Historical Materialism and International Relations Theory

Kubalkova and Cruickshank contend that: 'The main difficulty in studying Marx's ideas on international relations seems to be that he paid such small explicit attention to them... it would be true to say that Marx's ideas on the subject were never explicity formulated or brought together in one place ...'. The same authors have this to say concerning Historical Materialism itself - that in the entire body of Marx's and Engels' work. Historical Materialism 'is nowhere set out systematically and is usually reconstructed from the following works: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and German Ideology (in a rather embryonic form) the Eighteenth Brumaire (the first attempt at the application of the doctrine to a current political situation) Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (very concise, but far too brief and scematic) and Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State'. V. Kubalkova and A.A. Cruickshank , Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 13,350 (from footnote 7B of chapter two, 'Marx and Engels on international relations'). For further discussion of the 'problem' faced by Marxism in addressing International Relations see R.N. Berki , ' On Marxian Thought and the Problem of International Relations ', World Politics (Vol. 24, No. 1, October, 197 1), pp. 80-105. Berki remarks on p. 8 The status that overt, covcntional Marxism affords to war and international relations is clearly secondary and derivative'. An even more basic dismissal of Marx in this regard was delivered by Martin Wight , who bluntly asserted that ' Neither Marx, Lenin, nor Stalin made any systematic contribution to international theory ... in 'Why is there no International Theory? ', in H. Butterfield and R.J.M. Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 25 . For analysis of Marx's and Engels' work on national questions, particularly from their contributions to the New York Tribune, see B.F. Bloom , The World of Nations: A Study of the National. Implications in the Work of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), cited in V. Kubalkova and A.A. Cruickshank , op cit. Even in terms of Marx's contribution to the theory ot the State itself there are considerable lacunae. Bob Jessop has written, in The Capitalist State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) that '... I deny that it is possible to distil a single, coherent, unitary Marxist theory from the various studies that Marx and/or Engels presented concerning the state and political action. Instead they offered a variety of theoretical perspectives which co-exist in an uneasy and unstable relation', p. xii . Bob Jcssop's work is one of the finest available reviews of recent Marxist debate on the theory of the State. Ralph Miliband has commented in a similar vein that 'Marx himself never attempted to set out a comprehensive and systematic theory of the state ....ln the late 1850s he (Marx) wrote that he intended, as part of a vast scheme of projected work, of which Capital was only to be the first part, to subject the state to systematic study. But of this scheme, only one part of Capital was in fact completed. I lis ideas on the state must therefore be taken from such historical pièces de circorurance as The Class Struggle in France. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France, and from his incidental remarks on the subject in his other works' [from 'Marx and the State' in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds.), The Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1965) and reprinted in Class Power and State Power: Political Essays (London: Verso Editions and New Left Books, 1983), p. 3-4]. For further review of recent Marxist theory of the state see: John Holloway and Sol Picciotto (eds.), State and Capital: A German Debate (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). For a delineation of quintessential issues of conceptualisation within Marxist theory of the capitalist state see the classic Miliband-Poulantzas debate: Ralph Miliband , The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1969): Nicos Poulantzas , ' The Problem of the Capitalist State ', New Left Review (No 58, November-December 1969) ; Ralph Miliband , ' The Capitalist State - Reply to Nicos Poulantzas '. New Left Review (No. 59,1970); Nicos Poulantzas , Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973; originally published in French in 1968); Ralph Miliband , ' Poulantzas and the Capitalist State ', New Left Review (No. 82. November-December 1973; Ernesto Laclau , ' The Specificity of the Political: Around the Poulantzas-Miliband Debate ', Economy and Society (Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1975): Nicos Poulantzas , The Capitalist: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau ', New Left Review (No. 95, January February 1975). For a later alternative critique of Poulantzas, see Erik Olin Wright , Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).

See V.L. Lenin. Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, English Edition, Vol. 1. Part 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952; originally published in Russian, 1917). Lenin's work has been elevated to a central status that is perhaps beyond the actual merits of this small publication. There were, of course, several other key works on Imperialism produced within that general period ; N. Bukharin , Imperialism and World Economy. published in Russian in 1917; R. Hilferding , Finance Capital, published in German in 1910; J.A. Hobson. Imperialism: A Study , published in 1902; Karl Kautsky , 'Ultra-Imperialism ', published in German in 1914; and Rosa Luxemburg , The Accumulation of Capital, published in German in 1913.

A critique of Stalinism can be found in such works as Herbert Marcuse , Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), Roy Medvedev , Lei History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1972) and On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 1979), L. Kolakowski. Main Currents of Marxian (Oxford: Oxford University Press . 1978). the Praxis group of philosophers in Yugoslavia. For socialist alternatives to Stalinism developed by East European theorists see: Mihailo Marcovic . Democratic Socialism: Theory and Practice (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), Rudolf Bahro. The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books. 1978) and Roy Medvedev. On Socialist Democracy ( Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1977 ). Kubalakova and Cruickshank provide an interesting discussion of Soviet Marxism as it pertains to international Relations theory, especially in chapter three of Marxism-Leninism and Theory of Intenational Relations, op. cit. They provide a useful summary of Professor Valena D. Modrzhinskaya's outline of Soviet International Theory from F.V. Konstantinov (ed.). Sociological Problems of International Relations (Moscow: Izdatclstvo Nauka', 1970). See also D.V. Kuusinen (ed.). Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow ; Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963). For a less orthodox assessment of international Relations from an Eastern European perspective, see Silviu Brucan , The Dialectic of World Politics (New York: Free Press, 1978).

For a general introduction to both classical and neo-Marxist approaches to International Relations and International Political Economy see: Charles A. Barone , Marxist Thought on Imperialism: Survey and Critique (London : Macmillan. 1985); Anthony Brewer , Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 ) ; Magnus Blomstrom and Bjorn Hettne. Development Theory in Transition: The Dependency Debate and Beyond: Third World Responses (London : Zed Books, 1984); Ronald H Chilcote , Theories of Comparative Politics: The Search for A Paradigm ( Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 1981 ). lan Roxborough , Theories of Underdevelopment ( London: Macmillan, 1979): and John G. Taylor . From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment ( Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. 1979).

For an introduction to the debate within the International Relations discipline see: William R. Thompson (ed). Contending Approaches to World System Analysis (London : Sage Publications. 1983): W. Ladd Hollist and James N. Rosenau , World System Structure: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. 1981); K.J. Holsti , The Divided Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985); E. Krippendorf. International Relations as a Social Science (Brighton: Harvester Press. 1982, originally published in German. 1975); and Robert O. Keohanc (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics {New York: Columbia University Press. 1986). Also of great importance are the separately edited collections in the series edited by Immanuel Wallerstein as The Political Economy of the World System Annuals ( Beverly Hills, CA: Sagc, annual).

Perry Anderson . Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974, Verso , 1981), and Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the 16th Century ( New York: Academic Press. 1974) and The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press. 1980). In addition, although not specifically addressed to the question of the transition from one social formation to another, Geoffrey de Ste-Croix's magnum opus, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981 ) is a magnificent example of the conscientious application of a Historical Materialist conceptual framework of analysis to pre-capitalist socio-economic formations which incorporates trenchant discussion of political forms. Also see the Dobb-Sweezy debate, from the journal Science and Society in the 1950s, reprinted in a collection introduced by Rodney Hilton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978). In Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), Perry Anderson refers to Absolutism as 'The first international State System in the modern world' and on p. 11 asserts:' ... one of the basic axioms of historical materialism: that secular struggle between classes is ultimately resolved at the political — not at the economic or cultural - level of society. In other words, it is the construction and destruction of States which seal the basic shifts in the relations of production, so long as classes subsist'. Perry Anderson's seminal formulation on pp. 403-4 of this volume succinctly states 'All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion .... The "superstructures" of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of production in pre-capitalist social formations. They intervene directly in the "internal" nexus of surplus extraction .... In consequence, pre-capitalist modes of production cannot be defined except via their political, legal and ideological superstructures, since these are what determine the type of extra-economic coercion that specifies them. The precise forms of juridical dependence, property and sovereignty that characterize a pre-capitalist social formation, far from being merely accessory or contingent epiphenomena. compose on the contrary the central indices of the determinate mode of production dominant within it'. Immanuel Wallerstein, in Volume 2 of The Modern World System, op. cit.. maintains on pp. 113-4 that. ' ... a state's strength correlates with the economic role of the owner-producers of that state in the world economy ...'. Wallerstein suggests five political measures of this strength: 'The degree to which state policy can directly help owner-producers compete in the world market (mercantilism); the degree to which states can affect the ability of other states to compete (military power); the degree to which states can mobilize their resources to perform these competitive and military tasks at costs that do not eat up the profits (public finance) ; the degree to which states can create administrations that will permit the swift carrying out of tactical decisions (an effective bureaucracy); and the degree to which the political rules reflect a balance of interests among owner-producers such that a working "hegemonic bloc" (to use a Gramscian expression) forms the stable underpinnings of such a state. The last element, the politics of the class struggle, is the key to the others ... Wallerstein adds, 'I see the modern history of the state rather as one long quest to create structures sufficiently strong to defend the interests of one set of owner-producers in the world-economy against other sets of owner-producers as well as, of course, against workers'. 7. The debate between Historical Materialism and the Realist, Neorealist, and Liberal Internationalist schools has expanded rapidly since the mid-1970s, a phenomenon which can be viewed as a dialectical product of the objective conditions developing in the capitalist mode of production and in the international order, relating to the downturn that began at about that time. Ernest Mandel and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, characterise this structural reorganisation in terms of long waves, or Kondratieff cycles. Perry Anderson predicted in Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976) that the new objective conditions in the international structure could re-orient the focus of research in the Historical Materialist tradition, and as a consequence of the possible reunification of theory and practice 'it would inevitably shift the whole centre of gravity of Marxist culture towards the set of basic problems posed by the movement of the world economy, the structure of the capitalist state, the constellation of social classes, the meaning and function of the nation'. Anderson also stated, in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), that Historical Materialism 'would also have to come to terms with the fundamental gains made by Marxist historiography - above all in the Anglo-American area - since the Second World War'. Anderson's footnotes in 'Prediction and Performance', in the same volume, partially document the veritable explosion of creativity within the Historical Materialist tradition in recent years, and provide an extremely useful guide to many of the key works and debates since the 1970s, including such authors as Ernest Mandel, John Roemer, Marco Lippi, Ulrich Krause, Nicos Poularitzas. Ralph Miliband, John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, Claus Offe, Goran Therborn. Erik Olin Wright, Guglielmo Carchedi, Christian Baudelot and Roger Estahlet, Rudolf Bahro, Domenico Mario Nuti. Wlodzitnierz Brus, Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson, G.A. Cohen, Eric Hobshawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, E.P. Thompson, Victor Kiernan, Geoffrey de Ste-Croix, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, David Montgomery, Robert Brenner, David Abraham, Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol, James O'Connor, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, and Christopher Lasch. See also the wide ranging debates on crucial issues of theory contained in condensed form in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate. Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and an unedited collection of various authors, The Value Controversy (London: Verso. 1981). For a very interesting review of one internal Marxist debate concerning Historical Materialism's central conceptual categories and the direction of Marxist historiography see the piece entitled Anderson's Balance Sheet' in Paul Q. Hirst , Marxism and Historical Writing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1985). According to Hirst, some of the principle works in the particular debate he attempts to outline, by way of a perhaps over-defensive self-defence, are: Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar , Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970); E.P. Thompson , The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978); and Perry Anderson , Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), Lineages of the Absolutist State, op. cit., Considerations on Western Marxism, op. cit., and Arguments Within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980): Barry Hindness and Paul Hirst , Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) and Mode of Production and Social Formation ( London: Macmiltan, 1977); B.A. Cohen , Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Alex Callinicos , Is There a Future for Marxism? (London: Macmillan, 1982); and Andrew Levine and Erik Olin Wright , ' Rationality and Class Struggle ', New Left Review (No. 123, September-October 1980). 1 would also like to direct attention to Ralph Miliband's 'Political Forms and Historical Materialism. in The Socialist Register, op. cit., in which Miliband critiques Anderson's Passages and Lineages (both op. of.). For very recent works on topics relating to International Relations, see: Ali Kazancigil (ed.). The State in Global Perspective (Atdershot : Gower/UNESCO, 1996), especially the chapter by Immanuel Wallerstein. ' The States in the Institutional Vortex of the Capitalist World-Economy ', pp. 145-55. This volume includes contributions from Goran Therborn. Maurice Godelier, S.N. Eisenstadt, A. Zolberg, and Romila Thapar. See also Martin Shaw (ed.). War. State and Society (London: Macmillan, 1984), particularly Shaw's 'War, Imperialism and the State System: A Critique of Orthodox Marxism for the 1980s'. This collection includes Ralph Miliband , Michael Mann , Dan Smith , John Hall and others. Michael Doyle. Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) deserves attention, as does Theda Skocpol's chapter 'Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research' in Peter Evans, P. Rueschemezer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also Richard Rosecrance , ' Long Cycle Theory and International Relations ', International Organisation (Vol. 41, No. 2, Spring 1987 ), pp.283-301, and Joshua Goldstein , ' Long Cycles in War and Economic Growth ', Vols. 1 and 2 (unpublished PhD dissertation, Massachussets Institute of Technology , 1986). Finally, see Anthony Giddens , A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism : Vol. 1; Power, Property and the State (London: Macmillan , 1981), especially chapter nine ' The State: Class Conflict and Political Order ', and ibid, Vol. 2; The Nation State and Violence ( London: Polity Press, 1985), especially chapter six ' Capitalism and the State: From Absolutism to the Nation-State' and chapter ten 'Nation-States in the Global State System', and the response to these critiques by Erik Olin Wright, 'Giddens' Critique of Marxism '. New Left Review (No. 138, March-April, 1983), pp. 11-35.