Alex Callinicos

Does capitalism need the state system

Contemporary Marxist students of international relations, like their mainstream counterparts, disagree over whether geopolitics has a future. Many believe that it has none, either because globalized capitalism has overcome the nation-state or because the ‘informal empire’ of the United States has overridden inter-state conflict. This article supports those who argue that significant economic and political conflicts persist among the main capitalist states. It does so by exploring the question of whether, in Marxist theory, the capitalist economic system and the international system of states are necessarily or contingently related. Marxs method in Capital offers, it is argued, a way of non-reductively incorporating the state system within the capitalist mode of production. This argument provides the basis for a partial reconciliation of Marxism and realism. More importantly, it offers a theoretical framework in which to explore the scope for inter-state conflict in the 21st century.

Uneven and combined development: the social-relational substratum of ‘the international’? An exchange of letters

ion of the historical process is the only means I’ve yet found for getting behind this problem in order to crack the reification in its generality (rather than just controlling its effects in the particular cases of Absolutism or capitalism). I try to illustrate this in the ‘Interim Synopsis’ of the idea contained in my rejoinder to the ‘Globalisation Theory’ forum (Rosenberg 2007). So I guess this is the difference between our positions: your position implies, I think, that at any rate there’s a great deal more to be said about how capitalism in particular generates ‘uneven and combined development’—and I’m sure that’s right. My position—mostly a hunch, since I haven’t done enough of the work yet—is that even when that ‘more’ is said, the fact of multiplicity itself and what arises from it will not have been addressed in a way that finally deals with the problem of Realism (and with it the problem of ‘the international’ for social 9 Not even where this theory is historicized to locate the emergence of capitalism within an antecedent Absolutist state system, as Teschke (2003) and Hannes Lacher (2002) have both importantly done. Uneven and combined development 81

The Limits of Passive Revolution

This article addresses what it identifies as the over-extension of the concept of passive revolution in recent writing on international political economy. It traces the evolution of the concept in the Prison Notebooks, where it is rooted in Antonio Gramsci’s development of the Marxist theory of bourgeois revolutions to account for episodes of what he called ‘revolution/restoration’ such as the Italian Risorgimento. But, in his attempt to offer a comprehensive alternative to the great liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce, Gramsci extends the concept to cases such as Mussolini’s fascism. The core meaning common to these uses is that of socio-political processes in which revolution-inducing strains are at once displaced and at least partially fulfilled. In more recent Marxist work, even this meaning is in danger of being lost. The article concludes by seeking to relocate passive revolution within Gramsci’s non-determinist, but still firmly materialist, understanding of Marx’s theory of history.

Relations of Production

No discussion of historical materialism in Britain today can avoid confrontation with the arguments of two recent contributions to the subject — Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst and Karl Marx’s Theory of History by G. A. Cohen. Both books are in their way highly ambitious attempts to state the basic concepts of historical materialism from opposed standpoints and in very different idioms — the first a key-work of post-althusserian marxism heavily influenced by the ‘revolution of language’ sketched in Chapter 2 of this volume, in retrospect a stepping stone to the authors’ openly ‘revisionist’ ‘auto-critique’, Mode of Production and Social Formation, the second defending ‘an old-fashion historical materialism’, very close to Kautsky and Plekhanov, applying ‘those standards of clarity and rigour which distinguish twentieth century analytical philosophy’.1 I cannot hope here to match the authors’ scope or their capacity for detailed argument, but shall merely attempt to elucidate Marx’s concept of relations of production and draw out its consequences.

Marxism and philosophy

Marxism began with the repudiation of philosophy, yet Marxists have often resorted to distinctively philosophical modes of reasoning. In recent years, Western Marxism has been more concerned with philosophy than with research or political activity, and in this book Callinicos explores the ambivalent relationship between Marxism and philosophy. Beginning with Marx and the legacy of Hegelianism, he surveys the schools of Marxist philosophy from Engels and the Second International through the revolutionary Hegelianism, of the 1920s, the Frankfurt School, and the anti-Hegelian Marxism of Adorno and Althusser.

Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory.

Subjects and agents structure and actio reasons and interests ideology and power tradition and revolution.

How to solve the many-state problem: a reply to the debate

This article responds to the debate provoked by the authors ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’ (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4 2007, 533–549) and his exchanges with Justin Rosenberg (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:1 2008, 77–112). It is divided into three parts. The first restates the issues, situating them in the context of a growing Marxist preoccupation with the international in recent years, and contrasts the ‘high road’—Rosenbergs attempt to use Trotskys concept of uneven and combined development to provide a transhistorical perspective on intersocietal relations—with Callinicoss own preferred ‘low road’ of more focused analysis centred on the prevailing mode(s) of production. The second addresses the fundamental criticisms addressed to him by Hannes Lacher, Benno Teschke and John M Hobson, all of whom deny that there is a necessary relation between capitalism and the interstate system. The third considers the more specific comments offered by Neil Davidson, Gonso Pozo-Martin, and Jamie Allinson and Alex Anievas, before concluding with an appeal for a move off the terrain of abstract theory to more empirical studies that can test the relative value of rival conceptual constructions.

Iraq: fulcrum of world politics

The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq must be understood in the context of the grand strategy consistently pursued by the US since at least the beginning of the 20th century. The Bush administration, breaking from Washingtons reliance since the Second World War on coalition building, is seeking to use one of the main comparative advantages of the US—its military supremacy—to perpetuate a favourable global balance of forces. The seizure of Iraq seemed to favour this strategy, particularly since it would enhance US capacity to deny access to Middle Eastern oil to actual or potential rivals such as the European Union and China. But popular resistance to the occupation of Iraq is now testing this policy, perhaps to destruction.

Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust

Nothing challenges Marxism more directly than the Holocaust.1 As at once heir and critic of the Enlightenment, Marx sought to expose the social limits of its aspiration to universal emancipation through the power of reason by tracing the material roots of its ideals to what he called the “hidden abode” of production. At the same time, he radicalized these ideals into the ethical and political drive to rid the world of all forms of exploitation and oppression—what as a young man he proclaimed to be “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.”2 The Holocaust is—for good reasons I need not rehearse here—generally held to be the most extreme case of human evil. All the different kinds of domination fused together in Auschwitz—racism, directed at Jews, Slavs, and Roma; the economic exploitation of slave labour; the oppression of gays and women; the persecution of dissenting minorities such as Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. No human phenomenon can put a stronger demand on the explanatory powers of Marxism. Indeed, it might be reasonable to doubt whether any social theory can throw light into the darkness of Auschwitz.

Britain and Europe on the geopolitical roller-coaster

This article analyses the geopolitical significance of Brexit. It argues that, together with Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, it represents the historical moment when the twin crises that emerged in 2008 – the re-emergence of Russia as a geopolitical challenger to the United States and the financial crash that exposed the fragility of the neoliberal economic system – effectively fused. The article explores the double imperial constitution of the European Union, Britain’s peculiar positioning within global power structures, and the combined impact of the crash, the Great Recession of 2008–2009, and the policy reaction of seeking to recharge neoliberalism through austerity as creating the conditions for the Brexit vote. Now elites in Britain, the rest of the European Union, and the US must grapple with the direct circuit that has been established between domestic socio-political tensions and geopolitical antagonisms.