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The Nature of Theory and Realism

Part 1: The Nature of Theory

Rationale
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We live in a confusing, complex, chaotic world
We need theory to make sense of it
By developing a theory of world politics, you can understand it, and ideally engage with it, more effectively

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Objectives
Briefly explore some of the major concerns and flashpoint conflicts of world politics today
Appreciate the nature and importance of theory for understanding international relations
Understand the components of theoretical frameworks
Concepts, abstractions, propositions, empirical testing, laws of world politics
Learn the difference between critical and uncritical theory
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The Complex World
Globalization and economic interdependencies
Economic inequalities and financial crises
Migration
New military tensions between great powers
Global public health concerns and the pandemic
Climate Change

We need theories to explain these disparate elements of the global order

What are theories (short version)?
A theory is a language or set of ideas for understanding the world
It explains why regular patterns of events occur, for example:
Why has the US been locked in ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East?
Why has global capitalism suffered from chronic crises over the past decade?
Why is the US relentless in its quest for global ‘leadership’ and why does this constantly produce backlash?

What are theories (short version)?
Theory tries to discover an essential logic or fundamental explanation for why world politics unfolds or operates as they do
If the theory matches real world developments, it can claim to represent objective laws of world politics, like the laws of physics

What are theories (short version)?
One of the ways that theory creates intellectual order of the confusing, complex world is by identifying causal factors and relationships
For example:
A causes B
X + Y results in Z
In conditions of C, D causes E
Different theories posit different causal relations

What are theories (short version)?
As an alternative, think about theories as filters on your phone camera
You take a picture, and in it are various objects and subjects
Maybe you see friends (subjects) on a bridge in a forest (objects)
In your brain, you think: “What are the key features of or dynamics within the photo and which filter illustrates them best?”

What are theories (short version)?
When you play with filters, different elements of the picture are emphasized – they standout as the most important aspects of the photo
Like theories, different filters highlight different realties
So, theory is like photo filters
It identifies key factors and develops causal relationships between different aspects of the world

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What are theories (long version)?
Intellectual systems of concepts and propositions that seek to explain the fundamental factors and causal reationships of the world, and to guide empirical or political practice.
If theories are a language for understanding reality, then concepts are the ‘words’ and propositions are the ‘sentences’, which form explanations or hypotheses.

What are theories (long version)?
Concepts are formed by abstractions, the mental process of making generalized simplifications about real world factors, actors, objects and relationships
For example, there are many units of political governance in the world, and we ‘abstract’ these as, or name them, states
Or, people perform infinite types of labor, but we can label them workers or members of the working class
Or, all of you are unique individuals, but in this classroom we can abstract or simplify your role as students

What are theories (long version)?
By making many abstractions, and demonstrating the fundamental links or relations of causality between them, a theory can be built around hypotheses or propositions on how the world truly works.
For example:
The United States is locked in ‘forever wars’ because it makes profits for the giant arms-making corporations in the US
The last decade of recurring economic crises is the result of deregulation in the financial sector
The ‘New Cold War’ between the US and China is an expression of a changing balance of power in the world, with the US in decline and China rising

What are theories (long version)?
If the theory explains real world developments, it approximates science or truth and can inform effective political action.
This is done by empirical testing; comparing propositions to real-world evidence
If these match, the propositions are verified as objective laws, like the laws of physics

What are theories (long version)
A scientific theory of international relations accurately captures the objective laws of world politics

What are theories (long version)?
Finally, there is no escaping theory
You can’t just look at ‘facts’
If you want to make sense of ‘facts’, you need a theory, and you can’t attempt any explanation without a theory
Moreover, every explanation of the so-called facts is laced with theory – there is no ‘theory-less’ explanation of anything
So, it is imperative that you learn the core theories of international relations if you want to engage with the ‘facts’ of the complex world

Major Theories of World Politics
Realism
Liberalism
Marxism

Each has distinct concepts and propositions – and a unique ontology – for understanding the world – they see the world in entirely different ways.

Major Theories of World Politics
We can call the Realist and Liberal theories the “mainstream,” “conventional,” or “hegemonic” paradigms of International Relations
Most dominant in US media, politics, and academia.
They largely accept and work with the current relationships, institutions and dynamics of the current world order.
As a consequence, they normalize, and seek to make permanent, the current system of world politics – nothing needs to fundamentally change.

Major Theories of World Politics
We can call Marxism “critical” in the sense that it:
Historicizes and denaturalizes the current world system
Asks how it came about
Asks whose interests are served by it
Asks what contradictions or dynamics of crisis might open possibilities for systemic transformation?
In asking these questions, Marxism tries to show how the “mainstream” theories are not necessarily scientific truths, but political justifications for perpetuating features of the current world order

Part 2
Realist Theories of World Politics

Realism
Realism is a major theory of international politics in the US and globally
It offers an integrated set of concepts and propositions for describing what it believes are objective and systematic laws of world politics
It also offers prescriptive guidelines for rational policymaking in a complex world

Realism 101
In general, realism focuses on the competitive nature of world politics, the self-interest of states, and the inevitability of conflict in situations of major power shifts in world order
It rests on a conservative view of human nature, social life, and the state
How did this body of theory evolve?

Lineages of Realism
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War theorized the conflicts between Athens and Sparta in Ancient Greece as the inevitable result of a shifting balance of power
“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
This conflict was also rooted in human nature, as “fear, the desire for glory, and the pursuit of self-interest,” rule our genes, according to Thucydides.

Lineages of Realism
Italian diplomat, Nicollo Machiavelli (1469-1527), wrote in, The Prince:
“a prudent ruler cannot keep his word, nor should he, where such fidelity would damage him, and when the reasons that made him promise are no longer relevant.”
Machiavellianism is a politics guided by considerations of expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, for achieving its ends—its end being the aggrandizement of one’s country and leadership.

Lineages of Realism
The English Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his book, Leviathan, also contributed to the development of realist thinking.
Stemming from his theory about the State of Nature as ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ he posits that, without a world government, the international system is subject to “a war as is of every man against every man.”

Lineages of Realism
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as Western European states were colonizing most of Africa and Asia, many European intellectuals began developing strategic analyses of geopolitics:
The struggle to control space and territory in the world system is the key to national power and the prime mover of human history
British Geographer, H.A. Mackinder, for example, formalized a particular theory of geopolitics in a 1904 essay:
In his grand historical narrative, it is control of the heart of Eurasia – “the pivot area” – which is key to exercising global power.

Lineages of Realism

Later, in 1919, Mackinder wrote, in Democratic Ideals and Reality, that:
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

Lineages of Realism
Common themes in these old texts include:
Shifting balances of power between states engender war and conflict
A violent and competitive human nature is the taproot of the problem
Self-interest drives, and justifies, all politics and state behavior
Geopolitical struggles for power and control of territory and resources are inherent features of world politics
These are systemic or objective laws and dynamics, and cannot be overcome or transcended by subjective will and political effort

Lineages of Realism
This project of theorizing the struggle for space as critical to national survival and power was also a project of the European Right.
Indeed, proto-fascists such as the German Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and conservatives such as the Swede Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) first promoted ideas about the struggle for space by homogenous cultural or national blocs.
Indeed, an underlying component of these theories is that national groupings form organic, homogenous, and racialized blocs, which struggle for hegemony as in a ‘state of nature.’

Lineages of Realism
In Weimar Germany, these ideas were operationalized under the label ‘geopolitics’ by proponents of the so-called ‘conservative revolution,’ a group of nationalist, anti-liberal and anti-communist thinkers.
This group of intellectuals included two men, the geographer Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) and the legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), who were preoccupied by questions of Raum (‘space’).
While Haushofer promoted the fantasy of a new German Lebensraum (‘living space’), Schmitt turned in the late 1930s to geopolitics, fleshing out the notion of a German Großraum (‘greater space’ or, loosely, ‘sphere
of influence’).

Lineages of Realism
At the heart of this school of German geopolitics stood an insistence that:
Humanity is organized into separate and hierarchical, biological and cultural communities – and nations are formed in ‘blood and soil.’
War is the natural condition of the interstate system, as unified nations struggle for land and space to grow and develop
Germany had to break out of its jammed centric position in Europe, build a continental bloc (a Russo-German alliance against the perceived preponderance of Anglo-American sea power), and construct a German version of the Monroe Doctrine in Europe.

Lineages of Realism
In fact, this thinking was later reflected in Nazi war strategy:
Haushofer was notable for his connections to the Nazi leadership, even though he had lost his influence by the early 1940s.
Similarly, Carl Schmitt was not only successful as a legal scholar under the Nazis, but even dreamed of defending the regime at the
Nuremberg trials.

Classical Realism
However, it is only in the post World War 2 period that Classical Realism is formalized as a social science of world politics
It sheds the racist and ultra-nationalist lineages of early twentieth century ‘geopolitics’, but develops other themes of Thucydides, Hobbes, and European grand strategy thinking
Classical Realism takes off in the United States in the 1940s, primarily in the work of European immigrant intellectuals
Based on their experiences in Europe during WW1, the Great Depression, and WW2, including the rise of fascism, they developed a very bleak theory of world politics.

Key Ideas
Classical Realism demanded a realistic study of world politics – how it operates in reality, not how it should work ideally
Thus, it rejected political efforts to create a world through the implementation of preconceived, or abstract, moral principles
Rather, it sought to explain world politics through observations of existing realities

E.H. Carr
In his 1939 book, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, British historian E.H. Carr lambasted “utopians” who had trusted transnational ties or institutions to overcome states’ innate attraction to power, competition, and armed conflict.
Carr acknowledged normative and ideological appeal of liberal thinking
However, he ultimately argued that in the existing milieu of jostling nation-states, the realist paradigm was a superior guide and predictor of political behavior.
Indeed, later that year Hitler invaded Poland, launching World War II.

Hans Morgenthau
One of the major 20th Century thinkers of International Relations
Born and educated in law in Germany
He flees Nazi Germany and moves to the US in 1937
After WW2 he was a consultant to the US State Department, and worked with George Kennan
He also advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, before being dismissed for his criticisms of the Vietnam War

Hans Morgenthau:
Politics Among Nations
Six Realist Principles:
States are the primary agents of world politics;
States operate according to laws found in human nature;
States seek power as a fundamental interest;
State policies are empty of moral calculations;
States are unitary institutions and reflect the national interest;
States leaders are rational actors vis-à-vis the nation-state system.

Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations
“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”
The struggle for power is rooted in human nature – the “tendency to dominate” others.
As such, “there is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does.”

Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations
“We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power.”
“A realist theory of international politics will [thus] avoid the…popular fallacy of equating the foreign policies of a statesmen with his philosophical or political sympathies, and of deducing the former from the latter.”

Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations
Because the struggle for power is eternal and infinite, states must prepare for “organized violence in the form of war.”
In this context, the balance of power between states is key
It determines relations between states and, ultimately, real world outcomes
It can be economic, but is primarily military in nature
Engaging the balance of power (i.e., the power of the state relative to that of any rivals) is of paramount importance to state personnel – and rational leaderships address it with single-minded determination

Summary:
Classical Realism
A conservative view of human nature, social life and the state
States are the key units of analysis, the key agents of world politics
States seek power – and the balance of power between them determines the relationships and outcomes of world politics
War and militarism are inherent aspects of the competitive state system
These are the objective laws of world politics, according to classical realist theory – they are inescapable.

Limits of Classical Realism
Accused by Harvard Prof. Stanley Hoffman of being “too close to the fire” of US foreign policy (i.e., of being a political, not a scientific, mode of thinking – it was about creating a theory of power projection which served US empire-making after World War 2.
Others say it looks at the logic of Great Powers, but not at the logic of weaker states.

Limits of Classical Realism
It contained another weakness – the notion of power and politics as irreducible evils
These are highly normative or subjective assumptions, and thus might not be objective or ‘realistic’
In fact, classical realism undermined its so-called objective starting point by proceeding from a subjective view of human nature

Neo-Realism
Emerges in 1970s
The historical context is the Crisis of US Hegemony
US trade deficits
US military defeat in Southeast Asia
Wider challenges posed by anti-colonial movements globally
Upsurge in radical social movements inside the US (anti-war, Black Power and Civil Rights, women’s movement, counter-culture), which call into question the assumptions and logic of US foreign policy

Neo-Realism
Primary analytical goal was to purge the subjective foundations of classical realism, and to make it more objective or scientific
Primary political goal was to stamp out the radical critique of US foreign policy by the New Left:
Key examples of the left-wing critique of US imperialism:
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Harry Magdoff, Age of Imperialism
Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital
Some say that reasserting US national power or hegemony was another political impetus behind neo-realism

Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979)
Distinguishes between systemic and reductionist theories
Reductionist theories start with the internal character of states to adduce their external behaviors
But they thereby ignore the conditioning structure of the state system, which forces states to act in certain ways, regardless of their internal make up
Hence, a systemic theory is needed

Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
“Systems theories, whether political or economic, are theories that explain how the organization of a realm acts as a constraining and disposing force on the interacting units within it.”

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Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
What concepts are abstracted from the world of international politics?
Anarchy
A system of independent, competing states, with no overarching sovereign power
Self-help
“Self-help is necessarily the principle of action in an anarchic order”
Balance of Power
“If there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it.”

Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
What concepts are abstracted from the world of international politics?
Balancing
When a great power seeks hegemony or tries to revise the balance of power in its favor, other states form balancing alliances to contain the instigator
Bandwagoning
When a great power seeks or obtains hegemony, peer rivals or states of lesser power may accept that hegemony, align their foreign policy strategies and military organizations with those of the dominant state, and seek to benefit under the security umbrella of the hegemon

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Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
What is the prime goal of state strategy – Power or Security?
“If states wished to maximize power, they would join the stronger side, and we would see not balances forming but a world hegemony forged. This does not happen because balancing, not bandwagoning, is the behavior induced by the system. The first concern of states is not to maximize power but to maintain their positions in the system.”

This is a theory of defensive realism

John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism
In his Tragedy of Great Power Politics, University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer contests Waltz’s theory of defensive realism
Instead…
Great Powers strive for hegemony
Hence, revisionism is built into the logic of great power politics, except for a hegemonic state which wants status quo

John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism
Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism rests on five propositions:
Anarchy is the organizing principle of the state system
Great Powers possess military power to hurt and destroy other states
There is no certainty about other states’ intentions
Survival is the primary goal of Great Powers
Great Powers are rational actors and have a clear picture of their environments and how to act strategically

John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism
As a result:
“it pays to be selfish in a self-help world”
Alliances are only “temporary marriages of convenience”
The best security for survival is dominance or hegemony
Thus a Zero Sum Logic is induced: one state gains, another losses

John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism
As a result:
States are thereby disposed to think offensively towards other states
But the Security Dilemma – the dynamic by which investments in the armaments of one state impel its rivals to better their own armaments, creating an arms race or security competition – becomes the prime mover of world politics and the balance of power
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Why does Great Power Warfare Occur?
“The central idea embodied in the hegemonic theory is that there is incompatibility between crucial elements of the existing international system and the changing distribution of power among the states within the system. The elements of the system – the hierarchy of prestige, the division of territory, and the international economy – became less and less compatible with the shifting distribution of power among the major states in the system. The resolution of the disequilibrium between the superstructure of the system and the underlying distribution of power is found in the outbreak and intensification of what becomes a hegemonic war.” 
Professor Robert Gilpin

Why does Great Power Warfare Occur?
Or, as Professor Raymond Aron put it:
A hegemonic war “is characterized less by its immediate causes or its explicit purposes than by its extent and the stakes involved. It affect[s] all the political units inside one system of relations between sovereign states. Let us call it, for want of a better term, a war of hegemony, hegemony being, if not the conscious motive, at any rate the inevitable consequence of the victory of at least one of the states or groups.”

Mearsheimer on Multilateral Institutions
After the Cold War, Western liberals argued that great power politics were finished, and that global institutions could serve as forums for effective diplomacy and conflict resolution.
Global governance would replace balance of power politics
President Clinton, 1992:
“in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute.”

Mearsheimer on Multilateral Institutions
Mearsheimer disagrees in a 1994 essay called, “The False Promise of International Institutions.”
Global institutions are created by states, with their own national interests and balance-of-power considerations
As such, global institutions do not supplant or mute the basic structure of international politics – there is still a world of sovereign states, anarchy, the balance of power, self-help, the security dilemma, and the search for zero-sum gains
This reality works against cooperation, for two reasons:
it is unclear how gains can be distributed between allies
fears of cheating and dependence are omnipresent

Mearsheimer on Multilateral Institutions
“Realists maintain that institutions are basically a reflection of the distribution of power in the world. They are based on the self-interested calculations of the great powers, and they have no independent effect on state behavior. Realists therefore believe that institutions are not an important cause of peace. They matter only on the margins.”
Thus, “institutions have minimal influence on state behavior, and thus hold little promise for promoting stability in the post-Cold War world.”

Neo-Realism:
Foreign Economic Relations
If national security and power are the primary goals of neo-realism, then reducing external dependence on foreign powers is a key goal of foreign economic policy
Because self-sufficiency and autarky are unrealistic, a second best condition is asymmetrical interdependence, balanced in favor of the home state

Neo-Realism:
Foreign Economic Relations
A realist foreign economic strategy would include…
Minimizing exposure to global economic turbulence
Protecting and supporting strategic industries (arms, high-tech manufacturing, agriculture, industrial materials) through tariffs and subsidies
Restricting foreign buyers of critical assets, and limit export of advanced technology
Maintaining a national industrial base for arms production
Discouraging emigration of high-skilled labor (‘brain drain’)

Neo-Realism Summary
States are the key actors of global politics
Anarchy defines the structure of the state system – and institutions do not supplant the structure of anarchy
States must rely upon themselves – self-help!
Cooperation is limited, and competition reigns – zero sum gainst!
World politics and history, including hegemonic wars, are the outcome of the balance of power and security dilemma
Offensive realism: States seek hegemony
Defensive realism: States seek security

Neo-Realism Summary
Final take away points:
The conditions of war and peace in the world are determined by the logic of anarchy and the shifting balance of power in the state system
States pursue interests, understood in terms of power (military, economic, political)
For realists, the term security refers to the security of the state understood as a territorial unit in which military power is monopolized by the sovereign polity.

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Liberal Theories of International Relations

Summary: What is Theory?
Theory is necessary for explaining, and creating intellectual order out of, the complex world
Theories make sense of the world by finding causal relationships
This is done through the ‘abstraction’ of concepts and propositions (hypotheses)
If empirical reality consistently proves the propositions, then the latter can be said to be ‘laws’ of social, economic or political development

Summary: Neo-Realism
States are the key actors of global politics
Anarchy defines the structure of the state system – and institutions do not supplant the structure of anarchy
States must rely upon themselves – self-help!
Cooperation is limited, and competition reigns – zero sum gainst!
World politics and history, including hegemonic wars, are the outcome of the balance of power and security dilemma
Offensive realism: States seek hegemony
Defensive realism: States seek security

Summary: Neo-Realism
Final take away points:
The conditions of war and peace in the world are determined by the logic of anarchy and the shifting balance of power in the state system
States respond to objective laws of world politics and pursue national interests, understood in terms of power (military, economic, political)
For realists, the term security refers to the security of the state understood as a territorial unit in which military power is monopolized by the sovereign polity

Today’s Objectives
Review the origins and key ideas of liberal theory
Learn the key concepts and propositions:
individualism, markets, equal exchange, supply and demand, equilibrium, and comparative advantage, and notions of multilateralism, collective security, institutionalism, democratic peace theory, and the responsibility to protect

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Liberalism:
Markets, Democracy and Peace
Liberalism is the dominant theory of international political economy
It offers a systemic set of concepts and propositions, and makes political prescriptions for government policy makers
It revolves around an economic and political understanding of capitalist markets and democratic procedures, and their connection to peace and conflict and thus to human welfare in global political economy
Liberalism centers around the actions of individuals – individuals are the key agents – an individualist methodology

Liberalism
Emerges as a theory in the 1700s and 1800s as feudalism gives way to capitalism in England and Western Europe
Feudalism was based on the Lord-Serf relationship and the direct transfer of peasant labor and products to landlords.
The transition to capitalism involved…
Privatization of peasant land by landlords; the enclosure of common lands; dispossession of the peasants and their loss of self-subsistence; market dependence and wage labor; urbanization; monetization; state formation; and so on.

Feudalism: the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, while the peasants or serfs were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him labor or a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection

Liberalism
Political Economy emerges as the study of the emerging capitalist economy and society
It is the study of the rules, laws or logic of capitalism
The first wave of political economy is called the classical school, which included Adam Smith and David Ricardo
The classical school lays the foundation for all liberal thought
There is no straight line between the classical school and modern liberal economics, but the former is foundational to the latter

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, 1776, is concerned with uncovering the logic of market society – the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism
Starts with human nature, the selfish, trading instinct
“propensity in human nature…to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another”
Individual pursuit of self-interest has social benefits and productive outcomes:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their self-interest.”

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
Economic Growth – the wealth of nations – is a function of the division of labor and specialization, which are defining features of capitalism
The ‘invisible hand’ of competition impels firms to increase efficiency through internal divisions of labor based on specialization.
Divisions of labor based on specialization, both within and between firms, increase output in more efficient ways, and expand the scope of the market and the wealth of society
Real wealth, then, is not just an augmentation of gold or currency, but is based on expanding productive assets and capacity through specialization and the division of labor

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
Smith developed different theories of value (price):
labor theory
“Labor was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.”
additive theory (wages, profits, rent)
supply and demand determine market prices

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
Supports Free Trade between nations
critique of state-managed trade and the role of state-monopoly corporations in world trade
These limit and supplant the market and create distorting political interferences
Favored free trade in cases of complimentary interests
Against ‘protectionism’ or limits on imports, like the British Corn Laws, which blocked grain imports from abroad – this supported landlords, not industrial capitalists, who needed cheap imported food for the working class if wages were to be kept low and profits kept high

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
Optimistic about market expansion and development
However, Smith is not a one-sided ideologue of capitalism
Concerned with issues of poverty and inequality too:
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”
Also concerned with collusion and price fixing by monopolistic corporations:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Liberalism:
Adam Smith
Smith is critical of the division of labor’s affect on workers’ intelligence:
“In the progress of the division of labor, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labor, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.”

Adam Smith Summary
Initiates political economy with The Wealth of Nations (1776), seeks to uncover the invisible hand of capitalism
Starts with the selfish, commodity-exchanging individual as the foundation of liberty and freedom – “natural liberty”
Growth = function of division of labor, specialization
Develops various theories of value (price), but settles on Supply & Demand
Supports free trade, against protectionism
Concerned with inequality, education, and monopolistic corporate power but optimistic about the market

Adam Smith Summary
THUS: Specialization, division of labor, competitive markets, and trade, supported by rational individual acquisitiveness, are the bases of modern economic growth

David Ricardo
British MP and banker
Principles of Political Economy, 1817
Accepts Smith’s theory of labor value
Adds concern with how wealth is distributed and how economic crises occur

Liberalism:
David Ricardo
Capitalism is inherently expansionary, and growth oriented, and this leads to a rising population
But: with expanding population and increase demand for food, the margins of agricultural production expand, bringing into cultivation land of lesser fertility, requiring more labor and thus increasing the cost of grain, yet increasing returns to landlords who own more fertile lands and employing less labor, earning them extra profits

Liberalism:
David Ricardo
Landlords thus gain riches even though they don’t contribute to any wealth-creating process in urban industry
As a result, industrial capitalists have to increase workers’ wages for buying more expensive food – and this limits industrial production and markets, division of labor and specialization
As workers’ wages increase, capitalists’ profits and investment decrease, causing capitalists to lay off workers (unemployment) and potential economic and political crises

Liberalism:
David Ricardo
With this in mind, he opposed the Corn Laws, which limited food imports and protected artificially-high landlord incomes
Argued that free trade would lower food costs and that that would benefit industrial capitalists who could pay lower wages to workers, and thus save their profits for productive investments in new plant and machinery
Spells out mathematical defense of free trade – called the comparative advantage model
Turn to the exercise

Liberalism:
Comparative Advantage Exercise
This is a two country (England, Portugal), two sector (cloth, wine) model
The first table shows how many hours of labor it takes each country to produce both commodities (wine, cloth)
The second box shows the labor productivity (output per labor hour) of both countries for both commodities. So, for example, in one hour of cloth production, England produces 1 yard of cloth
The third table looks at total output in both sectors in both countries, for the given amount of labor time in both countries
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Liberalism:
Comparative Advantage Exercise
The fourth table is the key test of comparative advantage theory based on specialization.
To fill out this table, let each country focus all of its labor hours on the good in which it is most efficient (i.e. has a higher labor productivity). So, England should focus all of its labor hours on cloth; Portugal on wine. They both should dedicate 0 labor hours to the commodity they are less efficient at producing.
Fill out the boxes of the fourth table. What are the results in terms of total output?
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Liberalism:
Comparative Advantage Exercise
What is England’s opportunity cost (what does it give up) to produce one yard of cloth?
What is Portugal’s opportunity cost (what does it give up) to produce 1.25 barrels of wine?
Which country has absolute advantage in both products?
In what should England specialize? Why?
In what should Portugal specialize? Why?
Calculate the total output with trade?
What are the gains from trade?
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Liberalism:
Comparative Advantage Exercise
In sum, specialization in each country based on comparative advantage leads to higher total output, i.e. a greater wealth of nations
Specifically, if both countries put all their labor hours into producing the commodity in which they have a higher productivity (i.e. specialization based on comparative advantage), more output is produced and the wealth of nations increases
In particular, there will be more output for the same amount of total labor
This is the basis of all liberal arguments for free trade between nations based on specialization

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Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
Historical Context
Before World War 1, the world economy had been liberalized in many important ways – transportation, trade, foreign portfolio investment, and migration, in addition to activities of the European colonial empires
World War 1 destroys the liberal world economy, and after the war the capitalist world-system is rocked by workers’ revolutions, growing calls for colonial independence, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism
World War II caps off the Thirty Years Crisis
The liberal defense of capitalism thus needed refurbishing!

Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
Synthesized by Cambridge Professor Alfred Marshall before WW2, and by MIT Professor Paul Samuelson after WW2, entailing:
The bedrock assumption of rational, utility-seeking individuals
A subjective theory of value replaces the objective, labor theory of value
Value is determined by Supply and Demand, with demand determined by consumer preferences

Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
Capitalism is theorized as exchange relations between individual buyers and sellers of commodities in the market, depicted by the formulas: C-C and C-M-C.
Market exchanges are equal
Commodities exchange as equal equivalents
Thus the market is fair and transparent
Wages are also equal to the value of labor exerted, and thus are fair and just
Inequality is the product of different individual efforts
J.B. Clarke’s theory of the marginal productivity of labor

Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
The market tends towards equilibrium if state interference is absent and supply and demand operate
Limited State
“the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.” Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
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Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
Free Trade or Comparative Cost Theory
Any deficit in a nation’s trade provokes a fall in its export prices relative to its import prices (‘terms of trade’ decline)
The supply of that nation’s commodities are too high, external demand is too low, and prices drop
Such a fall in prices increases foreign demand, stimulates exports, and thus improves the trade balance
Free trade thus tends towards Equilibrium, a balance of supply and demand for exports
Hence, no nation suffers overall job losses
And nations only gain from free trade as Ricardo’s model implies

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Liberalism:
Neoclassical Economics
Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson Synthesis
Extends the theory of free trade by emphasizing the comparative factor advantage of countries
Countries with an abundance of labor should specialize in labor-intensive production and exports
Countries with an abundance of capital should specialize in capital- or technology-intensive production and exports
Countries with an abundance of land should specialize in land-intensive production and exports

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Liberal Political Economy in Summary
Individuals are the key actors of market economies and democratic states
Capitalism is theorized as equal, commodity exchange relations between self-seeking individuals, all of whom benefit
Value is determined by supply and demand
Markets tend towards equilibrium if unfettered by political direction
Comparative cost or factor advantage in world trade
Limited State

Liberalism:
World Politics
On this economic foundation, liberal thinkers develop a political theory of international relations
The essential idea is that world politics are determined primarily by the domestic character of states; liberal states are prosperous and peaceful, non-liberal states are not
Note that this is different than realist theory, which says that the internal character of a state has no bearing on world politics – and that starting analytically from the internal nature of a state is reductionist, not systemic

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832)
A major founder of liberal philosophies of individual rights
A critic of natural law, the notion that society, politics and law are based on laws of nature – instead, we construct our own modes of governance and law
A founder of utilitarianism, the axiom that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11211544/Armitage_GlobalizingJeremy ?sequence=1

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832)
Bentham’s international legal writings applied the principle of utility not only to the relations between states but also to the relations of states with the rest of humanity – he thus goes beyond the state-centricity of realism
This extension of the greatest happiness principle to encompass all nations and peoples was essential if the legislator’s duty to promote the welfare of his own people was not to be prosecuted at the expense of the well-being of all others:
“Expressed in the most general manner, the end that a disinterested legislator upon international law would propose to himself, would therefore be the greatest happiness of all nations taken together.”
Thus, the ‘self-help’ imperative of realism is problematic and unnecessary

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832)
War is not inevitable and state leaders can construct “laws of peace” on the basis of the utility principle.
The subjects of international law would be states, rather than individuals, but all were considered as equals and their relations would be founded on mutual recognition of their forms of government, their religion and their customs

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832)
Note his understandings that:
world politics are not simply about military balances amongst states and their executive institutions;
society and human populations matter to international relations;
normative values – the greater good – matter to conditions of war and peace;
conflict is not inevitable and in fact can be mitigated by international laws of peace.
All of this differs drastically from realist thinking

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
German philosopher
Argued that perpetual peace could be obtained through republican governments, markets and international cooperation
Liberal republics engage in profitable trade and commerce with each other and thus develop vested interests in cooperation rather than war
Warfare would increasingly be seen as injurious to “all trades and industries, and especially to commerce.”
Kant suggested that the “spirit of commerce . . . [could] not exist side by side with war” and that states must realize that their own “financial power” depended upon pre­venting war with other commercial states.

https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/030437540202700401

Lineages of Liberal IR Theory
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
An international civil society was con­ceived as a “kind of league” or “pacific federation” that, unlike a world government, did not possess coercive powers, and unlike a mere treaty that “terminate[d] one war,” the pacific federation sought “to end all wars for good.”
The pacific federation would gradually expand “to encompass all states” through a process of mutual alliance, and it was in this vein that he denounced the “inhospitable” conquest of weak states by the strong.

Lineages of Liberal Theory
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Notice the differences with realist theory:
Peace is possible
An interdependence of interests and mutual gains can be created
International federations, rules, norms, alliances, etc. can be established
Power imbalances can be contained or mitigated without domination, conflict, etc.

Liberalism:
Democratic Peace Theory
Michael Doyle. 1986. “Liberalism and World Politics.” American Political Science Review:
There are two types of states
Liberal democracies have market economies, share the benefits of free trade, hold elections and rule of law, and thus hold their leaders accountable for decisions of war and peace.
State-centric regimes have politically-directed economies, reject free trade in favor of protectionism and expansionism, and are run by unaccountable autocrats.

Liberalism:
Democratic Peace Theory
Liberal states tend to form a “zone of peace”
“liberal states do exercise peaceful restraint, and a separate peace exists among them. This separate peace provides a solid foundation for the United States’ crucial alliances with the liberal powers, e.g., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our Japanese alliance. This foundation appears to be impervious…as the number of liberal states increases, it announces the possibility of global peace this side of the grave or world conquest.”
Liberal “republics are capable of achieving peace among themselves because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics.”

Liberalism:
Democratic Peace Theory
But…
They “remain in a state of war with nonrepublics. Liberal republics see themselves as threatened by aggression from nonrepublics that are not constrained by representation.”
Indeed…
“Even though wars often cost more than the economic return they generate, liberal republics also are prepared to protect and promote – sometimes forcibly – democracy, private property, and the rights of individuals overseas against nonrepublics, which, because they do not authentically represent the rights of individuals, have no rights to noninterference.”

Liberalism:
Multilateral Institutions
After the Cold War, Western liberals argued that great power politics were finished, and that global institutions could serve as forums for effective diplomacy and conflict resolution.
President Clinton, 1992:
“in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute.

Liberalism:
Multilateral Institutions
For liberal theory, there are several factors that underpin cooperation:
Free trade and other forms of economic interdependence create mutual gains and thus vested interests in cooperation and compromise
Liberal democracies share a culture of rules-based governance – and this transfers to international institutions, which set rules for individual member states

Liberalism:
Multilateral Institutions
For liberal theory, there are several factors that underpin cooperation:
The benefits of cooperation create disincentives to cheat and seek private gains
The norms and procedures of global institutions, in addition to the benefits, come to change the calculus of states’ interests
Thus, collective forms of security and conflict resolution are possible through liberal institutionalism
Collective security is the notion that one’s own security depends simultaneously on the security of others and thus can’t be obtained through zero sum politics

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Liberalism:
Responsibility to Protect
The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect was a major initiative of liberal thinking after the Cold War
For liberals, as the ‘balance of power’ rivalry with the Communist bloc winded down, the principle contradiction in world politics became that between authoritarian governments and their own people(s)
The new security concerns became human rights, civil wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and failed states – for example, in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
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Liberalism:
Responsibility to Protect
In academia and at the United Nations, a liberal doctrine emerged called The Responsibility to Protect
It said that the international community had a duty to respond to human rights violations in failed states or in civil wars
To do this, the international community would have to cast aside the right of state sovereignty
R2P is not codified in international law, but it is based on the norms and principles of international human rights law, and is a political commitment unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly in its 2005 World Assembly
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Liberalism:
Responsibility to Protect
Thus, R2P is an updated version of Liberalism’s Democratic Peace Theory, particularly its defense of intervention in sovereign states
Various Western powers have invoked the R2P doctrine to legitimatize their military interventions in countries like Serbia or Libya
But critics have said R2P has no standing in international law, and has been used as a legitimation discourse by Western powers to advance their own geopolitical or geo-economic interests in strategic countries or regions – in other words, that it is a false pretext for imperialism or great power militarism
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Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
“Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations – the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded – have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics. Societal ideas, interests, and institutions influence state behavior by shaping state preferences, that is, the fundamental social purposes underlying the strategic calculations of governments. For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics.”

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
“Liberal IR theory’s fundamental premise – that the relationship between states and the surrounding domestic and transnational society in which they are embedded critically shapes state behavior by influencing the social purposes underlying state preference”

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Assumption 1
The fundamental actors in international politics are individuals and private groups, who are on the average rational and risk-averse and who organize exchange and collective action

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Assumption 2
In the liberal conception of domestic politics, the state is not an actor but a representative institution constantly subject to capture and recapture, construction and reconstruction by coalitions of social actors. Representative institutions and practices constitute the critical “transmission belt” by which the preferences and social power of individuals and groups are translated into state policy
Liberal theory focuses on the consequences for state behavior of shifts
in fundamental preferences, not shifts in the strategic circumstances under which states pursue them
Liberal theory rests on a “bottom-up” view of politics in which the demands of individuals and societal groups are treated as analytically prior to politics

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Assumption 3
State behavior reflects varying patterns of state preferences. States
require a “purpose,” a perceived underlying stake in the matter at hand, in order to provoke conflict, propose cooperation, or take any other significant foreign policy action
Thus, liberals causally privilege variation in the configuration of state preferences
In essence, “what states want is the primary determinant of what they do”

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Variants of Liberalism
Ideational liberalism views the configuration of domestic social identities and values as a basic determinant of state preferences and, therefore, of
interstate conflict and cooperation
Commercial liberalism explains the individual and collective behavior of states based on the patterns of market incentives facing domestic and transnational economic actor
Republican liberal theory emphasizes the ways in which domestic institutions and
practices aggregate those demands, transforming them into state policy. The key
variable in republican liberalism is the mode of domestic political representation,
which determines whose social preferences are institutionally privileged

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Democratic Peace?
“With respect to extreme but historically common policies like war, famine, and radical autarky, fair representation tends to inhibit international conflict. In this way, republican liberal theory has helped to explain phenomena as diverse as the “democratic peace,” modern anti-imperialism, and international trade and monetary cooperation. Given the prima facie plausibility of the assumption that major war imposes net costs on society as a whole, it is not surprising that the prominent republican liberal argument concerns the “democratic peace,” which one scholar has termed “as close as anything we have to a law in international relations” – one that applies to tribal societies as well as to modern states. Liberal democratic institutions tend not to provoke such wars because influence is placed in the hands of those who must expend blood and treasure and the leaders they choose”

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
“The more precise liberal prediction is thus that despotic power, bounded by neither law nor representative institutions, tends be wielded in a more arbitrary manner by a wider range of individuals, leading both to a wider range of expected outcomes and a more conflictual average. Nonetheless liberal theory predicts that democratic states may provoke preventive wars in response to direct or indirect threats, against very weak states with no great power allies, or in peripheral areas where the legal and political preconditions for trade and other forms of profitable transnational relations are not yet in place.”

Optional Reading:
Moravcsik
Uniqueness of liberal theory:
Provides a plausible theoretical explanation for variation in the substantive content of foreign policy
Offers a plausible explanation for historical change in the international system
Offers a plausible explanation for the distinctiveness of modern international politics

Liberalism Summary
Capitalism is a fair and self-adjusting system of market exchange relations between self-seeking individuals, buying and selling commodities for personal consumption.
The conditions of war and peace in the world order are determined by the domestic or internal character of states; Democratic Peace Theory explains the fault lines and conflicts of world politics.
Global institutions can reinforce the liberal zone of peace, and the benefits of these institutions can supersede the ‘self-help’ calculus of individual states.
For liberals, security refers to the security of individuals to own private property, exchange commodities in the market, vote for political leadership, and hold rights against the state.

Marx, Marxism and World Politics

Marxism
Marxism offers the third major theory of IPE
It offers an integrated system of concepts and propositions, and corresponding vision of politics
It is based on a particular theory of capitalism as a productive system of class exploitation, and of the world economy and state-system as an unequal system of imperialism

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Objectives
Review the ideas of the ‘young’ Karl Marx
Learn the key concepts of Marxism: dialectics, alienation, historical materialism, mode of production, forces and relations of production, classes, crisis, the state
Understand the Marxist theory of imperialism
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Now:
Next:
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*****Notes for Live Lecture*****

_________________________________________
*****Preparation Notes*****

Karl Marx, 1818-1883
German intellectual, journalist and working-class activist
Born in Trier, Germany
Earns a Doctorate in law and philosophy
But never obtains a university position
At 28 became editor of a liberal-socialist paper, based on Cologne, Germany
Shut down for advocating democratic rights and social justice, and for criticizing European monarchies
Refugee in Paris (France), Brussels (Belgium), and eventually London (United Kingdom)

The Young Marx
Marx began his intellectual career with a focus on Greek and German philosophy
From the Greeks, he took the notion of dialectics:
Relational view of the world and its parts
Relations form a whole or ‘totality’ or ‘system’, which in turn shapes the ‘parts’ of reality
Contradictions between the parts can lead to revolutions of the ‘whole’

The Young Marx
As a young man, Marx was also engaged with the dialectical philosophy of the German thinker, Hegel, who believed that human history moved through the dialectic of ideas
Society is organized around particular ideas, but new ideas emerge which contradict the old ideological framework
The clash of these ideas leads to an ideational revolution, to a new paradigm for organizing society
Thus, history is the progressive movement of rationality, ideas and logic

The Young Marx
Marx said Hegel was right to apply dialectics to human history and social analysis – human history does move through relational contradictions and revolutions!
But Hegel’s dialectic was grounded in ideas alone and thus went astray – it remained idealist
Ideas are not independent motors of history, but expressions of material realities
Our ideas about the world, our sense of rationality and logic, are connected to and reflections of our material circumstances of life
Dialectics must therefore be materialized

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The Young Marx
To move beyond Hegel and the limits of idealist philosophy, Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels write a book called The German Ideology
In this text they spell out historical materialism as their method of analyzing historical change, society, politics, economics and culture

The Young Marx
Historical Materialism
Human history depends first and foremost on the production of material life
The way in which production has been organized, though, has changed over time
Human history has been partitioned into modes of production, and each mode of production is constituted by forces and relations of production

The Young Marx
Historical Materialism
Furthermore, the relations of production have been class relations, involving struggles over ownership and control over social surpluses
The dialectic of human history, then, is class conflict over the production of material life, and human culture and consciousness is always a reflection of material reality

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The Young Marx
Marx’s theory of historical materialism was an expression of the historical conditions of his own life!
In Germany, Marx edited a newspaper which supported the widespread extension of democratic liberties and social justice for the poor
After his newspaper is suppressed, Marx flees to Paris in 1843, and encounters a vibrant working-class movement that had forming during the Industrial Revolution
That working-class movement had also learned a lesson from the French Revolution (1789-1799)
true democracy requires social equality, and that the new inequalities of capitalism limit or degrade the meaning of democracy

The Young Marx
After arriving in Paris, Marx leaves behind philosophy and turns to the study of Political Economy, reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and others, and writing copious notebooks
In his Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts (1844), he says that:
political economy had treated private property as an assumed fact
had not linked the dynamics of capitalism to the existence of private property
Marx says both private property and the dynamics of capitalism can be traced back to the alienation of labor

The Young Marx
Alienated labor is an objective, systemic feature of capitalism
It is rooted in the fact that, under capitalism, the vast majority of people lose control of their own means of subsistence or means of production, and have to sell their ability to work as a ‘commodity’ on the market
In this context, alienation takes four principal forms:
From the products of labor
From the process of labor
From our “species being” or human nature
From humanity

The Young Marx
Marx’s conclusion
Overcoming the entire structure of alienation in modern society, including “all relations of servitude,” requires the emancipation of labor, i.e. socialism
Put differently, the dis-alienation of labor means abolition of private ownership of the means of production

The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is the next text through which we will explore Marx’s thought
In it, he brings together, or synthesizes, his work on dialectics, historical materialism, political economy, alienation, and communism

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Published during the 1848 Revolutions for Democracy and Social Reform across Western Europe
Although it is part of his ‘early’ work, and is a political manifesto more than scientific analysis, it represents one of the most important texts of human history, and laid the foundation for Marxism as a critical theory and political project

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Importantly, it foregrounds the centrality of class struggle to human history, social organization, and political contestation
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Organized around several important questions…

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How did the bourgeoisie (the owners of capital) originate as a class?
From the chartered burghers of feudalism
These were the privileged citizens of European medieval towns, freed from feudal service, and engaged in town business or civil service

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How did the bourgeoisie (the owners of capital) originate as a class?
It monopolized the new technologies of the industrial revolution to develop manufacturing systems of production
It also facilitated European colonialism, and came to control the new markets for goods imported from the colonies
It builds up enough private wealth to challenge the old ruling classes of feudalism (the landlords and royal families)
Eventually, from the French Revolution (1789) onward, the bourgeoisie plays a revolutionary role in overthrowing feudalism and monarchy

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
Uprooted feudalism
Created new technologies, systems of production, and forms of state power
Undermined all past ideologies and social relations
Generates an immense mass of material wealth and civilization
Creates new intellectual life, a world culture of intellectual inquiry

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
Creates a world market of trade and production
Conquers nature
Develops cities and rescues the rural population from the ‘idiocy of rural life’
Consolidates and centralizes political power over national territories

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade….The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How was the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class?
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
But what are the contradictions of capitalism?
There are two structural realities generating crisis under capitalism

First, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production
Capitalism, by virtue of its technological dynamism, creates a productive capacity that goes far beyond the ability of workers to consume the totality of goods on offer
This results in periodic crises of overproduction

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
But what are the contradictions of capitalism?
The second contradiction is rooted in class formation – the conflict between the working-class (proletariat) and the bourgeoisie (or capitalist class)
“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
It develops in tandem with the bourgeoisie
Composed of property-less wage laborers, who sell their labor as a “commodity” to the capitalist class
In the factory system, they become an “appendage of the machine”
Factory work immiserates the working-class, and workers lose their unique human capacities to labor creatively and intelligently
Paid subsistence wages, and suffer from poverty
Marx describes wage labor as a new form of slavery – to technology, to the capitalist state, to bosses, and to the bourgeoisie as a class

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
But workers come to command a collective class agency for resistance
First, capitalism simplifies the class structure of previous modes of production
Society increasingly polarizes between two major classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
Second, the growing centralization of capitalist production brings together the working-class into massive factories
Third, the class experience of workers comes to be equalized – even divisions of gender, age and nation disappear says Marx

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
How does the working-class or proletariat develop?
At first, workers employ individualistic modes of resistance to capitalist wage labor
But gradually, the find collective modes of activism
Eventually, progressive intellectuals join their cause and, with their grasp of the “march of history,” offer political leadership and support
Inevitably, the working class develops a common class consciousness around the necessity of communism – creating a classless society based not on private markets and alienated labor but on working-class control of production

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Why is Revolution necessary?
“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Why is Revolution necessary?
Because “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Summary:
The Communist Manifesto
Capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production
Develops the forces of production
Destroys and transforms all old forms of social relationships
Creates immense material wealth and intellectual richness
Creates an expansionary world-system

Summary:
The Communist Manifesto
But, capitalism is prone to economic crises – over-production!
And, all its achievements rest on exploited human labor
Thus, capitalism is a new mode of class exploitation
True democracy requires equality and the abolition of class exploitation
Fortunately, capitalism creates the working-class, which is the majoritarian class and the historical agent of collective emancipation
Communist revolution is necessary because class war defines the economy, and the state is an institution of class rule

Summary:
The Communist Manifesto
In short, in the Manifesto, Marx synthesizes a theory of capitalism as a mode of production based on class exploitation

Question: does Marx’s analysis of capitalism in the mid-1800s still have resonance today, in our world of globalization, rapid technological change, and growing social conflicts over inequality and wealth?

Classical Marxism
After Marx’s death, his intellectual and political followers – the Classical Marxists – developed his ideas (1880s-1920s)
Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Nikolai Bukharin, amongst others
They develop the Marxist theory of world politics and economics as a system of imperialism
Their theories of imperialism were designed to explain the world economic and political dynamics of their time – the emergence of giant monopoly corporations, the colonization of the Third World, and the drive to World War 1

Classical Marxism
In the lead up to WW1, two factions emerge – a reformist faction, and a revolutionary one…

Classical Marxism
Karl Kautsky led the Reformist wing of European Marxism
Leading theorist of the German Social Democratic Party
Editor of Neue Zeit
Like fellow German Marxist, Edward Bernstein, Kautsky argued that capitalism could be reformed gradually into socialism without the need for revolution
This becomes the political basis for social democracy or “Evolutionary Socialism”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm

Classical Marxism
Karl Kautsky
Extends social democracy to global politics and economics through his theory of ultra-imperialism
Capitalist globalization leads to economic integration between nations and renders war unprofitable and thus politically irrational for capitalist business
Dynamics of corporate concentration might extend across borders, creating transnational corporate entities with no interest in war between states
Economic integration can underpin international institutions, e.g. League of Nations
Capitalism creates a basis for world peace, which socialism will inherit without the need for revolution

Classical Marxism
Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Rosa Luxemburg criticize Kautsky from the standpoint of Revolutionary Marxism
They argue that Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism left the international working-class movement unprepared to oppose World War 1, as demonstrated by the German Social Democratic Party’s endorsement of the war
They also argue that, while an international combination of capitalist industry was a theoretical possibility, Marxists needed a theory of capitalism as it actually existed at the time – one that had already produced economic, political, and military rivalries and conflict

Classical Marxism
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
Leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, and political leader of the Russian Revolution (1917)
Head of Government of the Soviet Union from 1917-1924
In 1917, his revolutionary strategy rested, in part, on a unique Marxist theory of imperialism

Classical Marxism
Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
A new stage of capitalism, 1870-1914
Monopolization
Merger of banking and industrial capital creates finance capital
Stagnation results from monopoly, surplus profits created
Export of capital
Colonialism

Capitalism and Colonialism
Eric J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (NY: Vintage, 1989)
“The economic and military supremacy of the capitalist countries had long been beyond serious challenge, but no systematic attempt to translate it into formal conquest, annexation and administration had been made between the end of the eighteenth and the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1914 it was made, and most of the world outside Europe and the Americas was formally partitioned into territories under the formal rule or informal political domination of one or other of a handful of states: mainly Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA and Japan.”

Capitalism and Colonialism
Eric J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (NY: Vintage, 1989)
“This partition of the world among a handful of states, which gives the present volume its title, was the most spectacular expression of that growing division of the globe into the strong and the weak, the ‘advanced’ and the ‘backward’, which we have already noted. It was also strikingly new. Between 1876 and 1915 about one-quarter of the globe’s land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among a half-dozen states. Britain increased its territories by some 4 million square miles, France by some 3.5 millions, Germany acquired more than 1 million, Belgium and Italy just under 1 million each. The USA acquired some 100,000, mainly from Spain, Japan something like the same amount from China, Russia and Korea. Portugal’s ancient African colonies expanded by about 300,000 square miles; Spain, while a net loser (to the USA), still managed to pick up some stony territory in Morocco and the Western Sahara.”

Classical Marxism
Colonizing Africa
1884 Berlin Conference, divides territory among European colonial powers.
1870, only 10% of Africa colonized; 1914, 90%.
Belgium’s King Leopold II colonized Congo for ivory and rubber, killing 10 million through slavery and forced collection quotas
See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

Classical Marxism
Lenin’s, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Imperialism wasn’t a policy of misguided governments, but a systemic reality of capitalism
In particular, it was an expression of economic competition between large-scale corporations from different nation-states
WW1 was a war between different blocs of national monopoly capital for control of world markets, and especially for control of colonies
England and France had colonized most of the world, but rising imperialist states, such as Germany, were denied global reach – hence the war between them.
Revolutionary socialists must turn the world war into class wars

Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
Made three contributions to the theory of imperialism
First, that capitalism must, because of crisis tendencies of over-production, constantly expand into non-capitalist spaces
Second, that ‘primitive accumulation’ (the dispossession of producers from the land and their owns means of subsistence) is a permanent dynamic of capital accumulation on a global scale
Third, that colonial violence and militarism are necessary tools of capital accumulation
Relatedly, military spending by the state becomes a field of accumulation for the arms industry

Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital.”

Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy”

Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day. From the point of view of the primitive societies involved, it is a matter of life or death; for them there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the finish—complete exhaustion and extinction. Hence permanent occupation of the colonies by the military, native risings and punitive expeditions are the order of the day for any colonial regime. The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation.”

Classical Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
“In addition, militarism has yet another important function. From the purely economic point of view, it is a pre-eminent means for the realisation of surplus value; it is in itself a province of accumulation.”

SUM: Marxism and Imperialism
The context of world politics is provided by processes of capital accumulation on a global scale
The competitive struggle between a plurality of centers of capital accumulation is a constitutive dimension of world politics

SUM: Marxism and Imperialism
Militarism and geopolitics are not autonomous from capitalism; they are political expressions of economic competition and class exploitation
The world system of capitalism – one of competition, war, inequality and exploitation – is one of imperialism
Peace between nations – and social security – requires anti-capitalist transformation globally

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Select one of the following sets of questions and write an essay:

1. Why do we need theories to explain the complex, chaotic world? What are the differences between the neo-realist and liberal theories of world politics? What are the core concepts and propositions of each theory (for example, anarchy, self-help, balance of power, comparative advantage, democratic peace theory, collective security, etc.)? How does each theory explain the conditions of war and peace in the world? How do they understand “security” differently? In your view, which of these theories better captures the fundamental drivers of peace and conflict in the world?

1. According to Marx’s 
Communist Manifesto, how does the bourgeoisie originate as a class, and how is it a revolutionary class? What are the structural contradictions of capitalism? How does the proletariat develop as a class, and why is revolution necessary? Next, describe the Classical Marxist theory of imperialism. How does Lenin explain the links between economic competition and military rivalry in the world system? What was the logic of colonialism and what is the Marxist theory of World War 1? Finally, how does Marxism theorize the global system of capitalism as a system of imperialism, and how is this theory different from a realist or liberal viewpoint?

No notes allowed. You must prepare in advance and write from memory. Bring a pen to class. Write clearly so the TA can read the test. Make sure to explain and define all of your terms. Write as much as possible, the more the better. Draw upon the readings, lectures and PPTS to prepare. You must write clearly and use proper grammar, punctuation and paragraphs.