Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marxism emerged as a major rival to both economic liberalism and neomercantilism in debates about the international dimensions of political economy around the world. With their focus on ending class inequality and exploitation by challenging capitalism, Marxists put prioritized distinctive goals from those prioritized by economic liberals and neomercantilists in the pre-1945 years. This chapter examines Karl Marx’s ideas about the world economy as well as those of a number of his influential European (including Russian) followers. The latter include thinkers commonly discussed in IPE textbooks, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also other thinkers who usually receive less attention, such as Carl Ballod, Rudolph Hilferding, Henry Hyndman, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Vollmar. The chapter highlights important disagreements among these various Marxist thinkers on issues such as free trade, imperialism, multilateral cooperation, strategies for challenging capitalism, the prospects for socialism in one country, and the relationship between capitalism and war.

Chapter 3 focuses on the 1942 rectification campaign against Wang Shiwei and other Yan’an intellectuals who had emerged from the Shanghai literary world of the 1930s. Mao sought to eradicate the “three evil workstyles” of subjectivism (favouring Wang Ming’s Russian Marxism over Mao Zedong’s local expertise), sectarianism (not doing what the leadership tells you to do), and stereotyped, overly dogmatic, Party writing. Historical, political, and geographic context for the campaign is provided, with particular attention payed to the position of Mao vis-à-vis the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Wang Shiwei was a Communist theorist who took exception to Mao’s version of rectification and offered an alternative Marxist model that shows the influence of Leon Trotsky. Rhetorical goals and strategies in Mao’s speeches are shown to highlight the importance of intellectual self-transformation, the better to create willing and effective mouthpieces for the CCP, which are contrasted with the agenda of revolutionary artists, such as Ding Ling and Xiao Jun, providing context for Wang’s essay collection Wild Lilies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the campaign against Wang and his “Trotskyite” supporters in the Rescue Campaign which ensued, implicating thousands of politically suspect cadres, and leading to Wang’s arrest and accidental execution in 1947.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

The story of Red Army military culture in 1917–1945 is a story of selective continuity with centuries of Russian military tradition, as well as dramatic innovation and discontinuity. The Bolshevik Party set out to create a new kind of state, a new kind of army, even a new kind of human being, the New Soviet Man. It never achieved the total transformation it envisioned, but the attempt shaped a unique military culture that blended new ideals with old traditions. For all the discontinuities in the revamped Red Army, the military culture of the Soviet era cannot be considered sui generis; continuities with the old imperial army were also in evidence. However, it was not the intention of the new Soviet state to allow such continuity. In fact, the state had intended just the reverse. Military culture in the Soviet period was dynamic. There were attempts to "change everything" with dramatic pendulum shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, in terms of organization, recruitment, hierarchies, and political oversight. Most of those efforts settled somewhere in the middle through a long process of debate and compromise. This produced a unique dialectic that distinguished Soviet military culture in 1917–1945 from any other.