Prof. Andreas Bieler and Prof. Adam D. Morton
Historical Materialism and International Relations: the social relations of production
'The "sphere" of production is dominant not in the sense that it stands apart from or precedes . . . juridical-political forms, but rather in the sense that these forms are precisely forms of production, the attributes of a particular productive system'.
- Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism
In this Class, we look at historical materialist IR theories. In the first section, we discuss why it is important to focus on the social relations of production when analysing instances of international relations. Then, we briefly introduce two rival definitions of capitalism, putting forward an argument as to why a definition focusing on the social property relations approach is the most appropriate way. The third section discusses the different Marxist ways as to how to conceptualise the internal relationship between the emergence of capitalism and the international state-system. Then, a number of historical materialist theoretical approaches are introduced in sections 4, 5 and 6.
Why focus on the social relations of production?
Marxist approaches hold that mainstream orthodox theories such as (neo-) realism and liberalism take the separation of the political and the economic, the state and market as their starting-point. By taking for granted, however, what is specific to capitalism, the mainstream collapses into ahistoric analysis. Instead, the main question has to be why it is that the political and the economic appear as separate in the current, capitalist historical period. Focusing on the social relations of production allows us to answer this question. As a result of capitalist production being organised around wage labour and the private ownership of the means of production, exploitation is indirectly, economically enforced, not directly, in a political sense. Nobody is forced by political authorities to sell her/his labour in a particular factory and be exploited while doing so. However, if we do not own the means of production, we inevitably have to sell our labour power in order to ensure our social reproduction. Hence, exploitation is indirectly, economically enforced as a result of the way production is organised and it is because of this way of organizing production that the state and market, the political and the economic appear to be separate. Once this is understood, Marxist approaches can focus on the internal relations between the political and the economic and it is revealed that, of course, state and market are closely internally related in that the former ensures and enforces the private ownership of the means of production.
Analysing the rise of China provides an interesting example as to why a focus on the social relations of production is key in understanding international relations. Neo-realists would emphasise the importance of great power politics and here Chinese – US rivalry with the question of China as a potential, new hegemon at the heart of analysis. Liberalism, in turn, would focus on possibilities of global co-operation with China and regard Chinese accession to the WTO in 2001 as a sign that co-operation on the basis of mutual benefits is possible. By contrast, a historical materialist analysis of the so-called ‘rise’ of China starts by investigating the way Chinese production is integrated into the global political economy. Uncovering the point that Chinese production is largely based on FDI by foreign TNCs and cheap labour, assembling pre-fabricated parts for export to North America and Europe, it can be concluded that China is in a much more fragile position than generally assumed.
Definitions of capitalism
In his world-systems approach, Immanuel Wallerstein defines capitalism as an economic system of production for the (world) market in which profit is generated in long-distance trade. Hence, the origins of capitalism are linked to an expanding world market as ‘a capitalist mode is one in which production is for exchange; that is, it is determined by its profitability on a market’ (Wallerstein 1979: 159). By focusing on the market, however, Wallerstein overlooks that this world market links up at times a range of different social relations of production such as feudal structures in the colonial periphery with capitalist production in the core. Equally, the focus on the world market, the system, overlooks class struggle as the dynamic underlying capitalist expansion and resistance.
Hence, our definition of capitalism is in line with Robert Brenner’s understanding and the wider social property relations approach. Brenner argues that it was in medieval England that a specific set of social property relations based on a landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer structure, as well as production improvements in agriculture was established (Brenner 1985: 46-9). This then led to a situation in which both landlord and tenant depended on the market for their social reproduction. Importantly, the specificity of this development was not linked to the emerging world market and the trade in luxury goods for the elites, but to the development of a unique economy based on a growing mass market for cheap basic goods such as foodstuffs and cotton cloth. In short, capitalism is not distinctive in that it emerged as a world market, but in the way the social relations of production are organised around the private ownership of the means of production and wage labour. This then immediately puts class struggle between capital and labour at the heart of the analysis.
Capitalism and the international state-system
The relationship between emerging capitalism and the international state-system is a point of contention within Marxist IR theory. Werner Bonefeld, for example, argues that capitalism emerged in tandem with the modern state. ‘Both, the establishment of the national state and the world market, were products of the same social struggles that revolutionised feudal social relations’ (Bonefeld, 2008: 67). In other words, both states and markets are considered as logical complementary parts of capitalism, one requiring the other.
Benno Teschke, on the other hand, has made a clear case that an international state system of absolutist states existed before the emergence and spread of capitalism. ‘Plural state formation, creating the distinction between the domestic and the international, and capitalism, creating the distinction between the political and the economic, were not geographically and temporarily co-constitutive. Multiple state formation came first’ (Teschke: 2003, 74; see also Lacher 2006). In other words, capitalism emerged within an already existing international state-system, which in turn influenced dynamics of uneven and combined development (U&CD) underlying capitalist outward expansion. The next section looks at this in more detail. This understanding is in line with Brenner’s definition of capitalism, as many absolutist states on the continent such as France and Spain, for example, were formed within feudalist social relations of production.
THINK POINT:
Why does it matter for our analysis, which definition of capitalism we adopt?
Historical Materialist approaches I: Uneven and Combined Development.
Linking with the focus in these classes on decolonial sentiments (see Class 8), Gurminder Bhambra (2011: 678) has argued that 'the narrative of historical transition, in this case of "uneven and combined development", is reified as the narrative of history - where "unevenness" points to difference and "development" to the universal framework within which those differences are to be located - and the histories of the rest of the world are understood within the problematics of this narrative'.
Despite this critique, the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development as a descriptive generalisation linking states’ social conditions has grown apace in recent years in theorising the international. The argument is that as capitalism expanded on a world-scale, it did so unevenly across cultural forms, geographical scales and developmental levels. The unevenness of the spread of capitalism has led to different relations of production becoming combined. Capitalist development is, therefore, uneven in its expansion and combined in its character, while the international states-system is shaped by these conditions of uneven and combined development.
Two dynamics can be identified driving this outward expansion. First, as a result of geo-political pressures, Germany and France, to keep up with the increasingly powerful arms manufacturing in Britain based on capitalist social relations of production, introduced similar production relations from above in the second half of the nineteenth century in what can be referred to as ‘passive revolutions’. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who first conceptualised the notion of U&CD, identified similar pressures on Russia by Western powers in the late nineteenth- early twentieth-century (Trotsky 1929/2007). Again, to compete with Western fire power, industrial arms manufacturing was established around St. Petersburg and Moscow. Overall, Western Europe was clearly more developed than Russia, hence uneven development. On the other, Russian development was combined with the West through French finance to establish these arms factories, and combined in Russia in that it brought together advanced industrial factories with traditional feudal relations around serfdom. It was this combination that in Trotsky’s eyes produced an explosive mixture underlying the Russian revolution and providing the ground for ‘permanent revolution’, i.e. an immediate transition from a bourgeois into a socialist revolution.
Second, it is capitalist crisis tendencies that drives capitalist outward expansion. As a result of both capital and labour having to reproduce themselves through the market, it is not only workers who compete with each other for jobs, but capitalists too compete with each other for market share. This makes capitalism so dynamic and innovative. In order to stay competitive, companies constantly have to innovate their products in order to stay ahead of their competitors. If they fail to do so, they will go bankrupt and disappear. The fate of the mobile producer Nokia is an example. Five to ten years ago it dominated the mobile phone market, now no Nokia branded mobile phones are anymore sold. Of course, as a result of constant technological innovation, more and more products are being produced with less and less living labour. What works for one company, however, is disastrous for the economy as a whole. With more and more products manufactured by fewer workers, we end up in a crisis of overproduction. How can such a crisis be overcome? Through outward expansion in the search for new markets and cheaper labour. As Trotsky (1929: 137) remarked, ‘in the process of its development, and consequently in the struggle with its internal contradictions, every national capitalism turns in an ever-increasing degree to the reserves of the “external market”, that is, the reserves of world economy.’ Hence, outward expansion within the existing international states-system is an inherent dynamic of capitalism.
FURTHER STUDY:
For an excellent study of capitalism’s outward expansion along uneven and combined development lines, see
Anievas, Alexander and Kerem Nişancioğlu (2015) How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
For a symposium on this book, see the online Progress in Political Economy blog at
http://ppesydney.net/west-came-rule-symposium/
Historical Materialist approaches II: Antonio Gramsci and world order
Drawing from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, historical materialist advances were made in a seminal article by Robert Cox in 1981. He distinguished three different levels of activity: (1) social relations of production, engendering a particular configuration of social class forces with class struggle as the fundamental dynamic; (2) forms of state, referring to social class forces operating within and through the integral state made up of civil society plus political society in order to establish their interests as the national interest; and (3) world order, which is based on a configuration of social class forces and state power. Additionally, at all three levels forces are assumed to interact, i.e. material capabilities, ideas in the form of intersubjective meanings, and institutions sustaining particular orders. Overall, the main objective here is to identify distinct historical structures.
On this basis of a much more complex ontology, historical materialism develop a different understanding of hegemony. Unlike neo-realists, which associate hegemony with one particular state, which is so predominantly powerful as far as material and economic capabilities are concerned that it can enforce its rule on other states, hegemony is regarded as being based on a historical bloc consisting of an alliance of social class forces, but also a coherent assemble of material capabilities, ideas and institutions. Thus, hegemony is not only based on force, but on a combination of consensus and coercion. Hegemony is first established at the national level by a leading class fraction, before it is extended outward through the international expansion of a particular mode of social relations of production. Hence, looking at the three different levels of activity and the three different sets of forces interacting on each level, Cox concludes that hegemony ‘is based on a coherent conjunction or fit between a configuration of material power, the prevalent collective image of ... order ... and a set of institutions which administer the order with a certain semblance of universality’ (Cox 1981: 139). In short, hegemony here is based on a particular configuration of social class forces capable of establishing its particular order at the three levels of activity on the basis of consensus as well as coercion.
Highlighting changes in the production structure since the early 1970s, Robert Cox (1981: 147) concluded early on that ‘it becomes increasingly pertinent to think in terms of a global class structure alongside or superimposed upon national class structures.’ Starting analysis at the social relations of production it is argued that transnational capital and labour have emerged as new, transnational social class forces in addition to national capital and labour. At the social relations of production level, moreover, globalisation is expressed in a division between established labour on good employment contracts often with TNCs on one hand, and an increasingly large number of workers in precarious employment on the periphery of the production process. Thus, transnationalisation of production goes hand in hand with outsourcing of parts of the production process by TNCs and increasing levels of informalisation. Capital too is potentially split between national and transnational class forces. Importantly, as a result of transnational restructuring ‘transnational capital has become the dominant, or hegemonic, fraction of capital on a world scale’ (Robinson 2004: 21).
At the form of state level, the focus is on how and to what extent the interests of transnational capital have become internalised within the state, often expressed in a shift from a Keynesian welfare state and its focus on full employment and extensive welfare provisions towards a neoliberal competition state with its focus on national competitiveness and attacks on trade union and workers’ rights, considered to be an obstacle to competitiveness in the global political economy. At the world order level, a new hegemonic order has emerged based on transnational capital and its allies, their structural material power and neoliberal economics as the dominant ideology, supported and spread further by international organisations such as the WTO, World Bank and IMF. In sum, a historical materialist perspective offers a much more complex, but also empirically richer picture of historical orders such as globalisation than mainstream approaches like neo-realism.
HM approaches III: The Transnational State thesis (William Robinson)
William Robinson has established a unique position within historical materialist debates on the transnationalisation of production and the concomitant rise of transnational capital as the new leading class fraction. In tandem with the transnationalisation of production, he argues, we have witnessed the emergence of a transnational state (TNS), regarded as a guarantor of capital accumulation at the global level. A loose network comprised of inter- and supranational political and economic institutions together with national state apparatuses form this new TNS. States continue to exist, but are no longer formal spaces for the organisation of capitalist accumulation.
As innovative as this understanding is, Robinson’s conceptualisation of the TNS with the view that states act as mere transmission belts for the diffusing aspects of global capitalism is highly problematic. National states are rather uncritically endorsed as ‘filtering devices’, as proactive instruments in advancing the agenda of global capitalism (Robinson: 2004, 109). Furthermore and closely related to the first point, national restructuring during times of globalisation is generally conceptualised as a uniform process, integrating all states in the same way into the global political economy. Thus, the TNS thesis has the problem of a flattened ontology, overlooking the persistence of uneven and combined development dynamics and the role states continue to play in these dynamics as nodal points in the organisation of capitalist accumulation (Bieler and Morton 2013/2014: 31-7).
Conclusion
Starting with Robert Cox’s article in 1981, there has been a revival of innovative, post-positivist historical materialist approaches in IR. Cox’s article based on his distinction of problem-solving and critical theory allowed scholars to overcome deterministic Marxist approaches by pursuing a critical theoretical, post-positivist strategy of analysis. That is a theory, which ‘does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing’ (Cox 1981: 129). Historical materialist approaches are foundational, of course, through their emphasis on the social relations of production as the necessary starting-point for analysis. This does not, however, make them economically deterministic. Ultimately, it is their heuristic focus on open-ended class struggle, which ensures that any economism is avoided. Hence, while it is possible to transfer the analytical framework from one empirical case to another, to generalise across time and space in a universal way is not viable.
References
Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2011) 'Talking Among Themselves? Weberian and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogues with "Others"?', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39(3): 667-81.
Bieler, Andreas and Adam David Morton (2013/14) ‘The Will-O’-The-Wisp of the Transnational State’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, Issue No.72: 23-51.
Bonefeld, Werner (2008) Global Capital, National State, and the International. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 36(1): 63-72.
Brenner, Robert (1985) Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. In: T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds) The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cox, Robert W. (1981) Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2): 126-55.
Lacher, Hannes (2006) Beyond Globalisation: Capitalism, Territoriality and the International Relations of Modernity. London: Routledge.
Robinson, William I. (2004) A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Teschke, Benno (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso.
Trotsky, Leon (1929/2007) The Permanent Revolution. In: Trotsky L (2007) The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects. With introductions by M. Löwy. London: Socialist Resistance, pp. 111-256.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979) The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1995) Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. London: Verso.
Textbook chapters
Bieler, Andreas and Adam D. Morton (2014) ‘Neo-Gramscian Perspectives’, in Manuela Spindler and Siegfried Schieder (eds.) Theories of International Relations. London: Routledge, Chapter 13.
Heinrich, Michael (2014) ‘The Theory of Imperialism’, in Manuela Spindler and Siegfried Schieder (eds.) Theories of International Relations. London: Routledge, Chapter 11.
LeBaron, Genevieve (2018) 'Women and Unfree Labour in the Global Political Economy', in Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts (eds) Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Linklater, Andrew (2013) ‘Marx and Marxism’, in Scott Burchill et al (eds.) Theories of International Relations, Fifth edition. London: Palgrave, Chapter 5.
Nölke, Andreas (2014) ‘World-System Theory’, in Manuela Spindler and Siegfried Schieder (eds.) Theories of International Relations. London: Routledge, Chapter 12.
Rupert, Mark (2016) ‘Marxism’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (fourth edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 7.
Smith, Hazel (2002) 'The Politics of "Regulated Liberalism": A Historical Materialist Approach to European Integration', in Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds) Historical Materialism and Globalization. London: Routledge, pp. 257-83.