Theories-of-International-Relations

Andrew Linklater 113

trapped within an international social division of labour, exposed to
unfettered market forces and exploited by new forms of factory production
which turned workers into appendages to the machine (Marx 1977a:
477). Marx thought that capitalism had made massive advances in
reducing feelings of estrangement between societies. Nationalism, he
believed, had no place in the hearts and minds of the most advanced
sections of the proletariat which were committed to a cosmopolitan
political project. But capitalism was a system of largely unchecked
exploitation in which the bourgeoisie controlled the labour-power of
members of the proletariat and profited from their work. It was the root
cause of an alienating condition in which the human race – the bourgeoisie
as well as the proletariat – was at the mercy of structures and forces
which it had created. Marx wrote that philosophers had only interpreted
the world whereas the real point was to change it (Marx 1977b: 158).
An end to alienation, exploitation and estrangement was Marx’s main
political aspiration and the point of his efforts to understand the laws of
capitalism and the broad movement of human history. This was his chief
legacy to thinkers in the Marxist tradition.

Marx believed that the historical import of the forces of production
(technology) and the relations of production (and especially the division
between those who own the means of production and those who must
work for them to survive) had been neglected by the Hegelian movement
with which he was closely associated in his formative intellectual years.
Hegel had focused on the many forms of religious, philosophical, artistic,
historical and political thinking – the diverse types of self-consciousness –
which the human race had passed through in its long journey of coming
to know itself. After his death, and as part of the struggle over Hegel’s
legacy, the Left Hegelians attacked religion, believing it was a form of
‘false consciousness’ which prevented human beings from acquiring a
deep understanding of what they are and what they can become. But, for
Marx, religious belief was not an intellectual error which had to be
corrected by philosophical analysis but an expression of the frustrations
and aspirations of people struggling with the material conditions of
everyday life. Religion was ‘the opium of the masses’ and the ‘sigh of an
oppressed creature’ (Marx 1977c: 64) and revolutionaries had to under-
stand and challenge the social conditions which gave rise to the solace of
religious beliefs. ‘The critique of heaven’, as Marx put it, had to become
‘the critique of earth’ (1977c).

The pivotal 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

114 Marxism

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. Indeed, 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 tech-
nological innovation had been the driving-force behind social change.

Marx wrote that history was the continuous transformation of
human nature (Marx 1977d: 105). 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. The fact that Marx
thought socialism would be a global rather than a European phenomenon
deserves further comment. Whereas war, imperialism and commerce had
simply destroyed the isolation of earlier human societies, capitalism
directed all sections of the human race into a single historical stream.
Few mainstream students of International Relations recognized the
importance of this preoccupation with the economic and technological
unification of the human species, with the widening of the boundaries of
social cooperation and with the forces that blocked advances in human
solidarity (Gill 1993a). Few traditional scholars commented on his
fascination with the relationship between internationalization and inter-
nationalism, but these are crucial themes in his writings which contain
much that should interest the student of contemporary international
affairs (Halliday 1988a).

In his reflections on capitalism, Marx argued that universal history
came into being when the social relations of production and exchange
became global and when more cosmopolitan tastes emerged, as illustrated
by the desire to consume the products of distant societies and to enjoy an
increasingly ‘world literature’. But the forces which unified humanity also
checked the growth of universal solidarity by pitting members of the bour-
geoisie against the proletariat (and against each other), and by forcing
members of the working class to compete for scarce employment. Yet the
very tension between the wealth generated by capitalism and the poverty
of many individual lives generated new forms of solidarity among the
exploited classes. International working class solidarity was also triggered
by the remarkable way in which capitalist societies used the language of
freedom and equality to justify existing social relations, while systemati-
cally denying real freedom and equality to the poorer classes.

Large normative claims are raised by the question of what it means to
be truly free and equal. In general, Marx and his collaborator, Engels,

Andrew Linklater 115

were dismissive of the study of ethics, but they were hardly engaged in
the dispassionate analysis of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism
(even though they did believe it was possible to develop a science of the
laws of capitalist development modelled on the physical sciences). There
is no doubt their inquiry into capitalism was normative through and
through (Lukes 1985; Brown 1992). Indeed, Marx’s own purpose was
made clear in the introductory remarks to The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, where he wrote that human beings make their own
history but not under conditions of their own choosing (Marx 1977e:
300). His point was that humans make their own history because they
possess the power of self-determination which other species either do
not have or cannot exercise to the same degree. And yet humans cannot
make history as they please because class structures stand over them and
greatly constrain their freedom of action. A distinctive political project
is already contained within this observation, namely how human beings
can come to make more of their history under conditions freely chosen
by themselves.

Although Marx rejected Hegel’s study of history and politics, he kept
faith with one of Hegel’s most central themes which is that in the course
of their history human beings acquire a deeper appreciation of what it
means to be free and a better understanding of why society will have to
be changed before freedom can be realized more completely. In line with
his belief that history revolves around the labour process, Marx
observed that freedom and equality under capitalism mean that bour-
geois 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. Marx’s passionate condemnation of capitalism has
to be seen in this light. It is a critique from inside the capitalist order
rather than a challenge from outside which appeals to some notion of a
higher morality.

Marx rejected the ethical standpoint, which one finds in Kant’s writings,
that human beings can agree on universal truths by using reason, but he
shared Kant’s conviction that all political efforts to realize freedom
within the sovereign state were ultimately futile because they could be
rapidly destroyed by the sudden shock of external events. For Kant, war
was the dominant threat to the creation of the perfect society; hence his
belief in the priority of working for perpetual peace. 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

116 Marxism

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. Marx and Engels
(whose nickname was ‘The General’, given his keen interest in strategy
and war) were aware of the importance of geopolitics in human history;
they knew that conquest in which economic motives were usually
predominant had led to the development of ever-larger political associa-
tions. They were aware that the struggle for power between the
European states led to imperial expansion, although they believed that
economic motives were the main reason for the development of world
trade and a global market. In short, their analysis was far less concerned
with what warring states had contributed to the process of globalization
than with explaining how the internal dynamics of capitalism led inex-
orably to this condition. Although states may have contributed to the
globalization of social and political life, they did this largely and increas-
ingly, in Marx’s view, because of the internal laws of motion of the
capitalist system of production.

Some of the most striking passages in Marx and Engels’ writings
emphasize the logic of expansionism which is peculiar to modern capital-
ism. The essence of capitalism is to ‘strive to tear down every barrier to
intercourse’, to ‘conquer the whole earth for its market’ and to annihi-
late the tyranny of distance by reducing ‘to a minimum the time spent
in motion from one place to another’ (Marx 1973: 539). In a famous
passage in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1977), which
reveals that Marx and Engels were among the first theorists of globaliza-
tion, they argued that:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given
a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every
country … All old-fashioned national industries have been destroyed
or are daily being destroyed … In place of the old wants, satisfied by
the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their
satisfaction the products of different lands and climes. In place of the
old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have inter-
course in every direction, universal interdependence of nations … The
bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of produc-
tion, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all,
even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation. The cheap prices of
its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all
Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production … i.e. to become

Andrew Linklater 117

bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own
image. (Marx and Engels 1977: 224–5)

This remarkable statement had clear implications for revolutionary
strategy. The sense of ‘nationality’ might already be ‘dead’ among the
most enlightened members of the proletariat, but humanity was still
divided into nation-states and national bourgeoisies remained in control
of state structures which they used to promote allegedly national interests.
Marx and Engels believed that each proletariat would first have to settle
scores with its own national bourgeoisie, but revolutionary struggle
would be national only in form. It would not end with the capture of
state power because the proletariat’s political objectives and aspirations
were international (1977: 230, 235).

Realists such as Waltz 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 under-
standing of nationalism, the state and war should have been even mildly
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 (Waltz 1959: Chapter 5). This is
one of the most famous criticisms of Marxism within the study of inter-
national 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 (Giddens 1981). 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,
burgeoning transnational capitalist activity shattered the illusion of
apparently separate societies – 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
(Gallie 1978). Reflecting one of the dominant tendencies of the age,
Marx (1973: 109) argued that relations between states were important
but ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ forces in human affairs when compared
with modes of production and their laws of development. In a letter to
Annenkov, Marx (1966: 159) asked whether ‘the whole organisation of

118 Marxism

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. Even the most sympathetic
reader of Marx’s work has to concede the point. There can be absolutely
no doubt that 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. They wrote that
the Irish and the Poles were the victims of national domination rather
than class exploitation, and added that freedom from national domi-
nance was essential if subordinated peoples were to become allies of the
international proletariat (Marx and Engels 1971; see also Benner 1995).
These remarks indicate that while Marx and Engels were primarily con-
cerned with the class structure of capitalist societies, they were well aware
of the persistence of ancient animosities between national groups – but
they almost certainly continued to believe that national differences
would eventually decline in importance and might even disappear alto-
gether (Halliday 1999: 79). The growing threat of inter-state violence in
the last part of the nineteenth century led to other adjustments to their
thinking. Engels’ writings, which stressed the role of war in human his-
tory, envisaged unprecedented levels of violence and suffering in the next
major European conflict. He thought that military competition rather than
capitalist crisis might be the spark that ignited the proletarian revolution.
Interestingly, Engels argued that the increased possibility of major war
meant that the socialist movement had to take matters of national
security and the defence of the homeland very seriously (Gallie 1978;
see also Carr 1953).

Third, as Gallie (1978) has noted, those intriguing comments about
nationalism, the state and war did not lead Marx and Engels to rework
their early statements about the explanatory power of historical material-
ism. 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 acquir-
ing some degree of autonomy from the ruling class in unusual political cir-
cumstances. Marx and Engels’ political writings revealed growing subtlety
but the main statements of their theoretical position continued to privilege
class and production, to regard economic power as dominant form of
power and to regard the revolutionary project as fundamentally about
promoting the transition from capitalism to socialism (Cummins 1980).

Andrew Linklater 119

Marx developed an analysis of capitalism which must remain a key
reference point for anyone interested in a critical theory of world politics
concerned with the promotion of human emancipation. An account of
the alienating and exploitative character of industrial capitalism was
linked with a political vision which looked forward to the democratization
of the labour process (regarded as being as important as democratizing
the institutions of the state, and possibly of greater significance).
Brilliant though the analysis was of the expansion of capitalism to all
sectors of modern societies and to all parts of the globe, it is clear the pre-
occupation with class domination and material inequalities obscured
other forms of social exclusion and human suffering which must also
feature in a comprehensive critical theory of world politics. These include
the forms of domination and discrimination anchored in notions of racial
and gender superiority as well as in ideas about nation and class.

Marx and Engels created some of the foundations of a critical theory,
and it was up to later radical theorists to build on their achievements.
Something of this kind is evident in the writings of the Austro-Marxists,
who developed a more subtle and complex analysis of capitalist global-
ization and national fragmentation in a manner that remained true to
the spirit but not to the letter of foundational texts. Writing in the early
part of the twentieth century, Austro-Marxists such as Karl Renner and
Otto Bauer argued that Marx and Engels had underestimated the impact
of cultural differences on human history, the continuing strength of
national loyalty and the need to satisfy demands for cultural autonomy
in the future socialist world (Bottomore and Goode 1978). Whereas,
Marx and Engels had been vague about whether or not national differ-
ences would survive in the socialist world order, the Austro-Marxists
envisaged a future in which increasing cultural diversity would be
celebrated while cosmopolitanism, understood as ‘friendship towards
the whole human race’ rather than ‘the want of national attachment’,
would develop. This was to combine a sociology of class and national
identity with a broader vision of universal human emancipation.

The Austro-Marxist response to the twin forces of globalization and
fragmentation imagined a world in which human beings would enjoy
levels of solidarity and cultural diversity which had no parallel in earlier
times. These were controversial ideas which clashed with the socialist idea
which developed in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin but they indi-
cated one way of building on the Marxian legacy and of reconstructing
historical materialism. However, the rise of Soviet Marxism–Leninism
meant that what Gouldner (1980) described as the anomalies, contradic-
tions and latent possibilities within the Marxist tradition were sup-
pressed in a closed, quasi-scientific system of supposed truths that
destroyed the potential for further growth and development. Numerous

120 Marxism

encrustations formed around Marxism in this period, as Anderson (1983)
noted, but the Marxist literature on nationalism and imperialism early in
the twentieth century did move the discussion of capitalist globalization
and national fragmentation forward in intriguing ways.

Nationalism and imperialism

We have seen that Marx and Engels were mainly interested in modes of
production, class conflict, social and political revolution and the eco-
nomic and technological unification of the human race. Their writings
raised key questions about the tension between centrifugal and cen-
tripetal forces in capitalist societies. 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 com-
munity which would eventually include the whole human race. So, in
their account of modern Europe, they analysed how early capitalism
brought scattered, local groups together in increasingly homogeneous
nation-states. In this period, ruling classes created national bonds which
checked the formation of divisive class identities. Later, capitalism burst
out of its national bounds. Increased exploitation in the era of capita-
list globalization produced internationalist sentiments and alliances
amongst the industrial proletariat. 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 (1968) and Bukharin (1972) 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 impe-
rialism 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 prole-
tariat of different nations (Linklater 1990b: Chapter 4). The theory of
imperialism developed Marx and Engels’ analysis of the relationship

Andrew Linklater 121

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.

Above else, however, the study of imperialism criticized the liberal
proposition that late capitalism was committed to free trade inter-
nationalism which would lead to peace between nations; it was a restate-
ment of Marx’s claim that capitalism was destined to experience frequent
crises. 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 accu-
mulations of surplus capital were regarded as the chief reason for the
demise of a relatively peaceful international system (although Lenin
thought the decline of British hegemony and the changing balance of
power had contributed in a secondary way to the relaxation of constraints
on force in relations between the major capitalist states).

Lenin and Bukharin maintained that nationalist and militarist ideologies
had blurred class loyalties and stymied class conflict in this chang-
ing international environment. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism, Lenin (1968: 102) 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 (Bukharin 1972: 166). 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’ (1972: 167). Instead of ‘clinging to the
narrowness of the national state’ and succumbing to the patriotic ideal of
‘defending or extending the boundaries of the bourgeois state’ the prole-
tariat would return to the main project of ‘abolishing state boundaries
and merging all the peoples into one Socialist family’ (1972: 167).

As noted earlier, 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 fun-
damentally important theme which has received too little attention in

122 Marxism

mainstream International Relations. This is how political communities
are shaped by the struggle between nationalism and internationalism in
a world political system; it is what unusually high levels of globalization
and fragmentation mean for the future of political community and
for the level of human solidarity; and it is how national and global
economic and political structures affect the lives of the marginal and
most vulnerable groups in society.

Marxist writings on nationalism dealt with the boundaries of loyalty
and community in greater detail. Recent claims about how the contem-
porary 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 move-
ments, 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. (Lenin 1964: 27)

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 cap-
italism and to the later phenomenon of Third World Marxism (Knei-Paz
1978). According to the latter perspective, the metropolitan core capi-
talist 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 knew that particular groups such as the Jews were oppressed
because of their religion and ethnicity, and that the demand for national
self-determination was their unsurprising riposte. Socialists had to
recognize that estrangement between religious and national groups was
a huge barrier to universal cooperation. Although Lenin argued that
socialists should support progressive national movements and try to
harness them to their cause, he rejected the Austro-Marxists’ approach
to the ‘national question’. They had advocated a federal approach
which would give national cultures significant autonomy within exist-
ing national communities. Lenin’s view was that national movements
should be made to choose between complete secession from the state or
continued membership on the basis of equal and identical rights with all
other groups. His judgement was that most national movements would
decide against secession for the simple reason that small-scale societies