13 Classical Marxism Paul Cammack This chapter makes the argument – perhaps surprising at first sight – that the best insights into the contemporary governance of the global economy are found in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from the 1840s. This, I suggest, is because the world they envisaged – one in which capitalism is globally dominant – is only now becoming a reality; and because their unique focus on the orientation of governments and international organizations towards competitiveness in the world market captures the most powerful dynamic shaping global politics today. My starting point is a passage from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that is widely cited as an early description of “globalization”: 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 climes. In place of the 1 old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. 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.1 This remarkable passage, written in Manchester and London when Marx and Engels were in their twenties and when the developments they described were in their earliest stages, addresses topics that were scarcely in evidence at the time, but that figure prominently in global politics today – the emergence of a global culture, the ‘interdependence of nations’, the global reach of markets and supply chains, and above all the establishment of capitalism and the intensification of competition on a genuinely global scale. This chapter reconstructs the theory of world history that underpins it, and shows how it provides an understanding and a critique of contemporary global politics and governance. As it addresses the original Marxist approach to world history, it takes no account of later work in the Marxist tradition (on which see Chapter 12). I have kept the use of Marxist terminology to a minimum, but there is no escaping the fact that a willingness to engage with the conceptual framework developed by Marx and Engels is essential in their approach is to be understood. 2 The first section below therefore outlines the method of historical materialism, which distinguishes classical Marxism from constructivism, liberalism and realism. It shows how Marx and Engels employed it in practice to identify the specific forces driving change in world history. Put simply, they thought that the advent of modern industry changed the world, both because it created a society of two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, with opposed interests, and because it obliged all countries, as they were drawn into the world market, to pursue industrialization themselves. Foreign trade was important because it was the main mechanism through which local industry was forced to modernise and compete, but reforms to establish the power of capital over labour and to create a modern working class were just as significant. The section concludes by discussing the implications for the contemporary world, in which the pressure to be competitive in the global market has become universal. The following section then turns directly to contemporary global governance, and argues that the international organizations involved in global economic governance – the Bretton Woods institutions and others – are primarily involved in promoting the spread of capitalism, or global competitiveness. I show here that, in line with the classical Marxist perspective, they are just as interested in the creation of a modern working class as they are in the promotion of trade and global markets. The conclusion pinpoints the distinctiveness and particular strength of the classical Marxist approach. Historical materialism The approach that is the focus here was developed by Marx and Engels over two decades or so from the early- to mid-1840s. The first full version came not in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, but in the Critique of the German Ideology, composed in 1845-46; the underlying materialist theory of history was summarised in the Preface and developed further in the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1857-8], and 3 further related material is scattered through Marx’s voluminous notebooks from the same years, eventually published as the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy or Grundrisse (1973), and in the first volume of Capital [1867]. Its intended structure (never realized in full) is set out in Marx’s statement at the beginning of the Preface: “I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market”.2 Underpinning this was what Marx described as the “guiding principle” of his studies: “In the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production”.3 The lines immediately following state the implications for institutions and ideas: The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. The “real foundation” of society, then, is the set of social relations arising from the way in which the material necessities of life are produced. This approach is materialist, in its insistence on the centrality of the “mode of production of material life”; this differentiates it from the constructivist approach outlined by Hall (Chapter ), with its starting point in “changing human conventions”, as a classical Marxist would seek to relate such changes to prior changes in underlying material circumstances. At the same time, it does not derive institutional change mechanically from the “economic structure of society”. As Marx and Engels note, observation “must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without 4 any mystification or speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production”,4 not least because in a society of classes in continuous struggle with each other, outcomes are always uncertain. Institutions and ideas, as Marx and Engels strikingly put it, themselves have “no history, no development”, because “men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking”,5 but they still matter, as class conflict is the driving force in history, and these are the “ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”.6 All this must be borne in mind when assessing the account that Marx and Engels give of the process of historical change, and the roles played in it by the state, foreign trade, and the world market. In the Preface, the macro-historical claim is made that successive “epochs marking progress in the economic development of society” come about as the material productive forces of one epoch come into conflict with the existing social structure, or the relations of production, giving rise to an era of social revolution, and “sooner or later to the transformation of the whole [legal and political] superstructure”.7 They concluded that the polarization of conflict in the “modern bourgeois mode of production” between the minority bourgeoisie and the majority proletariat would create the conditions for the overthrow of capitalism and the institution of a communist society in which private property was abolished – but also that this would only happen, if at all, after the bourgeois social order had developed “all the productive forces for which it [was] sufficient”.8 The significance of this is that even if this is taken as an unqualified prediction (it certainly should not be), it is still too early to say whether it is right or wrong, and speculative even to try. In order to grasp the relevance of classical Marxism today, we do better to focus on what Marx and Engels had to say about the development of capitalism, or the modern bourgeois mode of production, as it was coming into being when they wrote, and is continuing and reaching maturity only in the present day.