14 - The Communist Manifesto as International Relations Theory

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written between December 1847 and January 1848, Marx and Engels provide definite albeit brief indications of how a class theory of international relations can be constructed. Taken together with passages from the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-8 (published in Moscow in 1939 under the editorial heading, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) and The Civil War in France, it is clear that although Marx did not live to complete his proposed treatise on the world market and crises, he prepared a rudimentary analysis of international relations which challenges both realist state-centred orthodoxy and fashionable neo-Gramscian approaches.

In many respects Marx's work also provides an alternative to the rather crude interpretations of Lenin and Bukharin which often dominate discourse on the far Left. ‘Bukharinist’ theories of the state as ‘capitalist trust’ can appear anachronistic and all too easily lend themselves to the mechanical functionalism characteristic of determinist Soviet Marxism—Leninism. Alternatively, dependency and world systems theory, which seeks to dispense with the analysis of inter-state relations, opting instead for sociological core—periphery models, tends to disintegrate either into liberal institutionalism or display the worst traits of functionalism far removed from Marx's focus on class as developed in the Manifesto.

Faced with this crisis of theory many ‘marxist’ analysts simply adopt traditional realist or neo-realist approaches to international relations. International outcomes are explained in terms of the hegemonic dominance or decline of great powers and versions of ‘super-imperialism’ are fashioned from traditions which owe more to Machiavelli and Morgenthau than to Marx. The argument of this chapter is that such theorists need not relinquish Marx's class analysis when it comes to international relations. Although many ‘marxologists’ and international relations writers are keen on presenting the view that Marx's work is essentially a ‘domestic’ study, which was taken into the ‘international arena’ by Lenin, the alternative view of this paper is that Marx theorises bourgeois social relations as global class relations. It is simply unnecessary to approach the study of international relations in terms of Waltzean or Poulantzean structural ‘levels’.