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criticism even though his account of historical materialism is highly orthodox (G. A. Cohen 1988; Nielsen 1988; see also the discussion of Marxism and rights under "Rights in a plan of world politics," Chapter 12).

Marxism, international relations, and international society

Marx's concept of historical materialism and his critique of ideology lie at the root of his rejection of morality and ethics as nonderivative foci for consideration. A similar position can be identified as a prime reason for the downgrading of international relations as a subject for discourse within the Marxist tradition. The celebrated if controversial - metaphor of "base" and "superstructure," outlined most effectively in the preface to A Critique of Political Economy, posits the state as part of the superstructure and implies that international relations, defined here as inter-state relations, are even further away from the base - "the economic structure of society, the real foundation" (McLellan 1977,389; G. A. Cohen 1979). This does not imply a lack of interest in international relations, much less the state, on the part of the founders or their immediate successors. On the contrary, both Marx and Engels were deeply involved in foreign affairs and wrote extensively about them, mainly as journalists (Aveling and Aveling 1897; Molnar 1975). The point is rather that the founders produced no "Marxist theory" of the state or international relations; moreover - as will be seen below - when their immediate successors did create such a theory it was one-sided and positivist, imbued with "economism," and directed away from the sort of ethical issues with which this chapter is concerned. When examining Marxist approaches to the state and international relations, it is thus general attitudes and predispositions that are significant, rather than fully worked through theories or philosophies. A further parallel can be found in the contradictions that characterize these predispositions: whereas Marxist thinking on the state and on the relations of states is wholly cosmopolitan and universalist in its thrust, it is only by taking advantage of politically significant particularisms that Marxism has achieved political success. Marx's rejection of the moral significance of the state as a community is an unambiguous and pervasive feature of his work. The crude but effective formulae of the Communist Manifesto are refined but not rejected in his later work. What is central is the class struggle, and the state cannot stand above this struggle. "The executive of the modern
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state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (McLellan 1977, 223). In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (McLellan 1977, 300-26) Marx refined this statement to allow for the possibility that a state bureaucracy could develop its own interests, but he continued to reject the view that the state could be a mechanism for realizing the common interest, whether this common interest was conceptualized in terms of the liberal utilitarianism excoriated throughout his work, or in the Hegelian terms more intrinsically congenial to him, but rejected as early as 1843 in his
unpublished manuscript The Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"

(McLellan 1971). Following from this position Marx and Engels gladly accepted in the Manifesto the charge of desiring to abolish countries and nationality. "The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got" (McLennan 1977, 235). Although this is clear, it is interesting to consider the sentences that follow this dismissal:
Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. (McLellan 1977, 235)

This is by no means as clear-cut a dismissal of the idea of the nation as one might expect; it acknowledges that national ideas are unavoidable given the specificity of actual class struggle. However, Marx wishes to argue that the notion of nationality derived from these specificities is different from the (unspecified) bourgeois variety and, in any event, as the following sentences make clear, that political particularism is not a continuing problem:
National differences and antagonisms between people are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie . . . [to free trade, the market,] . . . to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. (McLellan 1977, 236)

In these sentences Marx and Engels identify the basic problem that the state and inter-state relations pose for Marxist practice, but then optimistically assume away the contradictions that characterize this 236

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problem. The proletariat must become the nation, but its emancipation relies upon united action that crosses national boundaries, at least among the "civilized" (advanced capitalist or European?) countries. While becoming the nation as opposed to simply the leading class in the nation, the working class must also hold fast with other nations. In so doing, it will drain from the idea of nationhood the sense of exclusiveness characteristically associated with it. This identification of the tasks and problems of proletarian national/internationalism is perceptive, but is accompanied by assumptions that effectively wish away the problem. Marx's version of economic interdependence is assigned the role of reconciling the national and international allegiances of the proletariat. Meanwhile, the assumption that all conflict, whether of individuals or of states, reflects class conflict ensures that with the abolition of classes, international conflict will necessarily disappear. These rhetorical moves allow Marx and Engels to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare; they can simultaneously assert the moral irrelevance of the state today, its emergence as a community after the triumph of the proletariat, and its unproblematic situation vis-a-vis the world community, while ignoring the problems involved in reconciling these positions. Although in later writings the authors of the Manifesto certainly move a great distance from the simplicities of this early work toward a far less functionalist account of the state, even the later work fails to address what have turned out in this century to be the real problems of political community (Gallie 1978). In part, this rhetorical elimination of the problems of the community reflects the nature of politics in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Manchester view that trade and open intercourse between nations would undermine particularisms was considerably more plausible than it would become two or three generations later. It also reflects the fact that Marx and Engels were never faced with the task of guiding an actual mass movement through the labyrinths of the national question. The writers and thinkers of the Second International were. In the decades before 1914 the ethical status of national communities and the state became an issue of compelling political importance. The AustroMarxist Otto Bauer, the Polish-German left-winger Rosa Luxemburg, and the Russian Social Democrat V. I. Lenin realized that answering the national question correctly was a precondition for revolutionary success, and none of these writers expected the national question to disappear with increasing interdependence. They saw that the necessary correspondence of proletarian nationalism and internationalism was something that would have to be worked for; it could not be taken
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for granted (Kolakowski 1978, vol. II; Munck 1986; Nairn 1977; Davis 1976). How to reconcile the necessity for internationalism with the evident national identification expressed by actual working classes was a key issue of the period. The debates are too complex to summarize adequately, but it is noteworthy that those movements that had the greatest practical successes were those most willing to harness national sentiment, while thinkers such as Luxemburg who advocated an uncompromising rejection of nationalism in the name of proletarian internationalism won many of the arguments while losing the war. The politics of the Second International suggest that political movements that seriously desire to attract the loyalty of a mass population have to cast their message in terms that at least seem to correspond to local needs rather than to a theoretical cosmopolitanism. This lesson has been learned and relearned over the course of the century. In some respects, the problem has become more acute. All the writers of the Second International assumed as a matter of fact that the real contradiction in world politics was between capital and labor and that the real interests of workers in different countries corresponded - with the possible exception of minorities such as the "labor aristocracies" of the imperial centers identified by Lenin. The real political issue was to what extent it was legitimate to acknowledge the fears of those who were unable to grasp this reality by assuring them that their national "rights" would be maintained - irrelevant though such assurances were when the real interests of the international working class formed a nonconflictual unity. In the late twentieth century, with the emergence of an international division of labor based on extreme differences in living standards, it is more difficult to make this assumption. Shifts in employment patterns in the world economy have created a situation in which, for example, the real interests of coal-miners in Britain, South Africa, Poland, and Australia do indeed appear to conflict; the support for the Multi-Fiber Arrangement given by textile workers in the West is a tacit recognition that the real interests of different proletariats may be different (Aggarwal 1985). While most mainstream Marxist thought continues to oppose protectionism and to identify the contradiction between labor and capital as central, the third-worldist neo-Marxist school, with its emphasis on unequal exchange and its stress on the exploitation of one nation by another, does acknowledge that one working class might be exploited by another (Emmanuel 1972). If this position can be defended, it adds strength to the notion that particular communities have a moral significance that is in at least
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potential contradiction to that of the wider community of all workers. This would suggest in turn that some kind of community of interest could exist between workers and capitalists within "their" state; and this suggestion is indeed implied by the popular distinction between "national" and "comprador" bourgeoisies. "National" bourgeoisies are, at least temporarily, allied with the workers against the forces of international capitalism, symbolized locally by the "comprador" bourgeoisie. However, such thinking is difficult to fit into even a highly revisionist Marxism; even those writers who see most clearly the need to find a theoretical basis for the centrality of the national community do not find this an easy task. Marxist thinking about the state simply does not readily cohere with any sense of community less inclusive than the international working class. If the notion of the state as a community is difficult to work with in the tradition, the idea of a society of states, an international community composed not of individuals but of states, poses even greater problems. If the state itself is superstructural, then international relations must be part of the superstructure of a superstructure, and thus even farther from the heart of events, even less likely to form the basis for an ethic, than the state itself. The extensive work of Marx and Engels on international affairs, and in particular on war, meets this expectation (Molnar 1975). Predictably, international events are assessed and evaluated in accordance with their likely impact on the prospects of the revolution - thus demonstrating the expected consequentialist attitude - yet the mode of analysis seems strangely divorced from expectations. Rather than demonstrating that the behavior of states corresponds to economic interests, Marx frequently shows that this is not the case. He does not, however, convey a distinctive alternative sense of what governs state behavior or produces the logic of the state system. The only theory of international relations that can be discerned is Clausewitzian - and Marx and Engels were keen readers of On War. Subsequent attempts to produce a Marxist theory of international relations have corrected Marx's lack of interest in economic determination, but not his lack of interest in the ethical dimension of the subject. Marxist theories of "imperialism" - which in the hands of Luxemburg ([1913] 1963), Kautsky ([1914] 1970), Hilferding ([1910] 1981), Bukharin ([1916] 1972), and Lenin (1968) is synonymous with a system of international relations and not simply with alien rule - have realized the aim of explaining the operation of the international system via the logic of capitalist accumulation, but they have not managed to theorize the idea of a community of states, nor have they attempted to 239

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do so. In some respects this is surprising; Marxist theories of the state may not have achieved a viable understanding of the state as a community, but this has at least been recognized and addressed as an important topic (Jessop 1982). By contrast, the morality of states and the normative dimension of international relations seems not to have attracted the attention of theorists. This omission could be regarded as a weakness in the tradition. Any number of issues in the world today, ranging from the destructiveness of nuclear war to the dangers of irreparable environmental damage, could form the basis for some sense of common interests shared not simply by peoples and classes, but also by states and their governments. Marxist writers within the Western "peace movement" have had some difficulty in deciding whether to view the threat of nuclear destruction as the product of capitalism or as a phenomenon that transcends class analysis; in the work of E. P. Thompson the latter view predominates, though his rather unclear notion of "exterminism" seems designed to stress the exceptional features of nuclear politics, rather than to form the basis for a wider understanding of the moral dimensions of a world of states (Thompson 1982). The idea that the threat to the environment posed by international pollution is tied up with capitalism rather than industrial society in general seems inherently implausible; as the Green movements in Europe have stressed, the Promethean desire to control and dominate fuels industrial society, and Marxists are at least as heavily implicated in this version of original sin as their opponents (Bahro 1983; Hulsberg 1988). Official Marxisms and international ethics In the twentieth century many people understand Marxism to be the ideology of the Soviet state. Although this judgment is plainly false, it reflects an important reality, that the government of the Soviet Union has been in the hands of men claiming the title of Marxists for over seventy years. In the late twentieth century, the official ideology of the Soviet Union is seemingly subject to self-critique; however, it is instructive to examine just what is being criticized. What are the main lines of Soviet Marxism, with special reference to the ethical dimension of international affairs? (Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1980, 1985; Lynch 1987; Light 1988). Two general features of Soviet ethics seem of interest. First is the matter of authority and the role of the party. As suggested above, the basic Marxist position is that knowledge generated by theoretically informed practice is self-validating. In principle, Marxism is based on
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the priesthood of all (theoretically informed) believers, but in practice Marxists have generally worked with political structures - parties and with leaders who are assigned, or assign to themselves, special powers to determine right conduct. The Leninist principle of democratic centralism, with the stress on the latter term, has, in the USSR, carried this tendency to extremes. Lenin's belief that left to their own devices, the workers would never achieve revolutionary consciousness provided the ideological justification for a leader-dominated and disciplined party, and the success of this party in 1917 imbued Leninist principles with a degree of authority that was effectively unchallengeable (Lenin 1968). This iron discipline is wholly compatible with the second feature of Leninist ethical thought - the extremism of its consequentialism. "We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle . . . Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat" (Lenin 1968, 607). As suggested above, most Marxists who have publicly adhered to this position have in practice backed away from its implications, but this unwillingness to go to extremes has been less characteristic of Soviet than of most other varieties of Marxism, especially in the Stalin years. In international affairs these features operated as background in the 1920s through to the 1950s for a Realpolitik as cynical as any in the twentieth century, with the possible exception of that of Hitler's Germany. Such policy moves as the branding of Social Democrats as Social Fascists, the calls for a Popular Front, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 reflected a hard-line consequentialist disregard for principle in the interests of the Soviet state (or the Fatherland of the Workers) made possible by rigid party discipline, an effective political police and, outside of the USSR, a portion of the intelligentsia willing to abandon even the most basic commitment to truth. As a state in the international system that wished to claim the rights that go with statehood, the USSR in this period adopted a state-to-state diplomatic stance that was formal and "correct." The extensive program of subversion generated by the Soviet Union and the assassination campaigns directed at Trotskyites and other enemies overseas were, when acknowledged at all, attributed to the Communist International (Comintern), a notionally independent body based in Moscow and controlled by the Soviet Communist party (Borkenau 1962; Ulam 1974). The abolition of the Comintern in 1943 is best seen as a propaganda move to reassure the Soviet Union's Western allies in the war against the Third Reich, but in the course of the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet 241

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Union's attitude toward the institutions of international society became less negative. The notion of "peaceful coexistence" came largely to dominate the previous assumption that war between capitalist and socialist states was inevitable, although the meaning of this phrase of Lenin's is by no means clear - indeed it seems capable of including whatever level of conflict between social systems the leadership of the party deems to be necessary, short of total war. For the rest, the change in Soviet behavior in the postwar era has not been matched by a similar evolution of doctrine. Those innovations that have emerged center on a recognition that not all nonsocialist states are alike, and on the need to theorize relations between the countries of the socialist bloc. The first of these points concerns Soviet recognition of the notion of the "South." During the high cold-war period, the Soviet view of third-world neutralism mirrored that associated in the West with Secretary of State Dulles - that between good and evil there can be no true neutrals. Gradually since the early 1960s the Soviet Union has come to see the advantages for Soviet foreign policy of the idea of a third world, given that the emerging Southern agenda has been directed more to the failings of the West than to those of the Eastern bloc (and, of course, the Soviet Union refuses to accept any responsibility for the past sins of Czarist imperialism). However, Soviet Marxism is, in some respects, a handicap in its dealings with the emerging South; the Southern claim for a global redistribution of income is regarded by the USSR as the international equivalent of social democratic revisionism, while the moral arguments that accompany this demand are disparaged by comparison with the ethics of self-reliance espoused by the Soviet Union. The view that the South should put its own house in order is held in Moscow as well as Washington (Light 1988; Papp 1985). Clearly, the countries of the socialist bloc have relations that go beyond the formal correctness that is the best that capitalist-socialist relations can achieve, but what this international socialist fraternity might involve is more troublesome. The Brezhnev Doctrine proclaiming the special rights and duties of the socialist commonwealth toward one another can be seen either as a genuine attempt to answer this question, or as a cynical rationalization of Soviet intervention to prevent developments in the socialist countries unwelcome to Moscow (Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1980, 1985; Jones 1989). What these last paragraphs suggest is that while Soviet diplomatic behavior seems to indicate a general readiness to abide by the norms of international society, this position has been, for the most part,
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untheorized. This may be changing now with the emergence of the New Political Thinking (NPT) of President Gorbachev (Gorbachev 1987; Sakwa 1988). The NPT explicitly recognizes the sort of inter-state problems that in Western theory have been identified with interdependence; recent writings and speeches have implied a basis for a morality of states in the problems faced by "our common European (or Asian, or World) home." Clearly, this new thinking is intended to point to cooperation far beyond that mandated by peaceful coexistence, and is intended to place interstate relations on a new footing. However, Soviet spokesmen have suggested that international relations remain within the orbit of Marxist theory. What is, as yet, unclear is first, what these two categories contain, and second, how they are to be articulated. It is clearly not the intention of the present leadership to return to the dual set of institutions of the Comintern era, but what the actual shape of the emerging Soviet approach to the world will be is something that remains to be seen (Kaldor et al. 1989). The NPT has undeniably shown a striking willingness to acknowledge past mistakes. The account given above of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin, Krushchev, and Brezhnev would no longer be dismissed as cold-war propaganda but would today be acceptable. The impact of Marxism on official international thought outside of the USSR is too big a subject to cover in this chapter. In the People's Republic of China, a distinctive international theory with a strong ethical dimension did emerge in the 1960s and 1970s with the Maoist notiorf of conflict between the countryside of the world and the cities with, of course, China leading the countryside (Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1985, Ch. 5). This notion is about as far removed from classical Marxism as it is possible to be while still leaving portraits of Marx and Engels hanging in the Great Hall of the People - Marx's view of the countryside is nicely conveyed by his description of Indian village life as "rural idiocy" (Avineri 1969, 94) - and, in any event, seems no longer to be heeded within the PRC (Yahuda 1983). Neo-Marxist thought about development and underdevelopment has helped form the attitudes of at least some Southern participants in the North-South dialogue (Hoogvelt 1982, Chs. 5 and 6). The gap between neo- and classical Marxism has been discussed above; it seems likely that it is those features of neo-Marxism that are furthest from the classical approach that have proved most attractive to Southern governments (Warren 1980). The willingness to think in terms of international as well as class exploitation undoubtedly appeals to Southern nationalist leaders, while the moralizing nature of some neo-Marxist writings has also been a necessary, if un-Marxist,
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condition of their acceptance. However, on balance it seems that neo-Marxism has been more important in shaping the rhetoric of the South in the North-South dialogue than in providing a usable intellectual framework; Southern elites have taken what is congenial to them from the dependency approach - largely the critique of the West - while ignoring less attractive aspects, such as the critique of Southern elites. In the long run, the impact of this thinking on the South may actually be most important for the emerging dialogue of cultures in world politics. For all their willingness to criticize aspects of industrialism that Marx himself greatly favored, neo-Marxists do represent a conception of Western modernity that may be of some importance in the face of non-Western critiques of this notion. Full circle The end of the twentieth century appears to be a time of crisis for Marxism both as a governing ideology and as a scholarly framework within the academy. In the Soviet Union, the New Political Thinking is clearly designed to remain within the Marxist tradition, but whether it can succeed is open to debate. The dramatic developments of the last two years have removed Marxist governments from power in most East European states. It seems that in states where Marxism has been long established, the tradition is losing its legitimacy. The role of morality in delegitimizing these regimes may be important (Lukes 1990). The retreat from Marxism is equally apparent in the South. The mood of "new realism" that has overtaken Southern economic policy in the 1980s is under threat from radical populism, but hardly from Marxist movements. The areas where Marxism is still a "live" doctrine are largely those where external forces have given a degree of credibility to its teachings. Decades of US anticommunism in Central America seem to have linked Marxism with the opponents of corrupt local regimes, while apparent Western support for the regime in South Africa has preserved the credibility of communism in that region. Apart from these special cases, Marxism seems almost everywhere to be in retreat. Marxism's position in the Western academy is rather more complex and paradoxical. On the one hand, Marx's status as a major theorist of modernity is now widely recognized, and scholars identifying themselves as Marxists play a more important role in philosophy and the social sciences than would have been conceivable a generation ago. On the other hand, with recognition has come a dilution of the
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