8
Hannes Lacher
Introduction
Marxism is dead – or so we have been told many times since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The gravediggers of Marxism are many, alone the corpse will not lay still. Indeed, over the last few years, there has been a proliferation of works which purport to renew the Marxist project, sometimes in purely theoretical terms, but often with explicitly political intentions which may become increasingly attractive as transnational economic integration proceeds apace and continues to produce global social inequalities.
One aspect of social life which has received particular attention by those trying to resuscitate Marxism is the international system. The theorization of international relations has, of course, long been regarded as a decisive lacuna of Marxist scholarship, and conceptual advance on this issue can rightfully be regarded as critical to its future appeal. So far, these efforts have not been noted by the systematizers and disciplinarians of IR (international relations) and IPE (international political economy). In the USA, at least, Marxism (which so far, in the form of ‘world-systems theory’, had been present in the academic discourse under the label of ‘globalism’ or ‘structuralism’) seems to have lost its status as a serious and influential perspective in the usual triadic representations of the discipline, having been replaced by ‘constructivism’.
The purpose of this chapter is to bring into focus the conceptual and theoretical innovations which have been made, over the last decade, by Marxists in their attempts to come to terms with the international system. I will concentrate on the work of Mark Rupert, Justin Rosenberg and Peter Burnham, though others have contributed significantly to this emerging perspective.1 In order to better understand their contribution and the distinctiveness of their approach (which, while far from being homogeneous, is marked by important commonalities), I will first review the development of Marxist thinking on the international system. It will be shown that the central question asked by Marxists about international relations has changed significantly over time: the classical theorists of imperialism and their successors were concerned with explaining the effects of changes in capitalist production on the conduct of the international affairs of states whose existence as separate political units was taken for granted; by contrast, the question that has emerged as central in recent years is how the existence of an interstate system in the capitalist epoch can be explained in the first place.
The second part of this chapter will look at the answers given by Rupert, Rosenberg and Burnham. These authors draw on the results of the Marxist debate over the nature of the capitalist state which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which have given rise to a ‘form-theoretical’ reformulation of the Marxist understanding of the state. I will argue that while this more general reconstruction of historical materialism does indeed provide the starting point for a Marxist theory of the international, it suffers from the implicit assumption that the capitalist state exists in the singular; it cannot simply be applied to the international system in the way proposed by the theorists under consideration. Indeed, I will argue that their work does not, in the end, provide a satisfactory answer to the question they pose; at best, they offer a partial determination of the modern international system as a social form of capitalist society.
The third part will then sketch out an alternative interpretation of international relations in the capitalist epoch. I will suggest that the interstate-ness of capitalist political space cannot be explained by reference to the nature of capitalism or the ‘laws’ or ‘logic’ of capital. Instead, it should be seen as a ‘historical legacy’ from pre-capitalist history which continues to structure social relations into the present period. To be sure, capitalist ‘geopolitics’ (for want of a better generic term) is very different from absolutist or feudal geopolitics; but that the totality of capitalist social relations is structured politically by a geopolitical system is not inherent in capitalism itself. This implies that we cannot simply ‘apply’ Marxism to international relations; we also have to ask some fundamental questions about the way in which the modern interstate system shapes and configures the existence, reproduction and the forms of competition of capital.
Marxism and international relations: heritages and trajectories
To the authors of the Communist Manifesto, the relations between states were of little interest. In particular, Marx and Engels seemed to agree with their liberal contemporaries that the importance of war in social life had declined since the Vienna Congress. This tendency, Marx and Engels suggested, was the result of the development of capitalism: ‘The national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production’ (Marx and Engels 1998: 36). This perspective does not, however, imply the obsolescence of sovereignty as such; sovereign states remain the guarantors of private property and the means of sustaining capitalist class relations. But the more the ‘universal interdependence of nations’ developed, the more would the conflicts between states be overshadowed by the struggles between the antagonistic classes of global capitalist society.2
This perspective became increasingly problematic as war re-emerged as a regular form of interaction between capitalist states, and as these states were able to muster the support of their ‘nations’ in these wars during the last third of the nineteenth century. While Marx and (especially) Engels recognized the growing importance of interstate conflict and nationalism, and indeed made them the topic of a large number of their journalistic writings, they did not integrate them into their theory of capitalist global society (Linklater 1996: 124–5). Only when the prospect of a general war between developed capitalist states became real in the age of imperialism did Marxists take up the challenge of theorizing international relations.
The classical Marxist theorists of imperialism suggested that even while capitalism became global and brought about international interdependence, it also became increasingly marked by the division of global capital into rival national blocs. As a consequence of a supposedly inevitable tendency towards the centralization and concentration of capital, competition was all but eliminated within state boundaries, while states themselves became agents in the advancement of their national monopolies in the world market. Thus, according to Bukharin (1972: 80), the internationalization of the economy and of capital was accompanied by the ‘nationalization’ of capital interests. The notion of a new relationship between state and capital, as a result of the emergence of monopoly capitalism, was also taken up by Lenin. The change in the character of capitalism was taken to account for the difference in the dynamics of international relations compared to the period of ‘competitive capitalism’ in which Marx wrote. It forced capitalist states to divide the world in the interest of their national capitals (Lenin 1973: 88–92).
Questions of war and international relations thus emerged at the centre of Marxist theories of imperialism. But the depth of the questions asked about international relations was limited. Crucially, while the (changing) content and function of the capitalist state was subjected to more sustained analysis than it had received from Marx and Engels, the nation-state as a social form was taken as given. Anthony Brewer (1990: 122) therefore correctly points out that Lenin’s ‘crucial failing’ is his ‘failure adequately to theorise the place of the nation state in the world economy’.
The traditional Marxist understanding of the state – which was decisively shaped by the debate on imperialism – has over time been recognized, not least by Marxists themselves, as one of the main problems of historical materialism. But it was only with the emergence of structural Marxism of Althusser and Poulantzas that a decisive break with the Leninist orthodoxy was achieved – though at a high price to be paid in the form of structural instead of economic determinism (Carnoy 1984: chap. 4). Ironically, the almost simultaneous attempt by Immanuel Wallerstein to theorize the modern interstate system as part of a larger capitalist world-system preserved the Leninist conceptualization of the state while adding a structuralist component as well. But for all its shortcomings, world-systems theory finally posed the question why the boundaries of the state and the world economy did not coincide in capitalism.
According to Wallerstein, the dissolution of the universal empire of the European Middle Ages was the precondition for the emergence of a capitalist world economy, allowing capitalists to make use of political differences. The interstate system is therefore the necessary and logical form of politics under capitalism. Indeed, Chris Chase-Dunn argues that ‘the interstate system of unequally powerful and competing states is the political body of capitalism’. Capitalism can only exist in this form and needs to reproduce the ‘division of sovereignty in the core’; capitalist competition in turn serves to reproduce the interstate system and geopolitical competition (Chase-Dunn 1991: 107 and 150).
World-systems theory has been surpassed in influence, at least in IR and IPE, by Robert W. Cox’s historicist materialism of world orders during the 1980s, which reacted not least against the structuralism and economism of Wallerstein. But it should be noted that the research problematique developed by Cox, which focuses on the specific ‘historical structures’ of capitalism rather than on the mode of production, remains limited as a social theory precisely by its failure to engage with the fundamental institutional structure of capitalist modernity (rather than their historical variations).
Simon Bromley is therefore right to argue that
the neo-Gramscians have singularly failed to develop a theoretical, as opposed to descriptive, specification of the principal structures of the international system. For no amount of discussion of such themes as ‘hegemony’, ‘historic blocs’ and ‘transnational capital’ adds up to a theory of the modern states system or of the world market.
(Bromley 1995: 232)
In this respect Cox has gone back behind world-systems theory, which had at least posed the theoretical problem of the interstate system as an historically specific social form of modernity, however much its solutions (and the way in which it arrived at them) were found wanting.
But Cox’s strong reaction against both economism and structuralism was shared by numerous Marxist approaches during the late 1970s and the 1980s, whose focus increasingly became the capitalist state, though they also entailed a more general rejection of the base/superstructure model.3 E.P. Thompson’s critique of Althusser and Poulantzas was crucial for initiating the search for alternative foundations of a non-economistic historical materialism framework. The ‘political Marxism’ of Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner, the ‘open Marxism’ of Werner Bonefeld et al., as well as the work of Derek Sayer, represent different (and often complementary) conceptualizations which have overcome the base/superstructure model without succumbing to structuralism (Wood 1991 and 1995; Brenner 1986 and 1989; Bonefeld et al. 1992; Sayer 1989).
These approaches emphasize the specifically capitalist nature of the separation of politics and economics, thus pointing to the ‘paradox’ that it was only the capitalist state which might be called autonomous. In fact, this autonomy is entailed in the concept of capital itself, which presupposes the insulation of an economic realm within which surplus appropriation takes place by economic means, by the control over things rather than people. The state is thus to be regarded as the institutional centre of the residual sphere of public authority, from which a crucial dimension of power, the power to appropriate surplus, had been abstracted and privatized.
The capitalist state, in this perspective, is not capitalist because it responds to the directives of the bourgeoisie, but because its very form of existence, as the locus of the abstractly political relations of domination, marks it out as part and parcel of a society in which exploitative powers have been separated from the political sphere. The capitalist state is thus the political form of existence of capitalist class relations which reproduces the capital relation by reproducing its own autonomy, as well as that of ‘the economy’.
‘Open Marxism' and the international system4
While these arguments may provide the basis for a non-reductionist Marxism, the question that needs to be asked is whether they also yield a satisfactory theory of international relations. It is noticeable, for instance, that the Marxist state debate was led overwhelmingly in terms which seemed to suggest that capitalist society was organized politically in the form of a single capitalist state.5 It thus failed to engage with the question which has marred Marxism from its very origins, namely why it is that the capitalist state exists only as part of a system of states, and thus why capitalist politics assumes a ‘geopolitical’ form.
This question has been posed most insistently to Marxists by Fred Halliday. According to Halliday, Marxism ‘begs the question of why, if there is a world economy in which class interests operate transnationally, there is a need for states at all. What, in other words, is the specificity and effectivity of distinct states within a single economic totality?’ (Halliday 1994: 91). The state debate of the last twenty-five years certainly allows us to understand why capitalism needs and entails statehood; but does it explain why the totality of capitalist social relations is fractured politically along territorial/national lines – and hence the existence of distinct states?
This question becomes critical when we turn to the Marxist theories of international relations which emerged over the last decade. The work of Mark Rupert, Peter Burnham, and Justin Rosenberg, among others, draws heavily on the state debate (and on the more general attempts to overcome the base/superstructure model). In particular they take the crucial argument underlying these debates, i.e. that the separation of politics and economics is historically specific to capitalism, to provide the key to the understanding not just of the capitalist state, but of the modern international system of sovereign states as well. This international system is thus decoded as a particular form of existence of capital as a social relation.
Burnham: national state, global accumulation and capitalism-in-general
Peter Burnham explicitly situates his conceptualization of the international system in the context of the ‘capital relation approach’ developed by Holloway, Picciotto, Clarke, Bonefeld and others (see the chapters in Clarke 1991). The key question of this approach is not how the political ‘superstructure’ is determined by the economic ‘base’, but what kind of social relationship gives rise to the separation of political and economic realms which appear to be autonomous and to follow some endogenous logic (Burnham 1991: 87, 1994: 228; Holloway and Picciotto 1991: 112).
The historical foundation of this separation, it is argued, is the emergence of capitalist production relations, which are marked by the privatization of the power to extract surplus, thus leaving the state to organize the general conditions of accumulation and exploitation. In that sense, the autonomy of the state is only apparent, as it is premised upon the reproduction of the capital relation.
At the same time, this capitalist state is quite independent from the directives or interests of capitalist pressure groups. As capital can only exist in the form of numerous and competing individual capitals, it cannot impose a particular strategy of accumulation on the state; on the contrary, capital relies on the state to define and organize the ‘general will’ of capital, by continually imposing the market as the form through which not only capital and labour, but also individual capitals among themselves, relate to each other. The state does so mainly through the impersonal means of the law, property rights and money. The state, in short, ‘must seek to maintain the rule of the market’ and to secure the general conditions for capital accumulation (Burnham 1990: 180).6 In fact, the state is the only possible social form for the organization of the ‘general interest’ in capitalism. Burnham thus rejects even sophisticated attempts to ground the state and its changing role in the economy in terms of the social formation of hegemonic coalitions, as the state cannot simply be the condensation of private interests.
The state, for Burnham, is a crucial social form of capitalist society; it does not stand in a zero-sum relationship with the market, as the globalization thesis suggests, but has an internal connection with this other fundamental form of the capital relation. Moreover, capitalist society has always been a world society, and in that sense, Burnham suggests, we should follow Marx in seeing ‘capitalism as a single social system in which state power is allocated between territorial entities’ (Burnham 1994: 229). The implication is that competition between individual capitals is complemented by competition between national states which aim to secure the reproduction of ‘their’ capitals in the world market. The consequent ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ between national states is limited, however, by their common interest in maintaining global capitalism and accumulation. Competition and cooperation are complementary strategies of states, though realism and liberalism have absolutized one to the detriment of the other.
For Burnham, then, nation-states ‘have a similar relation of conflict and collaboration as individual capitals’; this follows from his argument that the ‘role of the capitalist state is to express the “general interest” of capital. However, the national form of the state implies that the state can only constitute this “general interest” on a national basis’ (Burnham 1990: 185). But the question why ‘[n]ational states … are the political form of capitalist social relations’ is not answered – or even posed – by Burnham. If the state is regarded as ‘capital-in-general’, then clearly the derivation of the territorial or national form of the state needs an explication which can tell us why capital-in-general is territorially fragmented and thus only partial. Capital is a global social relation and capitalist society a world society; so why is the general interest of capital realized and operationalized at the level of territorial segments of this world society? Surely to answer the question ‘what kind of society exists in the form of differentiated political and economic realms?’ can only lead us to conceptualize ‘the state’ as a capitalist relation of production; it does not, however, allow us to derive the territorially fragmented character of ‘the political’. That the capitalist state does not exist in the singular but as one among many is thus not directly given by the capital relation.
Rupert: capitalist international relations as second order alienation
The same conceptual problem is apparent in Mark Rupert’s characterization of international politics as ‘a kind of second order alienation’ (1995: 33). In capitalism, Rupert argues, the products of human labour take on the semblance of autonomy from its producers; they confront them as the objectified form of their productive powers, as ‘alien and hostile forces’ which appear to have a life of their own. The relationship between these objects seems to be regulated by their inherent qualities, rather than by the social relationships between their creators, and are thus able to present themselves as objective facts to which social life has to adapt. Positivist theories of social science take these facts as their starting point and never penetrate to the social relations which underlie them, thereby dehistoricizing and fetishizing the social order of a given period.
Rupert, by contrast, argues that the power which the objects of human labour have achieved over social life has its roots in the private appropriation of the products of individual labour. This privatization, moreover, implies a differentiation of political and economic forms of power; these spheres consequently seem to be related externally rather than internally. But the form of the abstract political state is just as much an expression of the alienated relations between individuals mediated by things as the market.
The modern political state developed within and is integral to a political-economic system of class rule – a state-society complex in which property is assigned to the private sphere as a primordial individual right, and hence is exempted from ongoing political dialogue in the public sphere.
(Rupert 1995: 24)
The public sphere of political action organized within the state is thus an impoverished realm premised upon the relinquishing of a substantial part of societal self-determination and its subordination to the market.
The ‘modern state’ thus has its foundation in the capital relation. Rupert is adamant, however, that this cannot be taken to imply that the role of the state and its relationship to the market is fixed. Drawing on Marx and Gramsci, he suggests that the ‘structured separations of state-society and politics-economics in capitalist social formations’ can be bridged through the agency of a ‘historic bloc’ (Rupert 1995: 29). These formally separated realms periodically achieve a transient unity (or more precisely a temporary functional correspondence) as they are brought into a purposive relationship, which allows for the pursuit of specific strategies of accumulation for which social hegemony has been secured. In this way, the potentially contradictory relationship between these realms is articulated in a functional whole, though the underlying dynamics of capitalist society prevent these structural ‘fixes’ from becoming permanent. Rupert here relies heavily on the notion of hegemonic class coalitions imparting a particular social purpose onto the state, thereby shaping the way in which the state seeks to secure the reproduction and stability of capitalism as a whole. His theorization of the capitalist state is in this respect less prone to the functionalism of Burnham’s understanding of the role of the capitalist state. But is Rupert better able to provide an explanation of the national form of the capitalist state than Burnham?
Rupert argues that
insofar as the formal separations of state and society, of public and private, of the political and economic aspects of life, are integral to the historical reality of capitalism, we may say that capitalism and its manifold relations of alienation are the necessary context within which the historical construction of sovereign states – understood in the modern sense as functionally specialized administrative-coercive, ‘political’, organizations – becomes possible.
(1995: 32–3)
But again, this only allows us to understand the abstract character of the capitalist state, not its territorial shape, which Rupert does not problematize. He suggests that ‘national and international should be construed as two aspects of an internally related whole, a whole which is in some sense capitalist and alienated’ (1995: 32). But why capitalist politics should take this spatially differentiated form is left open. At most, Rupert’s approach can explain why the territorially bounded sovereign state took the form of an abstracted realm of the political and became the organizational centre of political action in capitalist society – itself a huge advance over the Weberian fetishization of the state. But this perspective cannot explain why the abstract state has to be (and historically took shape as) a territorial state in the first place. To characterize the relations between such abstract states in terms of alienation certainly helps us to understand the dynamics of international relations – what it is that is contested in this geopolitical form – but it does not provide an explication of the fact that global capitalism is organized politically through the medium of a system of national states.
Rosenberg: sovereignty and the ‘empire of civil society'
Implicit in Rupert’s and Burnham’s untheorized assumption that the capitalist state is a national state is a particular understanding of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Rupert notes in this vein that ‘the system of states … emerged historically along with capitalist production’ (1995: 33). This, of course, is a perspective that is widely accepted, notwithstanding the many alternative theorizations of exactly how this process took place. It points to the ‘long sixteenth century’ with its rising long-distance trade, increasing commodity production, the rise of the middle classes and the emergence and consolidation of the ‘modern’ state which controls the means of violence in a territorially circumscribed area, best exemplified in the absolutist state. Justin Rosenberg, by contrast, argues that neither was the early modern world economy capitalist in nature, nor was the absolutist state a capitalist state (Rosenberg 1994: 42, 92, 123 and 135ff). For him, the rise of capitalism dates from the late eighteenth century, and it was in this period that the sovereign state emerged.
Even more explicitly than Rupert, Rosenberg equates the abstractedness of the political in capitalism with state sovereignty. In fact, he suggests that we define sovereignty ‘as the social form of the state in a society where political power is divided between public and private spheres’ (1994: 129). Cutting through familiar debates in IR as to whether increasing economic interdependence implies the demise of state, this allows us to see that the consolidation of sovereignty and the creation of the capitalist world market were coeval. Both were made possible by the abstraction of ‘the political’ from production and exchange. This process simultaneously allows for the creation of a homogeneous political space in which formally equal citizens relate directly to the state, and independent wielders of political authority become subsumed under state authority; and for the ‘porousness’ of the boundaries of these states for the private activities of economic subjects (1994: 131). ‘The possibility of an international economy’, Rosenberg concludes, ‘is thus structurally interdependent with the possibility of a sovereign states-system’ (1994: 87–8).
This argument, however, is apt only to establish the compatibility of the territorial or national state with the global existence of capitalist class relations and a world market; it does not establish why capitalism politically exists or, indeed, needs to exist in the form of an interstate system. Indeed, this fact does not seem worth explaining to Rosenberg. Noting that a world state has never existed he concedes that anarchy, as a generic attribute of the relations between independent states, is not limited to a particular historical epoch. He insists, however, that this attribute does not tell us much about the dynamics of specific international systems. Hence, the task facing IR is precisely to develop a theory of capitalist anarchy (Rosenberg 1994: 139).
Yet this is already conceding too much to Realism. Feudalism, for instance, would be ill understood if described as ‘anarchic’ (cf. Fischer 1992; Hall and Kratochwil 1993; Lacher 1998). In fact, Rosenberg himself introduces a more concrete, and rather different, historical perspective when he argues that capitalism involved the ‘historical shift from empire to states-system’ (1994: 155). But surely this process took place before the eighteenth century, and thus, on the basis of Rosenberg’s own argument, before the rise of capitalist social relations. Rosenberg seems to acknowledge as much when he elsewhere distinguishes the process of state-formation in the early modern period, involving the centralization and bureaucratization of political authority, from the capitalist transformation of the state, the latter ‘lagging some way behind’ the former (1994: 130). Rosenberg here accepts that the differentiation between internal and external that was the consequence of state formation preceded the capitalist separation of politics and economics – without drawing the theoretical implications.
The problem which surfaces here is a more general one with Rosenberg’s argument: while he succinctly contrasts pre-capitalist and capitalist societies and their structural characteristics, he does not provide a dynamic historical account of the rise of capitalism and its relationship to state formation. His argument thus remains often schematic – photographic, in a sense – especially with respect to the timing of the crucial steps of the transition to capitalism, and thus to the social forms and structural dynamics which different social orders entail.
It is hard, then, to completely follow Rosenberg’s conclusion that ‘[b]ehind the contemporary world of independent equal states stands the expropriation of the direct producer’ (1994: 172). Rosenberg, like Rupert and Burnham, conflates the abstracted character of capitalist politics, which derives from the privatization of the power to extract surplus, with the sovereignty of the capitalist state. But the sovereignty of political rule in capitalism does not necessarily entail its national boundedness. Once we clearly recognize the distinctiveness of the process whereby internal and external structures became differentiated from the separation of politics and economics, it becomes necessary to pose the question of the capitalist character of the state and the interstate system in different terms. No longer can we derive the national state and the interstate system from the capital relation and take them to be the straightforward ‘geopolitical expression of a wider social totality’ (1994: 55). We have to first ask why the capitalist system does have a geopolitical expression at all. If state-formation and the supersession of universal empire have their origins in a social logic which precedes the rise of capitalism, as Rosenberg himself suggests in places, then we have to find a way of conceptualizing the totality of capitalist social relations in ways which allow for the recognition that not every organizational or institutional form of our epoch was itself brought into existence by capitalism.
The challenge of territoriality
The Marxist theories of international relations surveyed above ultimately fail to meet the challenge, set out by Halliday, to explain the ‘specificity and effectivity of distinct states within a single economic totality’. They take the territorial boundedness of the capitalist state as given and proceed to ground the interstate system in essentially the same conceptual operations in which the Marxist state debate sought to derive the capitalist state. In this way, the theoretical problem why capitalist political space is territorially fragmented disappears from view.
But unlike their predecessors, Rupert, Rosenberg and Burnham cannot afford to ignore this problem because it is thrown up by the very changes in Marxist theory designed to overcome the base/superstructure model and the pitfalls of economic determinism. For the Marxist theorists of imperialism, for instance, it was still possible to sidestep the problem of multiple capitalist polities, assuming as they did that certain states were capitalist because they were directed by the bourgeoisie; states, in other words, were capitalist by virtue of the actions of capitalists on them. At least within their own framework, states could be taken as given, however unsatisfactory this remains from the perspective of a critical social theory of international relations.
However, once we begin to define the capitalist character of the ‘state’ at the much higher level of abstraction, which marks the Marxist state debate, this becomes plainly impossible. The question why the capitalist state embodies only a territorially circumscribed subset of the capitalist relations of domination becomes unavoidable. For nothing in the argument that capitalism entails the abstraction of political from economic power leads to the conclusion that political power needs to be organized by multiple and competing centres of territorially organized sovereignty.
Is the theoretical impossibility to show that the same historical process which leads to the separation of politics and economics (i.e. the expropriation of the direct producers) also entails the emergence of system of sovereign states, a real problem? In any case, is it not a well-established fact that the modern state and the capitalist economy arose in tandem, as at least Burnham and Rupert seem to agree? In this case, it might be argued that the problem is simply one with Marxism itself, and with its tendency to overextend the explanatory powers of the concept of capital. After all, other – non-Marxist – approaches, most notably John Ruggie’s work on the medieval-to-modern transition, have shown how the separation of the political and the economic and the differentiation of the internal and the external are part of the rise of modernity. By not taking both of them to be expressions of the transition to capitalism, but as autonomous structures following independent logics of modernization, these approaches seem able to avoid the theoretical conundrums which face Marxist theories of the international system.
But are they? It may be argued that Ruggie’s suggestion that modernity is characterized by the differentiation of politics and economics, as well as of the domestic and international realms, becomes rather circular when he goes on to explain the emergence of modernity in terms which presuppose the very autonomy of the spheres which he sees as the product of the process of modernization. Ruggie’s theory of the transition is based on the interaction between already autonomous spheres which become increasingly differentiated -a quantitative process of rising ‘dynamic density’ (Ruggie 1993: 152–60, 169). It does not, however, provide an account of the qualitative rupture that dissolved feudalism’s organic unity of politics and economics.
It is here that it becomes useful to return to Marxism, or at least to the non-deterministic Marxism developed since the late 1970s. But rather than trying to derive a capitalist interstate system from the same theoretical foundations which in the earlier debates had yielded only ‘the state’, we have to pursue a more historical path to understanding the geopolitical structure of capitalist political space. On this path, we can follow some of the most creative attempts to explicate the rise of capitalism in non-economistic and non-circular terms, the ‘political Marxism’ of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. This approach explains the demise of feudalism as a result of the internal contradictions of a society in which political privileges, laws, monopolies not only constituted relations of personal domination, but simultaneously formed the socially decisive relations of surplus expropriation. Pre-capitalist property was thus ‘politically constituted’ and it is in the struggles between the aristocracy and the peasantry but also, and equally importantly, between the members of the nobility itself, over their relations of domination and dependence, that the dynamics of feudalism as well as the reasons for the demise of feudalism can be found (Brenner 1986; Wood 1991).
Ruggie, of course, also argues that ‘basic structure of property rights … characterizes an entire social formation’, including its international system (Ruggie 1983: 282); but whereas property appears as merely regulative of a basically autonomous economic structure operating in Ruggie’s account, property (or ‘social property relations’) should be understood as constitutive of historically a very different system of production, distribution and surplus appropriation, as well as sovereignty. Most importantly, however, Brenner recognizes that property in feudalism is very different from property in capitalism, in that it is not the control of things, but the control over people that confers access to surplus in feudalism.
On the basis of this argument, Brenner suggests that the demise of feudalism was not generally followed by the rise of capitalism. In fact, the societies in which the ‘modern state’ is usually taken to have emerged, the absolutist societies of France, Spain and Prussia, were not capitalist at all. Their social structure continued to be marked by the centrality of political forms of surplus appropriation. The difference was that in absolutism the state itself became the main locus of ‘politically constituted property’, while in feudalism it had been distributed among individual lords (Brenner 1985; Wood 1991).7
This argument also provides the basis for Rosenberg’s claim that the world economy of the early modern period was not a capitalist world economy, but remained based on the age-old exploitation of price differentials between segmented markets. But even if there was, pace Ruggie and the majority of historical sociologists (but see Skocpol 1979: 55), no separation of politics and economics in absolutist Europe, there certainly emerged, pace Rosenberg, a system of sovereign states and with it the differentiation of internal and external spheres. It is thus not the late eighteenth-century structural shift from personalized relations of domination to a system of impersonal relations mediated by things, ‘which explains why the units are no longer empires but bordered, sovereign states’ (Rosenberg 1994: 146).
We may gain a better understanding of absolutism if we differentiate between feudalism’s parcellized personal domination and absolutism’s generalized personal dominion (Gerstenberger 1990). The latter was articulated precisely as a claim to sovereignty over the inhabitants of a particular territory by rulers who regarded their state as patrimony. Clearly, absolutist sovereignty was fundamentally different from capitalist sovereignty based on ‘general impersonal rule’, and only the capitalist abstraction of political power from surplus appropriation allowed for the consolidation of sovereignty beyond what was possible in absolutism where legal privileges and corporate or regional particularism remained necessarily pervasive.
Yet the continental European capitalist transition of the late eighteenth (or, more likely, early nineteenth) century took place within these territorialized states, and within a system of sovereign states.8 It reproduced the boundaries of particular states and the boundedness of political communities. Crucially, then, that capitalism came to exist politically in the form of an international system for reasons not directly given by the nature of capital. In this sense, capitalism’s political space need not be organized by exclusive territoriality. The differentiation of internal and external spheres arose from the dynamics of political accumulation since the late feudal period, and thus within a social context from which capitalism was absent.
This argument raises two broad sets of questions in the context of the attempt to develop a historical materialist theory of international relations: first, what were the consequences of the capitalist reconstitution of society for the dynamic of the international system? And, second, what are the implications for the capitalist ‘logic of process’, for the way in which capital operates and for the fundamental laws of motion and contradictions of capitalism?
1. Just as the capitalist territorial state is different from the absolutist territorial state, so is the capitalist international system marked by a dynamic fundamentally distinct from absolutist geopolitics. Modernity in international relations cannot, as Ruggie (1993) suggests, be defined in terms of territoriality, as this obscures the nineteenth-century transformation of the social relations of sovereignty, and hence of the changes in the content of what is contested between territorial states. Territoriality became exclusive with respect to political space only, while the privatization of appropriative power allowed for the organization of surplus extraction across boundaries through the productive employment of contractually secured labour. While the social realm of the sovereign authority of a state was thereby restricted it also became dependent on the successful reproduction of ‘its’ capitals in the world economy. As a consequence, the old problematique of sovereignty, i.e. the assertion and rejection of claims to universal empire and the securing of the territorial integrity of a state’s polity, society and economy, was supplanted by a new problematique which has increasingly dominated the discourse of sovereignty ever since: the ability of states to shape their societies’ destiny in the face of world economic interdependence (Diner 1993: 38ff.).
2. The first question could still be answered within the parameters of the Marxist theories (especially Rosenberg’s) reviewed above. But to point to the ways in which the interstate system has become part and parcel of capitalist modernity is only one side of the story. In addition, we have to ask how the exclusive territoriality of political authority in turn structures the existence of capital. Capital is a social relation as well as a process of self-valorization, and in both these dimensions, it is profoundly ‘configured’ by the fact that the spatial organization of the capitalist polity does not correspond to the space of the world economy and world society based on the capital relation.
Of course, much of Marxist (and non-Marxist) reflection on the global political economy is focused on the tensions between global accumulation and territorial sovereignty; but only by explicitly problematizing the international character of capitalist politics can we gain theoretical leverage on this issue. Marx, for instance, constructed his theory of capital precisely by abstracting from the multiplicity of capitalist states and suggesting that in order to understand the process of capital accumulation ‘in its integrity … we must treat the whole world of trade as one nation and assume that capitalist production is established everywhere and has taken possession of every branch of industry’ (Marx 1977: 727). Trying to understand capitalist society’s concrete existence, however, we have to reintroduce the interstate system, without assuming that capital operates globally in the same way, whether political space is fractured territorially or not.
It is thus necessary to ask in what way the ‘logic of process’ of the capitalist mode of production became structured by the fact that its political space is fractured by sovereign territoriality; how this shapes the nature of competition between individual capitals; how the fragmentation of the capitalist polity structures the relations between classes domestically and internationally; how the world market is regulated by territorial authority and what the dynamics for the restructuration of the relationship between states and the world market are; and in what way the operation of the law of value is modified in the world market context by the fact that the circulation of capital is mediated by national currencies.
Instead of systematically answering these questions, I will here limit myself to suggesting that the starting point has to be the recognition that ‘the international’ is deeply problematic to the individual state seeking to maintain the ability of the capitals located or rooted within its boundaries to successfully extract surplus value and to accumulate. The fact that the state cannot control the conditions under which ‘its’ capitals have to reproduce themselves (and thus allow the state to reproduce itself in turn) entails a very different role of the state in the international and domestic contexts. Whereas the state domestically stands apart from the competition between individual capitals, and seeks to regulate the economy through universal forms of governance like the rule of law and money, in the international sphere it is or can itself be a competitor seeking to promote the interests of its capitals with political and economic means.
Internationally, individual states can use their political power to structure international competition in ways which benefit ‘their’ capitals to the detriment of the capitals of other states. They can use their borders and currencies to mediate the competition between the multitude of individual capitals. Thus, the world market is not simply a system of individual capitals competing with each other economically, but it is a system in which states are parties in the competition for world market shares rather than guarantors of the market as such. In that sense, it may be argued that the domestic separation of politics and economics, which constitutes the modern interstate system and the world market society, is ‘unthinkable in the sphere of world society’ (Diner 1993). Political and economic forms of power mesh in the international politics of capitalist states in a way, which goes beyond the state interventionism known from the domestic sphere, which fundamentally reproduces the separateness of politics and economics.
Conclusions
I have argued that the interstate-ness of capitalist political space cannot be derived from the nature of the capital relation. Instead, it should be regarded as a ‘historical legacy’ from pre-capitalist historical development. This is not to advocate a methodological pluralism that posits the autonomy of different social structures, each supposedly following endogenous logics. Such an approach would be fundamentally ahistorical as it ignores the very historicity of the separation of politics and economics, which the ‘radicalized ontology’ of contemporary Marxism correctly emphasizes. We have to start from historical totalities rather than transhistorical interacting structures that produce history as they interact.
The relevant historical totality to the conceptualization of the system of sovereign territorial states is capitalism. But while theoretical analysis shows that capitalism can no more exist without a state than it can exist without a market, it cannot explain the existence of multiple capitalist states. For this, we have to turn to a historical analysis of the way in which capitalism emerged; such analysis can draw on the innovations of Marxist theory over the last twenty-five years, but we cannot apply Marxist state theory to the international system in the more direct way suggested by Rosenberg, Burnham and Rupert.
Taking the international character of global capitalism to be a contingent aspect of capitalism raises the question of how to theorize capitalism as a totality. While Marxist theorists of IR have posited the need to start from the consideration of social totalities, they have spent little time on explicating their understanding of this concept, nor have they engaged with its troubled history in Marxist theory from Lukács to Althusser and beyond (Jay 1984). I have argued that not all social forms of really existing capitalism are necessarily or in all respects the emanations of the capital relation, as the Lukácsian concept of ‘expressive totality’ suggests. In this sense, rather than simply taking them to be internal to capitalism, certain institutions should be theorized as internalized. This avoids both the Weberian pluralism of ontologically irreducible structures, and the Marxist tendency to reduce everything, including the interstate system, to a necessary expression of the capital relation.
So the argument about the pre-capitalist origins of the state-system should not be taken to imply that international politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represents a logic which is still absolutist, lagging behind a more modern economy. The interstate system is capitalist, because it has become capitalist in the process of the totalization of capitalism – in other words, in the process of capitalism becoming a totality (a totality, moreover, which inherently produces difference and contradictions). But while the international system has become internalized it has simultaneously structured and configured the way in which capital operates: it has fundamentally shaped both the process of capital accumulation as well as the social conditions under which the capital relation was reproduced.
This leads to a final critical point. For the new Marxist theories of IR/IPE, taking national states and the world market to be necessary institutionalizations of the separated capitalist spheres of politics and economics, the question of globalization can be resolved without empirical inquiry and theoretical contortions: as long as there is capitalism, there will be national sovereignty. But this argument foreshortens a necessary debate to which historical materialism could contribute much. It does so on the basis of its confusion of the capitalist state form with its concrete territorial institutionalization. Other forms of capitalist statehood may be possible, like the transnational state suggested elsewhere in this volume by William Robinson.
Whether or not such a process of transnational state-formation is actually taking place is an open question; it is neither a foregone conclusion nor an impossibility within the framework of capitalist modernity. Moreover, even if the national state has become so entrenched that no transnational state can emerge, this may pose a contradiction to capitalist reproduction (and of individual states) in a world where the existence of capital has become global rather than international. From this perspective, the real issue may not be whether globalization undermines territorial sovereignty, but whether the continuing reproduction of territoriality prevents the emergence of a political framework that would allow for further global economic integration.
Notes
1. Other contributions include Boyle 1994; Bromley 1995, 1996 and 1999; Siegelberg 1994. For references on Rupert, Rosenberg and Burnham, see below.
2. As Linklater (1996) points out, Marx and Engels thought of the form of class struggle as national; the goal, however, was the transformation of the global society constituted by capitalist production relations.
3. Many of the most important contributions to this debate were published in the journal Capital & Class and collected in Clarke 1991; cf. Carnoy 1984 and Holloway and Picciotto 1978.
4. The term ‘open Marxism’ is used by Burnham to characterize his own approach, drawing on the closely related work of Bonefeld et al. (1992); it is here applied to Rosenberg and Rupert as well, who share substantial aspects of Burnham’s ‘open Marxism’.
5. Cf. Barker 1991: 204: ‘One might get the impression from [Holloway and Picciotto] as from a mass of other Marxist writings on the state, that capitalism has but one state. Where it is acknowledged that the beast is numerous, the implications of that very concrete fact are not developed at all.’
6. Cf. Burnham 1991: 89:
The state as an aspect of the social relations of production must be seen as [sic!] one remove from the interests of particular capital since the form of the state dictates that its role is to address the contradictory foundations of accumulation in the guise of meeting the interests of capital-in-general.
7. This summary passes over the crucial role of capitalist development in England emphasized by political Marxists; for a more comprehensive treatment, see Lacher 1998.
8. For a more detailed account of the role of absolutist international relations in the transition to capitalism, and on the subsequent transformation of the international system itself, see Lacher (2003).
Bibliography
· Barker, C. (1991) ‘A Note on the Theory of the Capitalist States’, in Simon Clarke (ed.), The State Debate, London: Macmillan, pp.204–213.
· Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis, K. (1992) Open Marxism, Vol. 1, London: Pluto Press.
· Boyle, C. (1994) ‘Imagining the World Market: IPE and the Task of Social Theory’, Millennium, 23 (2): 351–363.
· Brenner, R. (1985) ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.213–329.
· Brenner, R. (1986) ‘The Social Basis of Economic Development’, in J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Brenner, R. (1989) ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in A. Beier , D. Cannadine and J. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.271–304.
· Brewer, A. (1990) Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.
· Bromley, S. (1995) ‘Rethinking International Political Economy’, in J. Macmillan and A. Linklater (eds), Boundaries in Question, London: Pinter Publishers, pp.228–243.
· Bromley, S. (1996) ‘Globalization?’, Radical Philosophy, 80, Nov./Dec.: 2–5.
· Bromley, S. (1999) ‘Marxism and Globalisation’, in A. Gamble , D. Marsh and T. Tant (eds), Marxism and Social Science, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp.280–301.
· Bukharin, N. (1972) Imperialism and World Economy, London: Merlin.
· Burnham, P. (1990) The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction, London: Macmillan.
· Burnham, P. (1991) ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order’, Capital & Class, 45 (Autumn): 73–93.
· Burnham, P. (1994) ‘Open Marxism and Vulgar International Political Economy’, Review of International Political Economy, 1 (2): 221–232.
· Carnoy, M. (1984) The State and Political Theory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
· Chase-Dunn, C. (1991) Global Formation: Structures of the World Economy, Oxford: Blackwell.
· Clarke, S. (ed.) (1991) The State Debate, London: Macmillan.
· Cox, R. (1987) Production, Power, and World Order, New York: Columbia University Press.
· Diner, D. (1993) ‘Imperialisms und Universalismus: Versuch einer Begriffsgeschichte’, in D. Diner (ed.), Weltordnungen: Uber Geschichte und Wirkung von Recht und Macht, Frankfurt: Fischer, pp. 17–60.
· Fischer, M. (1992) ‘Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices’, International Organization, 46 (3): 426–466.
· Gerstenberger, H. (1990) Die subjektlose Gewalt. Theorie der Entstehung buergerlicher Staatsgewalt, Bd. 1, Muenster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot.
· Hall, R. and Kratochwil, F. (1993) ‘Medieval Tales: Neorealist “Science” and the Abuse of History’, International Organization, 47 (3): 479–491.
· Halliday, F. (1994) Rethinking International Relations, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
· Holloway, J. and Picciotto, S. (eds) (1978) State and Capital: A Marxist Debate, London: Edward Arnold.
· Holloway, J. and Picciotto, S. (eds) (1991) ‘Capital, Crisis and the State’, in S. Clarke (ed.), The State Debate, London: Macmillan, pp. 109–141.
· Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
· Lacher, H. (1998) ‘The Doubtful Modernity of the Westphalian System: Absolutist and Capitalist Sovereignty’, paper presented at the 39th International Studies Association Conference, Minneapolis, 17–21 March 1998.
· Lacher, H. (2003) The International Relations of Modernity: Capitalism, Territoriality and Globalization, London: Routledge.
· Lenin, V . (1973): Imperialism, Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
· Linklater, A. (1996) ‘Marxism’, in S. Burchill et al., Theories of International Relations, New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 119–143.
· Marx, K. (1977) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes , New York: Vintage Press.
· Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1998) The Communist Manifesto, New York: Monthly Review Press.
· Picciotto, S. (1991) ‘The Internationalisation of Capital and the International System’, in S. Clarke (ed.), The State Debate, London: Macmillan, pp.214–224.
· Rosenberg, J. (1994) ‘The International Imagination: IR Theory and “Classic Social Analysis’”, Millennium, 23 (1): 85–108.
· Ruggie, J. (1983) ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis’, World Politics, 35 (1): 261–285.
· Ruggie, J. (1993) ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47 (1): 139–174.
· Rupert, M. (1995) Producing Hegemony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Sayer, D. (1989) The Violence of Abstraction, Oxford: Blackwell.
· Siegelberg, J. (1994) Kapitalismus und Krieg: Eine Theorie des Krieges in der Weltgesellschaft, Münster: LIT Verlag.
· Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Thomson, J. (1995) ‘State Sovereignty in International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 39 (95): 213–233.
· Wood, E. (1991) The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, London: Verso.
· Wood, E. (1995) Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.