04 nardin and mapel 1992 (pruteanu)

8/13/2019 04 Nardin and Mapel 1992 (Pruteanu)

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M A R X I S M A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E T H I C Scriticism even though his account of historical materialism is highlyorthodo x (G. A. Cohen 1988; Nielsen 1988; see also the discussion ofMarxism and rights un de r Righ ts in a plan of world politics,Chapter 12).

Marxism international relations and internationalsocietyMarx's concept of historical materialism and his critique ofideology lie at the root of his rejection of morality and ethics asnonderivative foci for consideration. A similar position can be identi-fied as a prime reason for the downgrading of international relations

as a subject for discourse w ithin the M arxist tradition. The celebrated -if controversial - m etapho r of ba se and sup ers truc tur e, outlinedmost effectively in the preface toACritique of PoliticalEconomy, positsthe state as part of the superstructure and implies that internationalrelations, defined here as inter-state relations, are even further awayfrom th e base - the economic structu re of society, the real foun-da tion (McLellan 1977,389; G. A. Cohen 1979). This doe s not imply alack of interest in international relations, much less the state, on thepart of the founders or their immediate successors. On the contrary,both Marx and Engels were deeply involved in foreign affairs andwrote extensively about them, mainly as journalists (Aveling andAveling 1897; Molnar 1975). The point is rather that the foundersprodu ced no Marxist theo ry of the state or international relations;moreover - as will be seen below - when their immediate successorsdid create such a theory it was one-sided and positivist, imbued with e conomism , and directed away from the sort of ethical issues withwhich this chapter is concerned.

W hen examining Marxist approache s to the state and internationalrelations, it is thus general attitudes and predispositions that aresignificant, ra ther than fully w orked through theories or philo sophies .A further parallel can be found in the contradictions that characterizethese predispositions: whereas Marxist thinking on the state and onthe relations of states is wholly cosmopolitan and universalist in itsthrust, it is only by taking advantage of politically significant par-ticularisms that Marxism has achieved political success.Marx's rejection of the moral significance of the state as a commu-

nity is an un am biguo us a nd pervasive feature of his work. The crud ebut effective formulae of theCommunist Manifesto are refined but notrejected in his later work. W hat is central is the class struggle, and thestate cannot stand above this struggle. The executive of the m odern35


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CHRIS BROWNstate is bu t a comm ittee for mana ging th e com mo n affairs of the w holebourg eo isie (McLellan 1977, 223). InThe Eighteenth BrumaireofLouisBonaparte(McLellan 1977, 300-26) Marx refined this sta tem en t to allowfor the possibility that a state bureaucracy could develop its owninterests, but he continued to reject the view that the state could be amechanism for realizing the common interest, whether this commoninterest was conceptualized in terms of the liberal utilitarianismexcoriated throughout his work, or in the Hegelian terms moreintrinsically congenial to him, but rejected as early as 1843 in hisu n p u b l i s h e d m a n u s c r i p t The Critique of Hege l's Philosophy of Right(McLellan 1971). Following from this position Marx and Engels gladlyaccepted in theManifesto the charge of desiring to abolish countriesand nationality. The working me n have no coun try. We canno t takefrom them w ha t they have not got (McLennan 1977, 235).

Although this is clear, it is interes ting to consider th e sentence s thatfollow this dismissal:Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy,mu st rise to be the leading class of the nation, m ust constitute itselfthenation, it is, so far, itself national, th ou gh no t in the bourgeo issense of the word. (McLellan 1977, 235)

This is by no mean s as clear-cut a dismissal of the idea of the n ation asone m ight expect; it acknow ledges that n ational ideas are unav oidablegiven the specificity of actual class struggle . Ho we ver, Marx wishes toargue that the notion of nationality derived from these specificities isdifferent from the (unspecified) bo urgeo is variety and, in any even t, asthe following senten ces make clear, tha t political particularism is no t acontinuing problem:National differences an d antag onism s betwe en peo ple are daily moreand more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie... [to free trade, the market,] ... to uniformity in the mode ofproduction and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish stillfaster. Un ited action, of the leading civilised cou ntries at least, is oneof the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by an otherisputan en d to, the exploitation of one nation by ano ther will also be pu t anend to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within thenation van ishes, th e hostility of one nation to anothe r will come to anen d. (McLellan 1977, 236)

In these sentences Marx and Engels identify the basic problem thatthe state and inter-state relations pose for Marxist practice, but thenoptimistically assume away the contradictions that characterize this236


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M A R X I S M A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E T H I C Sproblem. The proletariat must become the nation, but its emancipa-tion relies up on united action that crosses national boun dar ies, at leastam ong the civilized (advanced capitalist or European?) coun tries.While becoming the na tion as oppo sed to simply th e leading class inthe nation, the w orking class m ust also hold fast w ith othernations.Inso doing, it will drain from the idea of nationhood the sense ofexclusiveness characteristically associated with it. This identificationof the tasks and problems of proletarian national/internationalism isperceptive, but is accompanied by assumptions that effectively wishaway the problem. Marx's version of economic interdependence isassigned the role of reconciling the national and international alle-giances of the proletariat. Mea nw hile, the assum ption th at all conflict,whether of individuals or of states, reflects class conflict ensures thatwith the abolition of classes, international conflict will necessarilydisappear.

These rhetorical moves allow Marx and Engels to hunt with thehounds and run with the hare; they can simultaneously assert themoral irrelevance of the state today, its emergence as a communityafter the triumph of the proletariat, and its unproblematic situationvis a vis the world community, while ignoring the problems involvedin reconciling these positions. Although in later writings the authorsof theManifestocertainly m ove a great distance from the simplicities ofthis early work tow ard a far less functionalist account of the state, eventhe later work fails to addres s w hat ha ve tu rne d o ut in this century tobe the real problems of political community (Gallie 1978). In part, thisrhetorical elimination of the problems of the community reflects thenatu re of politics in the mid-nine teenth century, w he n the M anchesterview that trade and open intercourse between na tions wou ld und er-mine particularisms was considerably more plausible than it wouldbecom e two or th ree g enerations later. It also reflects the fact tha t Marxand Engels were never faced with the task of guiding an actual m assmovement through the labyrinths of the national question.

The writers and thinkers of the Second International were. In thedeca des before 1914 the ethical status of national com munities an d thestate became an issue of compelling political importance. The Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, the Polish-German left-winger Rosa Luxemburg,and the Russian Social Democrat V. I. Lenin realized that answeringthe national question correctly was a precondition for revolutionarysuccess, and none of these writers expected the national question todisappear with increasing interdependence. They saw that the neces-sary correspondence of proletarian nationalism and internationalismwa s some thing that wou ld ha ve to be worked for; it could not be taken

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CHRIS BROWNfor gran ted (Kolakowski 1978, vo l. II; Munck 1986; Nairn 1977; Davis1976). How to reconcile the necessity for internationalism with theevident national identification expressed by actual working classeswas a key issue of the period. The debates are too complex tosummarize adequately, but it is noteworthy that those movementsthat had the greatest practical successes were those most willing toharness national sentiment, while thinkers such as Luxemburg whoadvocated an unc om prom ising rejection of nationalism in the n am e ofproletarian internationalism wo n m any of the argum ents while losingthe war.

The politics of the Second Internation al suggest tha t political move -ments that seriously desire to attract the loyalty of a mass populationhave to cast their message in terms that at least seem to correspon d tolocal needs rather than to a theoretical cosmopolitanism. This lessonhas been learned and relearned over the course of the century. In somerespects, the problem has become more acute. All the writers of theSecond International assumed as a matter of fact that the real contra-diction in world politics was between capital and labor and that thereal interes ts of wo rkers in different countries cor resp onded - w ith thepossible exception of minorities such as the labor aristocracies of theimperial centers identified by Lenin. The real political issue was towhat extent it was legitimate to acknowledge the fears of those whowere unable to grasp this reality by assuring them that their national r ights would be maintained - irrelevant though such assuranceswere when therealinterests of the international working class formeda nonconflictual unity.

In the late twe ntieth cen tury, w ith the emergen ce of an internationaldivision of labor based on ex treme differences in living stan da rds, it ismo re difficult to make this ass um ptio n. Shifts in em ployment pa ttern sin the world economy have created a situation in wh ich, for exam ple,the real interests of coal-miners in Britain, South Africa, Poland, andAustralia d o indee d app ear to conflict; the sup po rt for the M ulti-FiberArrang em ent given by textile work ers in the W est is a tacit recognitionthat the real interes ts of different proletariats m ay be different (Aggar-wal 1985). While most mainstream Marxist thought continues tooppose protectionism and to identify the contradiction between laborand capital as central, the third-worldist neo-Marxist school, with itsemphasis on unequal exchange and its stress on the exploitation ofone nation by another, does acknowledge that one working classmight be exploited by another (Emmanuel 1972).

If this position can be defended, it adds strength to the notion thatparticular communities have a moral significance that is in at least38


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M A R X I S M A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E T H I C Spotential contradiction to that of the w ider com mu nity of all worke rs.This would suggest in turn that some kind of community of interestcould exist betwe en wo rkers and capitalists within the ir state; andthis suggestion is indeed implied by the pop ular distinction betw een national and com prador bourgeoisies. Na tional bourgeoisiesare,at least temporarily, allied with the workers against the forces ofinternational capitalism, symbo lized locally by the co m prad or bou r-geoisie. However, such thinking is difficult to fit into even a highlyrevisionist Marxism; even those writers who see most clearly the needto find a theoretical basis for the centrality of the nation al com munitydo not find this an easy task. Marxist thinking about the state simplydoes not readily cohere with any sense of community less inclusivethan the international w orking class.If the notion of the state as a comm unity is difficult to work w ith inthe tradition, the idea of a society of states, an international commu-nity composed not of individuals but of states, poses even greaterproblems. If the state itself is superstructural, then internationalrelations must be part of the superstructure of a superstructure, andthu s even farther from the heart of even ts, even less likely to form thebasis for an ethic, than the state itself The extensive work of Marxand Engels on international affairs, and in particular on war, meetsthis expectation (Molnar 1975). Predictably, international events areassessed and evaluated in accordance with their likely impact on theprospects of the revolution - thus demonstrating the expected con-sequentialist attitude - yet the mode of analysis seems strangelydivorced from expectations. Rather than demonstrating that thebehavior of states corresponds to economic interests, Marx frequentlyshows that this is not the case. He does not, however, convey adistinctive alternative sense of what governs state behavior or pro-duces the logic of the state system. The only theory of internationalrelations that can be discerned is Clausewitzian - and Marx andEngels were k een rea ders ofOn War.

Subsequent attempts to produce a Marxist theory of internationalrelations have corrected Marx's lack of interest in economic determi-nation, but not his lack of interest in the ethical dimension of thesubject. Marxist theories of imper ialism - which in the han ds ofLuxemburg ([1913] 1963), Kautsky ([1914] 1970), Hilferding ([1910]1981),Bukharin ([1916] 1972), and Lenin (1968) is synonymous with asystem of interna tional relations and not simply with alien rule - haverealized th e aim of explaining the op eration of the interna tional systemvia the logic of capitalist accumulation, but they have not managed totheorize the idea of a com mu nity ofstates,nor have they attempted to

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CHRIS BROWNdo so . In some resp ects this is surprising; Marxist theorie s of the statemay not have achieved a viable understanding of the state as acom mu nity, but this has at least been recognized a nd a ddre ssed as animportant topic (Jessop 1982). By contrast, the morality of states andthe norm ative dimension of international relations seems no t to hav eattracted the attention of theorists.

This omission could be regarded as a w eakn ess in the tradition. A nynum ber of issues in the world today , ranging from the destructivenessof nuclear war to the dangers of irreparable environmental damage,could form the basis for some sense of common interests shared notsimply by peoples and classes, but also by states and their govern-m ents. Marxist writers within the W estern peace mo vem ent havehad some difficulty in deciding whether to view the threat of nucleardestruction as the product of capitalism or as a phenomenon thattranscends class analysis; in the work of E. P. Thompson the latterview pred om inates, thoug h his rather unclear notion of extermi-nism seem s designed to stress the exceptional features of nuclearpolitics, rather than to form the basis for a wider understanding of themoral dim ensio ns of a world of states (Thompson 1982). The idea thatthe threat to the environ m ent p osed by international pollution is tiedup with capitalism rather than industrial society in general seemsinherently implausible; as the Green movements in Europe havestressed, the Promethean desire to control and dominate fuels indus-trial society, and Marxists are at least as heavily implicated in thisversion of original sin as their op po ne nts (Bahro1983;Hulsberg 1988).

Official Marxisms and international ethicsIn the twentieth century man y people und ersta nd Marxism to

be the ideology of the Soviet state. Although this judgment is plainlyfalse,it reflects an im por tant reality, that the go vernm ent of the SovietUnion has been in the hands of men claiming the title of Marxists forover seven ty years. In the late twentieth cen tury , the official ideologyof the Soviet Union is seemingly subject to self-critique; however, it isinstructive to examine just w ha t is being criticized. W hat are the m ainlines of Soviet Marxism, with special reference to the ethical dimen-sion of international affairs? (Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1980, 1985;Lynch 1987; Light 1988).Two general features of Soviet ethics seem of interest. First is thematter of authority and the role of the party. A s suggested ab ove, thebasic Marxist position is that knowledge generated by theoreticallyinformed practice is self-validating. In principle, M arxism is based on

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M A R X I S M A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E T H I C Sthe priesthood of all (theoretically informed) believers, b ut in practiceMarxists have generally worked with political structures - parties -and with leaders who are assigned, or assign to themselves, specialpowers to determine right conduct. The Leninist principle of demo-cratic centralism, with the stress on the latter term, has, in the USSR,carried this tendency to extremes. Lenin's belief that left to their owndevices, the workers would never achieve revolutionary conscious-ness provided the ideological justification for a leader-dominated anddisciplined party , and the success of this pa rty in 9 7imbue d L eninistprinciples with a deg ree of auth ority th at was effectively unc hallenge -able (Lenin 1968).

This iron discipline is wholly compatible with the second feature ofLeninist ethical tho ug ht - the extremism of its con sequ entialism . W esay that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of theproletariat's class struggle ... Morality is what serves to destroy theold exploiting society an d to unite all the w orking p eople a rou nd theproletariat (Lenin1968,607). As suggested above, most M arxists w hohave publicly adhered to this position have in practice backed awayfrom its implications, but this unwillingness to go to extremes hasbeen less characteristic of Soviet than of most other varieties ofMarxism, especially in the Stalin years. In international affairs thesefeatures opera ted as bac kgro und in the 1920s throu gh to the 1950s for aRealpolitikas cynical as any in the twe ntieth cen tury , w ith the possibleexception of that of Hitler's Germany. Such policy moves as thebranding of Social Democrats as Social Fascists, the calls for a PopularFront, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 reflected a hard-line con-sequen tialist disregard for principle in the inte rests of the Soviet state(or the Fatherland of the Workers) made possible by rigid partydiscipline, an effective political police and, outside of the USSR, aportion of the intelligentsia willing to abandon even the most basiccommitment to truth. As a state in the international system thatwished to claim the rights that go with statehood, the USSR in thisperiod ado pted a state-to-state diplomatic stance th at wa s formal and correct. The extensive program of subversion ge nerated by theSoviet Union and the assassination campaigns directed at Trotskyitesand other enemies overseas were, when acknowledged at all, attri-buted to the Communist International (Comintern), a notionallyindependent body based in Moscow and controlled by the Soviet

Co mmunist party (Borkenau 1962; Ulam 1974).The abolition of the Com intern in 943is best seen as a prop agan damove to reassure the Soviet Union's Western allies in the war againstthe Third Reich, but in the course of the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet241


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CHRIS BROWNUnion's attitude toward the institutions of international societybecam e less negative. The notion of peaceful coex istence camelargely to domina te the previous assu mp tion that war betw een capital-ist and socialist states was inevitable, although the meaning of thisphrase of Lenin's is by no means clear - indeed it seems capable ofincluding w hatever level of conflict betw een social systems the leader-ship of the pa rty deem s to be necessary, sho rt of total war. For the r est,the chang e in Soviet behavior in the postwa r era has not been ma tchedby a similar evolution of doctrine. Those innovations that haveemerged center on a recognition that not all nonsocialist states arealike, and on the need to theorize relations between the countries ofthe socialist bloc.

The first of these p oints concerns Soviet recogn ition of the n otion ofthe So uth . During the high cold-war period, the Soviet view ofthird-world neutralism mirrored that associated in the West withSecretary of State Dulles - that be twe en good an d evil there can be n otrue neutrals. Gradually since the early 1960s the Soviet Union hascome to see the advantages for Soviet foreign policy of the idea of athird world, given that the emerging Southern agenda has beendirected more to the failings of the West than to those of the Easternbloc (and, of course, the Soviet Union refuses to accept any responsi-bility for the past sins of Czarist imperialism). However, SovietMarxism is, in some respects, a handicap in its dealings with theemerging South; the Southern claim for a global redistribution ofincome is regarded by the USSR as the international equivalent ofsocial democratic revisionism, while the moral arguments that accom-pany this demand are disparaged by comparison with the ethics ofself-reliance espoused by the Soviet Union. The view that the Southshould put its own house in order is held in Moscow as well asWashington (Light 1988; Papp 1985).

Clearly, the countries of the socialist bloc have relations that gobeyond the formal correctness that is the best that capitalist-socialistrelations can achieve, but what this international socialist fraternitymigh t involve is more troublesom e. The Brezhnev D octrine proclaim-ing the special rights and d uties of the socialist com mo nw ealth towardone another can be seen either as a genuine attempt to answer thisquestion, or as a cynical rationalization of Soviet intervention toprevent developments in the socialist countries unwelcome toMoscow (Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1980,1985;Jones 1989).W hat these last para grap hs suggest is that w hile Soviet diplomaticbehavior seem s to indicate a general readiness to abide by the nor m sofinternational society, this position has been, for the most part,

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M A R X I S M A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E T H I C Suntheorized. This may be changing now with the emergence of theNew Political Thinking (NPT) of President Gorbachev (Gorbachev1987;Sakwa 1988). The NPT explicitly recognizes the sort of inter- stateproblems that in Western theory have been identified with inter-dependence; recent writings and speeches have implied a basis for amorality of states in the prob lems faced by ou r com mo n Euro pea n (orAsian, or World) ho m e. Clearly, this new think ing is intend ed topoint to cooperation far beyond that mandated by peaceful coex-istence, and is intend ed to place intersta te relations on a new footing.However, Soviet spokesmen have suggested that international rela-tions remain w ithin the orbit of Marxist theo ry. W hatis,as yet, unclearis first, w ha t these two categories con tain, and second , ho w they are tobe articulated. It is clearly not the intention of the p resent leadersh ip toreturn to the dua l set of institutions of the Co mintern era, but w hat theactual shape of the emerging Soviet approach to the world will be issomething that remains to be seen (Kaldor et al. 1989). The NPT hasundeniably shown a striking willingness to acknowledge past mis-takes.The account given above of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin,Krushchev, and Brezhnev would no longer be dismissed as cold-warpropaganda but would today be acceptable.

The impact of Marxism on official international thought outside ofthe USSR is too big a subject to cover in this chapter. In the People'sRepublic of China, a distinctive international theory with a strongethical dimension did emerge in the 1960s and 1970s with the Maoistnotiorfof conflict between the countryside of the world and the citieswith, of course, China leading the countryside (Kubalkova and Cru-ickshank 1985, Ch. 5). This notion is about as far removed fromclassical Marxism as it is possible to be while still leaving portraits ofMarx and Engels hang ing in the Great H all of the People - Marx's viewof the countryside is nicely conveyed by his description of Indianvillage life as rural idiocy (Avineri 1969, 94) - and , in any eve nt,seems no longer to be heeded within the PRC (Yahuda 1983).Neo-Marxist thought about development and underdevelopmenthas helped form the attitudes of at least some Southern participants inthe North-South dialogue (Hoogvelt 1982, Chs. 5 and 6). The gapbetween neo- and classical Marxism has been discussed above; itseems likely that it is those features of neo-Marxism that are furthestfrom the classical approach that have proved most attractive to

Southern governments (Warren 1980). The willingness to think interms of international as well as class exploitation undoubtedlyappea ls to Southern na tionalist leaders, w hile the moralizing n ature ofsome neo-Marxist writings has also been a necessary, if un-Marxist,43


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CHRIS BROWNcondition of their acceptance. However, on balance it seems thatneo-Marxism has been more important in shaping the rhetoric of theSouth in the North-South dialogue than in providing a usable intel-lectual framework; Southern elites have taken what is congenial tothem from the dep end enc y ap proac h - largely the critique of the West- while ignoring less attractive aspects, such as the critique of South-ern elites. In the long run, the impact of this thinking on the Southmay actually be most im portan t for the em erging dialogue of culturesin world politics. For all their willingness to criticize aspects ofindustrialism that Marx himself greatly favored, neo-Marxists dorepresent a conception of Western modernity that may be of someimportance in the face of non-Western critiques of this notion.

Full circleThe end of the tw entieth century app ears to be a time of crisisfor Marxism both as a governing ideology and as a scholarly frame-work within the academy. In the Soviet Union, the New PoliticalThinking is clearly designed to remain within the Marxist tradition,but whether it can succeed is open to debate. The dramatic develop-m ents of the last two years have rem oved Marxist gov ernm ents from

power in most East European states. It seems that in states whereMarxism has been long established, the tradition is losing its legiti-macy. The role of morality in delegitimizing these regimes may beimportant (Lukes 1990).The retreat from Marxism is equally apparent in the South. Themood of ne w realism that has overtaken Sou thern economic policyin the 1980s is under threat from radical populism, but hardly fromMarxist m ove m ents. The areas w her e Marxism is still a live doctrine

are largely those where external forces have given a degree ofcredibility to its teachings. Decades of US anticommunism in CentralAmerica seem to have linked Marxism with the opponents of corruptlocal regimes, while app are nt W estern su ppo rt for the regime in SouthAfrica has preserved the credibility of communism in that region.Apa rt from these special cases, Marxism seems almo st everyw here tobe in retreat.Marxism's position in the W estern academy is rather more complexand paradoxical. On the on e ha nd , M arx's status as a major theorist of

modernity is now widely recognized, and scholars identifying them-selves as Marxists play a more important role in philosophy and thesocial sciences than would have been conceivable a generation ago.On the other hand, with recognition has come a dilution of the44

04 nardin and mapel 1992 (pruteanu)

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