Marx, Ideology, and International Relations Alexandre Kirchberger Marxism has had a peculiar destiny within the social

sciences. Its very nature challenged existing norms of thought as well as the different social and historical orders within which it was expressed, and the result was a de facto exclusion from mainstream academic life. During most of the 20th century, Marxism lived an encapsulated existence in academia, imprisoned by the political and historical analogy made with the USSR. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, Marxism was left discredited by the prevailing end-of-history ideology that has dominated Western intelligentsia since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of which Francis Fukuyama was the symbolic figure. On the other hand, Marxism has had a certain, diffused and sometimes strong, influence on other academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, geography, development studies, literature and art. But this process of diffusion has not affected the recent discipline of International Relations (IR). Most scholars agree on the relative paucity of Marxist writing specifically focused on IR. It should be noted however, that paucity does not preclude quality: it may well be that the few Marxist works that do exist offer a thorough approach to IR. This essay asks whether there is such as thing as a coherent Marxist approach to IR. What distinguishes it from other approaches, and what problems of validations does it face?. The argument of this essay is as follows: Marx, Engels and their followers (including Gramsci, Lukacs and contemporary Marxists) have many contributions to make to the field of IR. These are, however, presented as a scattered collection of various fragments of work. It will be argued that these fragmented contributions can and do present a coherent approach to IR, but that this coherence requires an active move from the one who seeks it: the Marxist approach does not come as a student handbook to IR. For instance, the link between Marxs method of historical abstraction and contemporary international issues such as terrorism or religious fundamentalism is not ready made; it needs working out. A number of scholars have advanced explanations for the paucity of Marxist writing on IR. Although these are not the primary focus of this essay, they are nonetheless useful when considered as a starting point. Halliday argues that Marxism did not fit easily into each of IRs three historical grand debates: utopianism versus realism, traditionalism versus

behaviouralism, and state-centrism versus world-system theory1. In each of these confrontations, Marxism took a bit of both sides and so could not be readily identified on the ideological spectrum. For MacLean, however, the dearth of Marxist writing on IR is explained by the division of labour in the social sciences which has brought the separation of politics from economics, and the emphasis on the scientific study of the latter within the general framework of positivism.2 Marxists, for whom the study of politics and economics could not be separated because both are intrinsically linked to the material and social world, were excluded. Similarly, Rosenberg claims the paucity to be the consequence of the clear separation between the domestic and foreign spheres that is at the core of the dominant ideological framework in IR, namely realism.3 This, in conjunction with MacLeans argument that Marxist scholars themselves insisted on using the domestic sphere as the basic unit for IR analysis, easily explains their exclusion. Finally, it is important to note that these explanations are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they fit together very well. The core of the Marxist contribution to IR lies in the concept of ideology. For Marx: the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour . In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura.4 As Jorge Larrain showed, at this time circa 1845 Marx did not clearly lay out the difference between ideas and ideology.5 It was only later that he distinguished the ideological component parts of the ruling class from its free spiritual production, implying that not all ideas are part of an ideology. In 1893, Engels stated that:.

1 2

F. Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1994), pp. 5052. J. MacLean, Marxism and international relations: a strange case of mutual neglect, Millennium, vol. 17 no. 2, p. 296. 3 J. Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 110. 4 K. Marx, The German Ideology, in D. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 164. 5 J. Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983), pp. 88118 and 169197.

ideology is a process which of course is carried on with the consciousness of the so-called thinker but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move him, he remains unaware of, otherwise it would not be an ideological process. He therefore imagines false or apparent driving forces.6 Ideology is thus a distorted form of knowledge that provides its own justification for reproducing itself. Its essential character, therefore, is one of appearance as opposed to being. Marxs method of historical abstraction, as described in Grundrisse and advocated by MacLean, allows for a distinction between things as they appear to us in the world, and their status as causal mechanisms in explanation.7 This method offers IR two contributions: firstly, an emphasis on the necessity of a critical epistemological and ontological inquiry in order to unveil the ideological matrix that might frame a particular concept; and secondly, a methodology, which Marx expounded as follows. We have to start from a general abstract definition more or less applicable to all forms of society (Marx used the example of a population), proceed to less and less complex abstractions (in the case of Marxs example, classes, means of production, etc.) until we arrive to the simplest determination. Then we start the journey back until we arrive to the real, concrete definition (a population), but now seen as a rich aggregate of many determinations and relations.8 This is applicable to any general concept. In IR, it can be applied to the concept of national interest for instance, something that is applicable to all nations, if not societies. National interest, if it is to be real-istically understood, needs first to be decomposed. We must explain what a nation is, then what the state is, its relationship to the dominant class, and the relationship of the latter to the capitalist mode of production, private property, the means of production, and so on. We may then come back to the concept of national interest and find that it is nothing more than the interest of a specific social formation defined by the socioeconomic structure of that nation. Another conceptual target within IR could be growth, for instance, a notion supposed to be particularly useful in political economy. Using Marxs method, growth can be seen as mere accumulation of commodities and capital. A similar conclusion would be reached by examining the concepts of Gross Domestic Product or national wealth. Mda, for example, has shown that economic indicators such as GDP only reflect the profusion
6 7

K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 459. MacLean, Marxism and international relations, p. 308.

of goods and services, brought onto the market by growth, that individuals consume.9 What they do not reflect is the distribution of this wealth, the degree of popular involvement in public life, the quality of public services or, most importantly, the social cohesion of a society, its force and its density. The potential of such an approach is therefore evident when focusing, for example, on how the discipline of international political economy is taught: the more you teach students that nations are judged according to their degree of accumulation, the more they will absorb this distorted form of knowledge and reproduce it. In fact, I believe this is the best approach for revealing the latent interests of a teaching method that justifies the reproduction of the prevailing social and historical order in such a way that the hegemony of the latters intellectual orthodoxies is maintained. The concept of national sovereignty and the norm of non-intervention, which are at the core of the legal, political and ethical disputes surrounding the issue of humanitarian intervention, are perhaps those in most urgent need of critical scrutiny. At first glance, it seems that these concepts should be congenial to Marxist scholars, who by nature abhor external interventions, something that Lenin equated with imperialism. But if their historicity is studied, as well as the historical and social order within which they were framed, it can be argued that they are the philosophical devices by which the dominant class in a society seeks to perpetuate its domination over the means of production. If this is especially true in the internal dimensions of these concepts, it also has implications for their external ones. Sovereignty and non-intervention, although linked to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), became enshrined in international law during the Industrial Revolution when the bourgeois order replaced feudalism, and in effect united the dominant classes of various nations over the desire of maintaining their hegemony over the means of production. Because of their natural tendency to preserve the existing political and social structure, they should not attract sympathy that easily. Similarly, the concept of humanitarian intervention, the academic study of which has literally exploded, quantitatively speaking, during the last decade, is not devoid of historicity, and ought to be the target of epistemological inquiry as well. Indeed, it is fundamentally linked to the ideological concept of individual human rights. It is this linkage which led NATO to assert, in the terms of the Rambouillet peace agreement on Kosovo, that the economy of Kosovo shall
8 9

Marx, Grundrisse, in McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 351. D. Mda, Quest-ce que la Richesse? (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 722 and 6779.

function in accordance with free market principles,10 thereby including the individual right to accumulation. Of course, that does not mean the concept of humanitarian intervention is completely flawed; would Marx have disagreed with the idea of using force to liberate an oppressed people, in the name of humanity, from tyranny? Surely not, but he would have appealed to the human rights of the oppressed people as a collective rather than to the rights of private individuals. In the end, it is by using Marxs method of historical abstraction, through its emphasis on the need for epistemological attention, that we can discover the reason for the inadequacy of contemporary writing on humanitarian intervention: most of this writing is in fact informed by a legal positivist logic of investigation that separates law from morality, just as positivism has separated politics from economics. Globalisation is another of the buzzwords that IR scholars are so fond of and, as such, it clearly deserves critical scrutiny. To apply Marxs method of historical abstraction to the concept of globalisation would surely give some interesting results. Although this is not the place for it, we can conceive of the direction of such an application. It would start with an examination of what global means. This would lead to a critical assessment of notions of time and space (since most IR scholars define globalisation as a contraction of space and time). In turn, this would bring us to the ideas of modernity and the Enlightenment. At this point we would have to explain the social mode of production that corresponds to the historical period that lies behind the notion of modernity, namely liberal capitalism. If we continued this process until we reached the simplest determination or relation, and if we then make our journey back, we would see that what is global about globalisation is not information and communication technologies nor new cultural interactions between societies: it is the ideology of globalisation that literally spreads everywhere. Can a Marxist approach be coherent then? Obviously, if all concepts are conditioned by the infrastructure of society, and if some of them are ideological, then necessarily the concepts of a coherent approach to IR and of validity should be the target of ontological, epistemological and methodological scrutiny as well. What does coherence mean? How do we determine the validity of an approach, i.e. what is the method for evaluating it? According to MacLeans interpretation of Marx, the criteria for confirmation or rejection cannot be predictive, and so
10

Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, [Rambouillet (France), 23/02/1999], Chapter 4, Article I(1), http://www.un.org/peace/kosovo/sc_kosovo.htm. See also Appendix B of the

must be exclusively explanatory.11 He distinguishes explanatory worth from internal theoretical coherence, so that the evaluation of a theory must reside in the extent to which it can expose mechanisms which, if they were to exist and to act in the way postulated by the theory, would account for the phenomenon in question.12 This is of importance here, because if the evaluation of a theory lay in its internal coherence (like that of several pieces of a jigsaw fitting well together), or in its elegance, then Marxism would not qualify. As opposed to realism, which precisely bases its own worth in the apparent internal coherence of concepts such as international anarchy, sovereignty, balance of power and national interest, the Marxist approach is not eloquently exposed nor is it de facto internally coherent. But this should not be basis of its evaluation. I have argued that the core of the Marxist contribution to the field of IR lies in the concept of ideology. But Marxism has much more to offer. These other contributions are fragmented however, and most of them take the form of specific theories and use the writings of Marxs followers. Nonetheless, all these other contributions are still centred on the idea of the duality of appearance and being. So, in a way, they all refer (implicitly or explicitly) to Marxs concept of ideology. Take for instance the field of development studies. The writings of Frantz Fanon and the intensity of political activism in the sixties have clearly helped the birth of new core/periphery and dependency theories. Baran, for instance, accounted for the post-war success of Western capitalism by suggesting that Western countries the core were able to extract an ever-expanding economic tribute from the periphery. He insisted on the role of transnational and multinational corporations in the draining of capital (surplus) from the periphery to the core.13 The desire to bypass the theories that appeared to prevail at his time is clearly visible in Barans intellectual approach. What is distinctive about the Marxist approach to IR should now be clear. First, it is a fragmented rather than a systematic one. Second, it has a distinctive methodology. Third, it is an approach rooted in the understanding of social relations. Fourth, it does not take the ideological framework that prevails as the result of the dominance of a particular social and historical order,

agreement for a full overview. 11 MacLean, Marxism and international relations, p. 306. 12 Ibid. p. 304. 13 P. A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 2244. See also A. Emmanuel, LEchange Ingal (Paris: Franois Maspero, 1969).

in which the task of theorising has to take place, for granted. Fifth, the state is not taken as the only valid unit of analysis: class and relations of production are other valid units, although it should be reminded that Marx never reduced social relations to the concept of class. The Marxist approach faces three main criticisms. The first and most common is that of excessive determinism. Many argue that political events or actors, or even the state itself, cannot be seen as mere expressions of the underlying socio-economic structure of a society. This is, of course, as relevant for IR as for other disciplines. This accusation of determinism has spawned another common criticism of Marx, that of orthodoxy, dogmatism and intolerance. But those who criticise Marx as determinist make the error of confusing determinism with conditioning. The latter certainly leaves room for political action and hope for change. Who would deny that the external behaviour of a state is, partly at least, conditioned, not determined, by its position in the international structure of production or division of labour? The second major criticism the Marxist approach faces is that it is economistic and, as such, only relevant to certain areas of IR like trade or finance. But if Marxism is labelled in this way, it is because politics and IR have been artificially separated from economics by modernity and its rationalised, scientific and positivist meta-theoretical framework. So this criticism is only valid if we assume that the sphere of international politics is distinct and separate from that of international economics. Those who criticise Marxism for being economistic make the error of taking the ideological framework that is given to them for granted. The third criticism postulates that Marxist concepts in general, and those of class and mode of production in particular, are not appropriate for the international arena. Coming essentially from realists who argue that the state is the sole valid unit of analysis in IR, this criticism suffers from a tautology. If one rejects the notion of class in the analysis of IR then one clearly rejects the Marxist approach in general. Class as a unit of analysis certainly has some defects, but that does not preclude it from having explanatory merit, or from being used alongside other units. Class can be a very useful concept in explaining intra-national conflicts for instance, something a realist perspective on IR obviously excludes, or in contributing to the debate on the emergence

of non-state actors within a globalised context. Van der Pijl, for instance, has argued persuasively that the EU, the G8 and others are examples of transnational elite coordination.14 Marx has a great deal to offer to the discipline of International Relations. Marxism involves a critical epistemology and a powerful methodology, as well as theories about specific issues. Of course, all this depends on whether by Marxism we mean the works of Marx only, or whether we are to include his followers as well. Is Marxism coherent? As we have seen, we need to define what is coherence or at least the criteria according to which coherence is to be assessed. In my opinion however, Marxism is a coherent approach to IR. But I would argue that it is our task to make this collection of fragments coherent and, from this, to give an account of what a Marxist approach to IR is. I do not wish to push this point to its logical conclusion, which is that any idea or concept has meaning only if we give it one. This is not what I mean. Rather, I mean that we should not demand a precise handbook of IR or a manual of statecraft from Marxism. Marx is not Hans J. Morgenthau, and Capital is not Politics Among Nations. Bibliography Baran, P. A., The Political Economy of Growth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). Burchill, S. et al, Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Emmanuel, I., LEchange Ingal (Paris: Franois Maspero, 1969). Halliday, F., Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1994). Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, Rambouillet (France), 23/02/1999, http://www.un.org/peace/kosovo/sc_kosovo.htm. Kirchberger, A., Legitimacy Without Legality? The Case of Humanitarian Intervention in Kosovo, BA final dissertation, University of Reading, 2001 (unpublished). Larrain, J., Marxism and Ideology (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983).
14

K. Van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1994).

MacLean, J., Marxism and International Relations: a strange case of mutual neglect, Millennium, vol. 17 no. 2, 1988. Marx, K. and Engels, F., Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965). McLellan, D., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Mda, D., Quest-ce que la Richesse? (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). Rosenberg, J., The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994). Smith, H., Marxism and International Relations theory, in A.J.R. Groom and M. Light, Contemporary International Relations: A Guide to Theory (London: Pinter, 1994). van der Pijl, K., The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso 1994). Alexandre Kirchberger is a Masters student in International Relations at the University of Sussex. His current research focuses on a historical materialist approach to the concept of national identity.