many of the features that characterize national
capitalism; that is, structural inequalities based on
exploitation and a tendency towards instability and
crisis that is rooted in economic contradictions. The
world-system consists of interrelationships between
the ‘core’, the ‘periphery’ and the ‘semi-periphery’.
 Core areas such as the developed North are
distinguished by the concentration of capital, high
wages and high-skilled manufacturing production.
 They therefore benefit from technological innovation
and high and sustained levels of investment.
 Peripheral areas such as the less developed South are
exploited by the core through their dependency on the
export of raw materials, subsistence wages and weak
frameworks of state protection.
 Semi-peripheral areas are economically subordinate to
the core but in turn take advantage of the periphery,
thereby constituting a buffer between the core and the
periphery. Such thinking about the inherent
inequalities and injustices of global capitalism was one
of the influences on the anti-globalization, or ‘anticapitalist’, movement that emerged from the late 1990s
onwards.
 The core-periphery thesis of world-systems theory is
based on another body of work, dependency theory,
which argues that the basis of international politics is
the transfer of natural resources from peripheral
developing countries to core wealthy states, mostly the
Western industrialized democracies.
 The poor countries of the world, like the poor classes
of the world, are said to provide inexpensive human
and natural capital, while the wealthy countries'
foreign policies are devoted to creating and
maintaining this system of inequality.
 International economic law (such as the World Trade
Organization) and other such systems are seen as
means by which this is done.
 To combat these systems of inequality, traditional
Marxists and dependency theorists have argued that
poor countries should adopt economic control policies
that can break them out of the prison of international
economic controls, such as import substitution rather
than the export-based models usually favoured by
international economic organizations such as the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
 Dependency theory was crucial for two reasons: it
forced students of International Relations to analyse
material inequalities which are at least partly the result
of the organization of the capitalist world economy,
and it argued for a moral engagement with the
problem of global inequality.
 It argued for a critical engagement with the world – for
not only interpreting the world but with trying to
understand how to change it – in a period when the
newly independent states were forcing the issue of
global economic and social justice onto the diplomatic
agenda.
 The study of global inequality was the vehicle which
brought the Marxist tradition more directly into
contact with the study of international relations.
Robert Cox’s analysis of social forces, states and world
order remains one of the most ambitious attempts to
use historical materialism to escape the limitations of
state-centric international relations theory.
 His materialist conception of global economic and
political structures focused on the interaction between
modes of production – specifically the capitalist mode
– states and world order but in such as way as to avoid
economic reductionism.
 Cox claimed that production shapes other realms such as
the nature of state power and strategic interaction to a far
greater extent than traditional international relations
theory has realized but it is also shaped by them.
 The relative importance of each domain in any era was an
empirical question rather than a matter that could be
settled a priori.
 However, Cox was especially interested in first analysing
the dominant forms of production and then moving to a
discussion of the other constituent parts of the global
order. He placed special emphasis on the
internationalization of relations of production in the
modern capitalist era and on forms of global governance
which perpetuate inequalities of power and wealth.
 Developing a theme which was introduced by the
Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and
1930s, Cox focused on the hegemonic nature of world
order – that is, on how the political architecture of
global capitalism helps to maintain material
inequalities through a combination of coercion and
efforts to win consent.
 During the Cold War, Marxists and their sympathisers
were critical of realist arguments that strategic
competition could be considered apart from the
struggle between two radically different social systems
and ideological perspectives, although this view had
few adherents in the mainstream study of
international relations.
 The collapse of bipolarity and the accelerated rise of
the ‘global business civilization’ encouraged a
reconsideration of Marx’s writings on capitalist
globalization.
 Marxism may appear less relevant given the revival of
national security politics since 9/11, but its analysis of
the relationship between capitalism and the state can
still contribute to the study of global governance in a
period when the subordination of many states to the
dictates of global capitalism is so evident.
 Marxism comes into its own when analysing the
relationship between the states system and global
capitalism and when considering the structure of
global hegemony. These are two respects in which it is
best placed to contribute to the study of international
relations.
 Marxism has been influential in the development of
approaches to international political economy which
have a critical or emancipatory intent.
 Marx wrote about the origins and development of
modern capitalism, but not as an end in itself: he was
especially interested in the social forces that would
bring about its downfall with the result that the mass
of humanity would be free from domination and
exploitation.
 Neo-Gramscian approaches work in the same spirit by
focusing on the role of counter-hegemonic political forces
in the global order – that is, on the various groups which
are opposed to a world system which produces among
other things massive global inequalities and damage to the
natural environment.
 Mainstream International Relations theory has long been
opposed to what it sees as manifestly ‘political’ scholarship,
although its claims to neutrality and objectivity have been
challenged in the critical literature.
 Realism and neo-realism have been criticized on the
grounds that they have a ‘problem-solving’ rather than a
‘critical’ purpose.
 The distinction between problem-solving and critical
theory was made by Cox in conjunction with his muchquoted remark that ‘knowledge is always for someone and
for some purpose’.
 Cox argued that neo-realism is a version of problemsolving theory which takes the existing international order
for granted and asks how it can be made to ‘function more
smoothly’.
 In the main, this means concentrating on the problems
resulting from relations between the great powers.
 By contrast, critical theory asks how the existing global
political and economic order came into being, and whether
it might be changing.
 Marxist-inspired political inquiry is only one strand of
contemporary critical theory. Approaches such as
feminism, postmodernism and postcolonialism have
been concerned with patriarchy and with
constructions of identity and otherness in national
and global politics which have not been central
dimensions of Marxist studies of world politics.
 We have seen that Marx and Engels were mainly interested
in modes of production, class conflict, social and political
revolution and the economic and technological unification
of the human race.
 They focused on the national ties which bound the
members of modern societies together and separated them
from the rest of the human race; they analysed what they
saw as the weakening of national bonds because of
capitalist globalization while recognizing the resilience of
national loyalties in many of Europe’s nation-states; they
discussed what they regarded as the development of new
forms of human solidarity and the slow emergence of a
global community which would eventually include the
whole human race.
 Somewhat simplistic assumptions about how capitalist
internationalization would be followed by socialist
internationalism had to be rethought in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of
the revival of nationalism and the increased danger of
major war. The theory of capitalist imperialism should
be viewed in this context.
 Lenin and Bukharin developed the theory of imperialism to
explain the causes of the First World War.
 They argued that war was the product of a desperate need
for new outlets for the surplus capital accumulated by
dominant capitalist states.
 The theory of capitalist imperialism has been discredited
on account of its economic reductionism but, despite its
flaws, it was concerned with the central question of how
political communities closed in on themselves in the
period in question – an inescapable preoccupation given
the earlier Marxian assumption that the dominant trend
was towards greater cooperation between the proletariat of
different nations.
 The theory of imperialism developed Marx and Engels’
analysis of the relationship between nationalism and
internationalism, and globalization and
fragmentation. In so doing, it highlighted the tension
between forces promoting the expansion and forces
promoting the contraction of the sense of community.
 Lenin and Bukharin claimed the dominant tendency
of the age was the emergence of new mercantilist
states ever more willing to use force to achieve their
economic and political objectives.
 National accumulations of surplus capital were
regarded as the chief reason for the demise of a
relatively peaceful international system.
 Lenin and Bukharin maintained that nationalist and militarist
ideologies had blurred class loyalties and stymied class conflict in this
changing international environment.
 In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin claimed that no
‘Chinese wall separates the [working class] from the other classes’.
 Indeed, a labour aristocracy bribed by colonial profits and closely
aligned with the bourgeoisie had developed in monopoly capitalist
societies.
 With the outbreak of the First World War, the working classes which
had become ‘chained to the chariot of … bourgeois state power’ rallied
around pleas to defend the homeland. But it was thought that the shift
of the ‘centre of gravity’ from class conflict to inter-state rivalry would
not last indefinitely. The horrors of war would show the working classes
that their ‘share in the imperialist policy [was] nothing compared with
the wounds inflicted by the war’.
 Instead of ‘clinging to the narrowness of the national
state’ and submitting to the patriotic ideal of
‘defending or extending the boundaries of the
bourgeois state’ the proletariat would return to the
main project of ‘abolishing state boundaries and
merging all the peoples into one Socialist family’.
 Marx and Engels believed that capitalism created the
preconditions for extending human loyalty from the nation
to the species – and Lenin and Bukharin thought the
destruction of national community and the return to
cosmopolitanism would resume after a brief detour down
the disastrous path of militarism and war.
 Their idea that the superabundance of finance capital was
the reason for the First World War was mistaken, but that
does not mean their analysis lacks all merit.
 Like Marx and Engels before them they were dealing with a
fundamentally important theme which has received too
little attention in mainstream International Relations.
 Marxist writings on nationalism dealt with the boundaries of
loyalty and community in greater detail. Recent claims about
how the contemporary world is shaped by globalization and
fragmentation have an interesting parallel in Lenin’s thought:
 Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the
national question. The first is the awakening of national life and
national movements, the struggle against all national
oppression, and the creation of national states. The second is the
development and growing frequency of international intercourse
in every form, the breakdown of national barriers, the creation of
the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of
politics, science etc.
 Globalization and fragmentation were inter-related in Lenin’s
account of how capitalism spreads unevenly across the world.
 This theme was central to Trotsky’s analysis of the
‘combined and uneven development’ of capitalism and
to the later phenomenon of Third World Marxism.
 According to the latter perspective, the metropolitan
core capitalist societies, including the proletariat,
exploited the peripheral societies which had been
brought under their control.
 Their understandable response was not to seek to
develop alliances with the working classes in affluent
societies but to strive for national independence.
 Lenin and many other Marxists believed that national
fragmentation was an inevitable consequence of the
global spread of capitalism, but with the exception of
Austro-Marxism they believed it was essential to avoid
a socialist compromise with nationalism.
 Proletarian internationalism was more important than
creating multicultural political communities.
 Theories of imperialism shared Marx’s belief that
capitalism was a progressive force because it would
bring industrial development and the basis for
material prosperity to all peoples.
 The assumption was that Western models of capitalist
and then socialist development would be imitated by
other regions of the world.
 It was noted earlier that several Third World Marxists
argued that the proletariat in the industrial world is
one of the beneficiaries of neoimperialism; they
supported the national revolt of the periphery rather
than the Western socialist ideal of proletarian
internationalism .
 Western Marxists disagreed about whether or not to
support national liberation movements in nonWestern societies, and many displayed considerable
unease with forms of nationalist politics which would
dilute the internationalist commitments of classical
Marxism.
 The fact that Marxism is a Western doctrine with its
roots in the European Enlightenment is the crucial
point here. Marxist cosmopolitanism was developed in
the era of European dominance – in the colonial era
which Marx greatly admired – and at a time when it
was reasonable to assume that the non-European
world would become more similar to the West in most
ways.
 The rise of Third World Marxism in the 1960s and
1970s was a powerful reminder that the modern world
was gradually entering the post-European age. Its
emergence might be regarded as an illustration of ‘the
cultural revolt against the West’ or as an attempt to
adapt European ideas to very different circumstances.
 In more recent years, many non-Western governments
and movements have openly rejected Western models
of economic and political development, and many
oppose what they see as alien and decadent Western
values. In this context, all forms of cosmopolitanism –
whether Marxist or not – meet with suspicion.
 The main problem is not that classical Marxism
underestimated the importance of nationalism, the
state and geopolitics but, many would argue, that it
expressed a culture-bound view of the world which
was inherited from the European Enlightenment.
 Classical Marxism may have defended the ideal of
universal human emancipation, but its vision of the
future assumed the non-European would and should
become the same as the modern West. The issue then
is whether its project of emancipation was always at
heart a project of domination or assimilation.
 Despite its weaknesses, Marxism contributes to the
theory of international relations in at least four
respects.
 First, historical materialism with its emphasis on
production, property relations and class is an
important counter-weight to realist theories which
assume that the struggle for power and security
determines the structure of world politics.
 This leads to two further points which are that Marxism
has long been centrally concerned with capitalist
globalization and international inequalities and that, for
Marxism, the global spread of capitalism is the backdrop to
the development of modern societies and the organization
of their international relations.
 A fourth theme, which first appeared in Marx’s critique of
liberal political economy, is that explanations of the social
world are never as objective and innocent as they may
seem.
 Applied to international politics, the argument is that the
analysis of basic and unchanging realities can all too easily
ignore relations of power and inequality not between states
but between individuals.
 Dominant strands of Marxist thought have taken the
view that one of the main functions of scholarship is to
understand the principal forms of domination and to
imagine a world order which is committed to reducing
material inequalities.
 This critical orientation to world politics can no longer
be simply ‘Marxist’ in the largely superseded sense of
using the paradigm of production to analyse class
inequalities.
 But it can nevertheless remain true to the ‘spirit of
Marxism’ by combining the empirical analysis of the
dominant forms of power and inequality with a moral
vision of a more just world order.
 This critical approach can extend beyond the analysis
of capitalist globalization and rising international
inequalities to the ways in which states conduct
national security politics.
 One of the failings of Marxism as a source of critical
international theory is its ingrained tendency to focus
on the former at the expense of the latter field of
inquiry.
 Marxists had underestimated the crucial importance
of nationalism, the state and war, and the significance
of the balance of power, international law and
diplomacy for the structure of world politics.
 New interpretations of Marxism have appeared since
the 1980s: the perspective has been an important
weapon in the critique of realism and there have been
many innovative attempts to use its ideas to develop a
more historically aware conception of the development
of modern international relations.
 Its impact on the critical theory of international relations
has been immense.
 It has also been an important resource in the area of
international political economy, where scholars have
analysed the interplay between states and markets, the
states-system and the capitalist world economy, the
spheres of power and production.
 For some, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph
of capitalism over socialism marked the death of Marxism
as social theory and political practice.
 In the 1990s, some argued that the relevance of Marxism
had increased with the passing of the age of bipolarity and
the rapid emergence of a new phase of economic
globalization.
Marxist analyses of capitalist globalization and fragmentation invite
reconsideration of Waltz and Wight’s argument that Marxism may not be
regarded as a serious contribution to the study of international politics or is
clearly inferior to conventional approaches in the field.
It might also be argued that its project of developing a critical theory of world
society is one respect in which Marxism supersedes the dominant approaches
in the Anglo-American study of international politics. If so, the question is how
to build on its foundations, how to preserve its strengths and how to move
beyond its errors and weaknesses.