Gramsci’s Marxism and International Relations

By Adrian Budd

 

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of international relations. However, in the past few decades a group of radical scholars has drawn on his work to challenge the dominant ‘Realist’ perspective in this field. The Realist perspective is associated with key US strategists such as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who provided the US state with its ‘intellectual compass’ during the Cold War.¹ Realism takes the bourgeois view of human nature as a struggle between atomised individuals and transposes it onto the international system—its essence is inter-state rivalry and conflict. It assumes that since the time of the ancient Greek city-states the world’s states have had coherent national interests that they project internationally, chiefly by military means.

Given this abstract, ahistorical approach, in which there is no place for the rise and fall of modes of production or the class dynamics underpinning them, it is not surprising that there was ‘mutual neglect’ between Marxism and international relations for much of the 20th century.² But recently, the ‘neo‑Gramscian’ perspective, initiated by the Canadian Robert Cox, has provided a convincing critique of Realism.³ Cox firmly rejects the label ‘Marxist’, and has merely applied to the study of international relations ideas derived from a selective reading of the Prison Notebooks—of which the most important is the concept of hegemony. The neo-Gramscians have helped enlarge the space for Marxist ideas in international analysis but their selective use of Gramsci and their idealist understanding of hegemony mean that they neither accurately represent Gramsci’s Marxism nor convincingly explain the dynamics of the international system.

Gramsci’s comments on international relations are fragmentary and under-developed. His use of the concept of passive revolution, however, illustrates a consistent appreciation of the interpenetration of the national and international. Passive revolution is central to Gramsci’s analysis of 19th century and early 20th century European history, including Italian unification (the Risorgimento) in the 1860s. It describes a top-down process in which a narrow, modernising elite brings about a transformation of traditional social relations by piecemeal reform. Unlike the Jacobins in the French Revolution, this elite failed to mobilise mass activity behind its revolutionary programme. The pressure behind this process arose not from domestic economic development, but was ‘instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery—currents born of the productive development of the more advanced countries’.⁴ Similarly, Gramsci argued that the Fordist development of early 20th century American industry, itself a passive revolution that transformed existing forms of capitalist relations, was reshaping European societies and forcing states to adopt structures and policies more supportive of free enterprise and economic individualism.⁵ Gramsci also suggested that Italian fascism represented a passive revolution designed to preserve the power of a decaying bourgeoisie faced with the revolutionary challenge from Russia.

Whatever their historical accuracy, these arguments illustrate Gramsci’s understanding of a national-international dialectic in which international forces both provide the context of change and penetrate and transform national political and social relations. There are hints of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the uneven and combined development of world capitalism here but Gramsci did not develop these ideas. Nor did he produce an analysis of imperialism like those of Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, who both saw imperialist rivalry as a consequence of capitalism’s economic dynamic, particularly the growth of capitalist monopolies and the tendency for economic processes to transcend national limits. Nor did Gramsci place competitive processes (including capitalist accumulation, imperialist expansion and war) at the centre of the national-international dialectic, focusing instead on mechanisms of ideological transmission.⁶ Nevertheless, against much academic Marxism, which even today analyses social relations and state power in their specifically national dimensions, he understood that internal and international relations ‘intertwine’ and that Marxism should study how ‘the international situation should be considered in its national aspect’.⁷

Is Marx Relevant to International Relations Today?

by Pia Muzaffar

 

Introduction

Marx – and by implication, Marxism – is frequently disregarded, arguably needing “to be returned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had always belonged” (Gamble 1999:128). This opposition comes not only from those who have an interest in perpetuating capitalist social relations, but also more recently from the Left, contending that the materialist premise of historical materialism makes it ill-equipped to conceptualise other forms of exploitation and domination. However, there is clearly no definitive Marxism, and there may not even be a definitive Marx. This essay focuses specifically on a ‘neo-Marxist’ theorisation of the capitalist manifestation of power, evaluating its implications for international relations. I first outline the capitalist redefinition of power, arguing that the economic/political divide constitutes a systemic continuity making Marx’s critique still highly relevant. I then assess the quite formidable implications for contemporary international relations, both as a critical interrogation of the norms of orthodox IR, and for the way we presently theorise the ‘international’, looking specifically at the ‘globalisation debate’. I conclude that one central problem remains regarding this Marxist theorisation of the international: namely that the normative concern of historical materialism can engender hostility towards contemporary ‘postmodern’ themes, which may ultimately prove an intractable obstacle to further intellectual enquiry.

 

Power depoliticised: the uniqueness of capitalism

Capitalism’s redefinition of the ‘political’ derives from a real shift in the nature of power, which formed a fundamental part of the historical transitions to capitalism in those European societies that were first to do so. Recent scholarship, using Marx’s understanding of the economic/political dichotomy as an artificial differentiation of capitalist power, has begun to theorise alternative accounts of the process of modern state-formation and its attendant concepts of ‘state’, ‘civil society’ and ‘market’, situating their construction within the historically specific development of the capitalist system. Teschke’s analysis emphasises the uniqueness of this manifestation of power, noting that in pre-capitalist Western Europe social relations of property were at once both ‘political’ and ‘economic’. Those who exercised direct control over production processes were part of a system of “vertical relations of subordination and horizontal relations of co-ordination” (2006:536) forming a highly complex power-system that was far more precarious than the later manifestation of capitalist power, since sovereignty was fragmented or “parcellised” (Anderson 1974) and authority was “personalised” or direct (Teschke 2006:538). The construction of the English state, the formative moment of which Teschke locates in the Glorious Revolution making ‘sovereign’ power conditional on parliamentary approval, embodied the exceptional conditions of the capitalist configuration of power relations – namely the economic/political or private/public split. It enabled a “de-personalization of public authority… as accumulation was prosecuted increasingly in the private sphere of production, whereas the British state assumed, if not overnight, the role of the general public guardian of a private property regime” (2006:539).