A necessarily historical materialist moment for whom? A tale of two literary rhythms

My contribution to this forum on Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton’s monograph reflects on how their work over the last two decades informs Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. ¹ In particular, I enquire into the thematic sequencing of the argument, which primarily reflects their socialization into the discipline of International Relations (IR) in the late 1990s. Yet the final chapter in parts II and III – on the social factory and ruptural resistances respectively – indicates a broader, cross-disciplinary approach to the world of international relations. Hence, I ask whether the necessarily historical materialist moment that Bieler and Morton call for is aimed at IR the discipline or the study of international relations more holistically.

In order to make sense of this, I deploy the term “literary rhythms.” This combines the observations of Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci on the process of authoring a text: the former’s discussions of literary tendencies and techniques, and the latter’s writings on the rhythms of thought as they develop across an author’s biography. ² What I find useful about their contributions is the emphasis that is placed on authoring as a purposeful, productive practice which nevertheless cannot be reduced to “single causal affirmations and isolated aphorisms.” ³ Consequently, the production of a text such as the monograph under review here must be situated within the wider literary relationships that the authors have found themselves; yet, these relationships will evolve over time, meaning that the text is never fully singular or coherent in form or content. Hence, all texts are comprised of various literary rhythms, and, in the case of GCGWGC, which of the two main rhythms is prioritized by the reader is of lasting significance for how the book will be received and interpreted.

For reasons of space, I concentrate here on Part II. Two of the three chapters reflect work published jointly by the authors between 2003 and 2014, where they focused on themes such as passive revolution, uneven and combined development, geopolitics, and the relationship between capitalism and the international states-system. ⁴ Yet the third chapter is clearly informed by separately-authored writings from 2014 to the present-day, where a more grounded and concrete approach comes to the fore, dominated by themes such as resistance, borders, the politics of water, and literary geographies. ⁵ This highlights tensions immanent to the monograph between an argument that epistemologically and methodologically is situated within IR – states as key actors, epochal global shifts in and across history as important focal points, and a relatively high level of abstraction and generality – and one that is epistemologically and methodologically situated within the study of international relations in a more holistic sense: contested and class-relevant constructions of identity politics, social struggles in and beyond the workplace, and a more concrete and grounded level of abstraction. To be clear, these tensions can both be accommodated by the “internal relations” social ontology advocated throughout the book and especially its first three chapters. However, emphasizing the internal relations between capitalism and the states-system takes one in a different intellectual and political direction than stressing the internal relations between workplaces and households.

It is to the authors’ credit that they have crafted the book in such a way: it is considerably more open, pluralistic, and thus richer than other historical materialist IR texts. Indeed, the critical comments made here are only possible because Bieler and Morton have made such efforts not to remain in a comfort zone, recycling old arguments for the sake of it. This will ensure that the book will be an essential text for years to come. Nevertheless, an intriguing question will linger long into the future: for whom is this a necessarily historical materialist moment? Scholars of global capitalist modernity or of the social factory, of uneven and combined development or of the conflictual entanglements of political identities? It should be stressed that it is possible to include both historical materialist moments in one’s argument, but the book’s attempt to do so is simultaneously its greatest strength and most salient weakness.

As I and Kathryn Starnes have pointed out, how texts are written is just as important as their content. ⁶ And in parts II and III, it is apparent that the more holistic chapters are the last of three, following on from two IR-focused chapters on both occasions. These literary gestures – IR reference points come first each time, and receive twice the attention by virtue of there being two chapters as opposed to one – indicate that this is the dominant historical materialist moment for Bieler and Morton. The gestures thus intimate that we as readers can only make sense of and study the world of international relations once we have been taken through more discipline-specific chapters.

Perhaps unintentionally, this implies that contested and class-relevant constructions of identity politics, and social struggles in and beyond the workplace, are reactive to rather than constitutive of states as key actors and of epochal global shifts in and across history. I need to stress again that an internal-relational ontology refutes the possibility that one set of socio-historical processes are analytically separate from, or exterior to, another set; the playing out of their interconnections can only be ascertained through detailed research and careful argumentation. At the same time, surely it is permissible to pose this question: what would happen to the book’s argument if the order had been reversed, with two holistic chapters followed by one IR-focused chapter? In what remains of this commentary, I sketch a potential answer.

Most notably, the reversing of the literary sequencing would immediately bring forth the possibility that IR is just one of several social science/humanities disciplines interested in researching the world of international relations. As such, the authors would have been able to argue more forcefully that, while their book is focused on the implications of the necessarily historical materialist moment for IR as a discipline, the approach they take has explicit relevance for cognate disciplines such as Geography, Development, and beyond. This would be made more visible to the reader by way of the greater emphasis on the world of international relations compared to more IR-specific considerations, enabling the book to address while also transcend the discipline that the authors had been socialized into in the first place.

More thematically, positioning the social factory and the conflictual entanglements of political identities as constitutive of global capitalist modernity and of uneven and combined development, rather than vice versa, would enhance the book’s potential to radically undermine some key IR shibboleths. For instance, a discussion of national states would be couched in a more critical manner, explicitly reminding the reader that the state is“ nothing more than the materialization of human thought/action in regularized practices which appear ‘real’ and ‘state-like’ by way of the implementation and enforcing of laws, procedures, and conventions.” ⁷ Furthermore, the welcome and important engagement with feminist scholarship already in the book could be enhanced through a more visible affirmation that political economy analysis of any kind ought to give equal weight to processes of production and reproduction across a range of societal sites. These two shifts would then enable the analysis to be more explicitly political, because the ruptures of resistance that Bieler and Morton discuss so engagingly in the final chapter would then be something that they did not just study, but also more visibly practised in the way they crafted their writings.

To conclude, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis is an outstanding book: carefully argued, wide-ranging in scope, disciplinarily open. It is thus the text for anyone interested in historical materialist IR, not least because it emphatically refutes many lazy notions about the conceptual and analytical potential of historical materialism. However, the more submerged literary rhythm found in the book is what I will prioritize when making use of it in the future. Whether others will do the same, or will instead emphasize the IR-focused rhythm, is a fascinating question for the coming years.