Marxism and World Politics

Contesting Global Capitalism

Alexander Anievas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415478021
• eBook ISBN: 9781135189297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book brings together internationally-distinguished scholars from History, Philosophy, Development Studies, Geography, and International Relations (IR) to examine recent developments in Marxist approaches to world politics.

Offering original and stimulating analyses of subjects traditionally at the forefront of Marxist studies of world politics, the collection also considers issues which have yet to be fully explored within a number of disciplines. Examining a wide array of topics ranging from the imperialism-globalization debate, the connections between social structures and foreign relations, the role of identity and imperialist norms in world politics, to the relationship between Marxist and Realist IR Theory, the contributors seek to further theoretical discussions and their implications for emancipatory radical politics. These contributions are structured around two major themes:

• The relationship between capitalist modernity and the states-system in explaining the changing patterns of inter-state conflict and cooperation;

• The debates within Marxist and IR discourses on the theoretical significance of 'the international', covering topics including uneven and combined development and passive revolution.

An impressive collection that seeks to advance dialogue and research, Marxism and World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, International Political Economy, Political Science, and Historical Sociology.

Part I
The geopolitics of capitalist modernity

1
Does capitalism need the state system?

Alex Callinicos¹

Introduction

One of the major puzzles in international politics since the end of the Cold War has been whether the collapse of the Soviet Union also marked the effective termination of geopolitics, at least on a global scale.² Realists famously answered this question in the negative. Kenneth Waltz, for example, predicted that Germany and Japan would develop into great powers armed with nuclear weapons and that the unipolar structure of global politics produced by the eclipse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) would prove a passing phenomenon as states started to balance against the United States: ‘over time, unbalanced power will be checked by the responses of the weaker who will, rightly or not, feel put upon’ (Waltz 1993, 79). Samuel Huntington (1999, 44) argued that ‘the formation of an anti-hegemonic coalition … would … appear to be a natural phenomenon in a uni-multi-polar world’ where the American superpower coexists with regional powers. But, most observers see little real sign of a coalition capable of limiting US primacy. For Huntington, the slowness of significant balancing behaviour to appear is to be accounted for, in part at least, by the greater influence of civilizations, larger cultural unities than the political units of the state system, in a post-ideological world (Huntington 1999, 45–46); for Waltz, it simply reflects the inherent difficulty of determining the precise timing of structural trends: ‘Realist theory predicts that balances disrupted will one day be restored. A limitation of the theory, a limitation common to social science theories, is that it cannot say when’ (Waltz 2000, 27).

For many, however, these responses represent unsuccessful attempts to rescue a failed research programme. Some offer explanations that seek to show that, granted the realist premise of an anarchic international system in which rational states must seek their own security, balancing is not the necessary outcome of a unipolar structure (for example, see Wohlforth 1999 or Paul 2005). Others posit a transformation in the nature of global politics: one influential thought is that economic globalization has been accompanied by the development of forms of global governance that both impose further restrictions on the sovereignty and capabilities of nation-states than those arising from the changed structure of the world economy and offer states real incentives to cooperate and to pool some of their remaining powers (for example, Held, McGrew, Goldblatt et al. 1999).

Similar debates have emerged among Marxist political economists and students of international relations. This chapter seeks to explore these debates and, in the process, to respond to criticisms of my own approach made by Ray Kiely (2006) and Gonzalo Pozo-Martin (2006). I do so by, first, framing the argument in the major controversy dividing Marxists about the nature of contemporary imperialism, second, addressing one particular theoretical anomaly, namely the relationship between the capitalist economic system and the international state system, and, finally, returning to the problem with which we started—the nature and future of contemporary geopolitics. While practitioners of mainstream international relations theory may find the conceptual vocabulary and the specific content of these Marxist debates unfamiliar, they may still discover some benefit from seeing how important problems are approached from a different perspective. Given that I defend the same conclusion as that affirmed by realists—that the end of the Cold War did not terminate geopolitical competition, of necessity I make some points about the relationship between Marxism and realism, though there is much more that could be said on this subject.

The debate on imperialism renewed

It has become a cliché to say that, with the Bush administration’s proclamation of a ‘long war’ against terrorism, imperialism is back with a vengeance. This has coincided with a renaissance of Marxist writing on imperialism. Of course, this is not exactly a coincidence, but the intellectual revival predated George W Bush’s entry to the White House. It was the conjuncture of the 1990s—in particular, the combination of the unrivalled hegemony of the US and the proliferating discourse of globalization—that commanded a new focus on imperialism among Marxist theorists (see, for example, Rupert and Smith 2002 for a good range of theoretical perspectives, and, on the conjuncture, Rosenberg 2005). Of course, this return was no simple repetition. Common ground among most contributors to the resulting debates was that the theory of imperialism formulated by Vladimir Lenin (1964) and considerably refined by Nikolai Bukharin (1972) during the First World War was a dead dog (for a rare exception, see Halliday 2002a).

Nevertheless, the Lenin-Bukharin theory can provide a useful framework for contrasting the positions staked out in the current Marxist discussion of imperialism.³ This theory did two things: (1) it offered an account of the specific phase of capitalist development that Marxists of the time generally agreed had been reached by the beginning of the twentieth century, in which the concentration and centralization of capital had produced what Rudolf Hilferding (1981) called ‘organized capitalism’ at the national level, culminating (Bukharin affirmed more strongly than Lenin) in the fusion of the state and private capital; and (2) it attempted an explanation of the geopolitical rivalries among the great powers that produced the First World War as a consequence of the economic and territorial competition of the ‘state capitalist trusts’ that now dominated these states. Given these two claims, it can be understood why both Lenin and Bukharin were so hostile to Karl Kautsky’s (1914) theory of ultra-imperialism, which asserted that the process of ‘organization’ would not stop at the national level but would so integrate capital transnationally as to make war irrational from a capitalist perspective (Callinicos 2002).

This is not the place for a full assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Lenin-Bukharin theory (see Callinicos 1987, 79–88; 1991). More to the point, claim (2) can be used as a template for framing contemporary debates. One can identify, broadly speaking, three positions. First, there are those who offer a version of Kautsky’s argument. Thus, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and William I Robinson all claim that capitalism is now organized both economically and politically along transnational lines: the conclusion straightforwardly follows that geopolitical conflicts among the leading capitalist states are obsolete (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2004; Robinson 2004). The minor premise of this argument is that the interstate system that has provided the structural context of geopolitical rivalries, first in Europe, then globally, for the past few centuries is neither inherently necessary nor any longer required for capitalist relations of production to function optimally. This claim has been very strongly contested, notably by Ellen Wood (2002; 2003), but those who reject it do not share the same view of contemporary imperialism. A second position, argued systematically by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, asserts that while capitalism needs the state system, the US has succeeded in constructing since the Second World War an ‘informal empire’ that effectively subordinates the other leading capitalist states to American hegemony (Panitch and Gindin 2003; 2004; 2005). This argument implies the same conclusion as is affirmed by Hardt, Negri and Robinson: geopolitical competition is obsolete. Neither the crisis of the 1970s, in which Japanese and West German economic competition with the US played a significant causal role, nor the contretemps over the Iraq war, has significantly dented American primacy, according to Panitch and Gindin.

It is probably fair to say that some version of this position is widely supported on the intellectual left: for example, it informs the editorial outlook of the New Left Review. It has the merit of consistency with the assertion of American national power under George W Bush (a development highly embarrassing to Hardt and Negri: see Boron 2005), and it certainly captures the asymmetry of power between the US and all other states in the post-Cold War era. Kiely (2006, 208, 212) has put forward a variant on this position that differs from Hardt and Negri in asserting that ‘the increased globalization of capital does not mean the erosion of the nation-state or the end of a hierarchical nation-state system’, but stresses the benefits that US hegemony offers the other leading capitalist classes: accordingly, ‘the most useful classical Marxist theory for understanding current realities is Kautsky’s … theory of ultra-imperialist cooperation between the core capitalist states’.

Both these perspectives are contested by a third group, dubbed ‘theorists of the new imperialism’ by Kiely (2005, 32–34). They are most prominently represented by David Harvey (2003), but also include Walden Bello (2005), Peter Gowan (1999), Chris Harman (2003), John Rees (2006), Claude Serfati (2004) and myself (2003). Broadly speaking, all these theorists affirm the following:

1. Global capitalism has yet to exit from the era of economic crisis into which it entered in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Brenner 1998; 2002).
2. One important dimension of this crisis is the division of advanced capitalism between three competing centres of economic and political power, the so-called Triad of Western Europe, North America and East Asia.
3. Consequently, despite the real asymmetries of power between the US and the other leading capitalist states, significant conflicts of interest exist among them (and indeed other states such as Russia and China) that are likely, in the context of the continuing ‘long downturn’, to give rise to geopolitical struggles.⁴

This third school of thought therefore differs from the other two in claiming that geopolitical conflict continues in the post-Cold War era. I have myself expressed this view strongly in debate with Panitch and Gindin (Callinicos 2005c; 2006; Panitch and Gindin 2006). Plainly who is right or wrong about this and other issues is ultimately an empirical and historical question.

What I want to do in this chapter is to clarify some theoretical problems as a way of addressing criticisms that have been made of Harvey’s and my views. Perhaps I should preface this with some remarks about where I am coming from. I start from a standpoint that is relatively sympathetic to the Lenin-Bukharin theory but recognizes that the theory’s limitations demand criticism, revision, and refinement. Therefore, pace some lazy critics, my position is not simply a reaffirmation or defence of the Lenin-Bukharin theory.⁵ In contrast, Harvey’s analysis in The New Imperialism is evidently a development of his own restatement and extension, in a broader ‘geo-historical’ framework, of Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production in The Limits to Capital—though it should be noted that this earlier work already concludes with an account of how inter-imperialist rivalries and war are one way of resolving crises of over-accumulation (for more on Harvey, see Ashman and Callinicos 2006).

Mention of this analysis brings me to the first point of clarification. It is common in contemporary Marxist debates to pose one of the main questions at issue between the third current of thought and the other two as whether inter-imperialist rivalries persist today. I prefer to formulate this question in more abstract terms as that of the persistence of geopolitical competition, for two reasons. First, though the phrase ‘inter-imperialist rivalries’ has canonical status in Marxist discussion deriving from the Lenin-Bukharin theory, it has the disadvantage of equating conflicts between states with the polarization of the state system into Great Power blocs that prevailed between (roughly) the 1890s and 1989–91. The implication is that conflicts among states tend to take the form of general war between the Great Powers: the apparent absence of such a tendency today therefore demonstrates the absence altogether of interstate conflict. To avoid such rhetorically effective but question-begging tactics, I prefer to use the more general concept of geopolitical competition, which denotes all conflicts over security, territory, resources and influence among states.⁶

Second, geopolitical competition thus understood characterizes one of the main forms of interaction among units of the state system. This has the merit of reframing the problem in terms of the relationship between capitalism and the state system. Both Weberian historical sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann and Theda Skocpol, and international relations theorists in one or other realist tradition have reproached Marxists for failing to see the kind of competition specific to interstate systems as a transhistorical phenomenon governed by a logic irreducible to that of class exploitation. Recently some Marxist theorists, notably Hannes Lacher and Benno Teschke, have gone part of the way with these critics. They argue that (1) the modern state system, while not, as Weberians and realists affirm, a transhistorical phenomenon, emerged prior to the predominance of capitalism, in the era of the absolutist states that developed out of the crisis of feudal property relations but which they argue (contrary to earlier Marxist interpretations of absolutism) did not yet represent the transition to capitalism; and (2) consequently the state system has only a contingent connection with capitalism, which could in principle dispense with it, though they differ about whether it is actually doing so (Lacher 2002; 2005; Teschke 2003).

Lacher’s and Teschke’s argument rests in part on a mistaken view of the development of capitalism (Harman 1989; 2004). But their conclusion (item (2) in the preceding paragraph) is rejected by at least one theorist who shares this view, Ellen Wood (2002). For Wood, even if the modern state system originated prior to capitalism, the sovereign territorial state required capitalist property relations and the separation they effect between the economic and the political for its perfection (see also Rosenberg 1994). Furthermore, the more globally integrated capitalism becomes, the more dependent it is on a system of such states to provide the intensive management of those subject to its domination. Wood’s argument can be extended using Mann’s (1986; 1993) distinction between the despotic and infrastructural power of states. A state’s despotic power is greater the fewer restraints there are on its exercise over its subjects. Its infrastructural power is, by contrast, a function of its capacity actually to regulate the lives of all its subjects. Thus, the rulers of ancient empires had great despotic power, but restricted to a relatively confined territory around the capital; modern states, by contrast, have, thanks to their bureaucratic organization and the extractive capabilities facilitated by capitalist economic relations, very great infrastructural power, which may or may not be exercised despotically. So one might restate Wood’s case by saying capitalist domination not only makes possible but actually requires the infrastructural power exercised by the plurality of states making up the modern state system.

There are two difficulties with this argument. The first is that it suffers from what Vivek Chibber (2005, 157) calls ‘soft functionalism’: in other words, it goes from the needs of capital to the existence of the state system. Second, even if we nevertheless grant that capitalism both facilitates and requires a far more intensive management of populations than earlier modes of production, why should the exercise of this function have to be by a plurality of states (Callinicos 2004b)? Hardt and Negri are perfectly clear that capitalist reproduction needs state capabilities, they just deny that these capabilities are now exercised by sovereign territorial states, as opposed to the transnational political networks binding together different actors—states certainly but also transnational corporations, international institutions, NGOs, etc—that they claim to be constitutive of the new ‘imperial sovereignty’. This illustrates one of the more general problems with functionalism, hard or soft, namely that to identify a function that must be performed if certain effects are to be produced does not of itself explain why the performance of that function takes any specific form. Hence, to repeat, granted that the reproduction of capitalist relations depends on the exercise of the kind of state capabilities that Mann describes as infrastructural power, why should the exercise of these capabilities be undertaken by a plurality of states?

But other Marxist approaches that also treat the relationship between capitalism and the state system as necessary seem vulnerable. Both Harvey and I have independently developed very similar conceptions of capitalist imperialism as constituted by the intersection of, respectively, capitalist and territorial logics of power and economic and geopolitical competition. One of the attractions of this approach is that it avoids any attempt to reduce the geopolitical strategies of states to economic interests. Thus for Harvey, ‘[t]he relation between these two logics should … be seen as problematic and often contradictory (that is, dialectical) rather than as functional or one-sided’ (Harvey 2003, 30). Similarly I argue that:

the Bush Doctrine can’t simply be read off the administration’s corporate connections: rather, it represents a more or less coherent project for maintaining and strengthening US hegemony that has, inter alia, an economic dimension. … More generally, throughout the history of modern imperialism, Great Powers have acted for complex mixtures of economic and geopolitical reasons. … The Marxist theory of imperialism analyses the forms in which geopolitical and economic competition have become interwoven in modern capitalism, but does not seek to collapse these analytically distinct dimensions into one another.

(Callinicos 2003, 105–6)

I commit what might seem to be the vulgarity of quoting myself at length in part because of the misrepresentation of my views persistently committed by Kiely. Thus, he describes my position as ‘seeing the Bush administration in terms of its functionality to US capital’ (Kiely 2006, 218), an interpretation that is hard to square with the passage I have just cited, let alone with the overall account of the Bush administration’s global strategy from which this passage is drawn, The New Mandarins of American Power.⁷ The real challenge to Harvey’s and my position is not that it is economic reductionist, but rather precisely the opposite. Thus, Pozo-Martin (2006, 236) writes:

two separate logics are posited, and thus it seems perfectly po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Origins and Acknowledgements
• The renaissance of historical materialism in international relations theory An introduction
• Part I The geopolitics of capitalist modernity
• 1 Does capitalism need the state system?
• 2 The changing ‘logics' of capitalist competition
• 3 Western hegemony and transnational capital A dialectical perspective
• 4 Beyond the theory of imperialism Global capitalism and the transnational state
• 5 Many capitals, many states Contingency, logic or mediation?
• 6 Post-Fordist capitalism and imperial power Toward a neo-Gramscian view
• 7 To be or not to be a non-reductionist Marxist: Is that the question?
• 8 Industrial development and international political conflict in contemporary capitalism
• Part II Marxism and ‘the international'
• 9 Uneven and combined development The social-relational substratum of ‘the international'? An exchange of letters
• 10 Capitalism, uneven and combined development, and the transhistoric
• 11 Approaching ‘the international' Beyond Political Marxism
• 12 The geopolitics of passive revolution
• 13 Politics and the international
• References
• Index