Chapter 2: Marxism & Neo-Marxism
(F) Day of the week: Monday Class: IS310 Created Time: April 19, 2021 1:23 PM Database: Class Notes Database Date: April 19, 2021 1:23 PM Days Till Date: Passed Last Edited Time: October 14, 2021 8:13 PM Status: Done Tags: (PROCESSED)
Different Perceptions on Marxism
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Marxism had been a foil for the argument: IRs have long revolved around competitions and conflicts between political communities and will do so in the future
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Realists: Marxism is “second-image” account of IRs, which believed the rise of socialist as opposed to capitalist regimes would eliminate conflicts between states. Its utopianism will be defeated by the “third-image” analysis: the struggle for power and security as an inescapable consequence of international anarchy {#a65ca8}
- Due to the cold war: realism says Marxism is irrelevant
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English School: Marxism-Leninism too preoccupied with the economic aspects of human affairs to be considered as a contribution to the academic study of international politics.
Marxism underestimated the importance for the structures of world politics in:
- nationalism
- state & war
- significance of balance of power
- international law & diplomacy
New Interpretations from the 1980s
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Marxism as an important weapon in the critique of Realism
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Marxism contributed to critical theories in IRs and IPE
(interplay between states & markets, the state system, the capitalist world economy, the spheres of power and production)
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Arguments against “collapse of Soviet Union killed Marxism”
- End of Cold War: relevance of Marxism increased with the passing of age of bipolarity & the new phase of economic globalization (neo-liberalism)
- Marxist ideas are still relevant because great inequality between North and South nations due to economic globalization. The problems only got worse.
- Neo-Marxist Analysis of Marx’s biography shows Capitalism broke down Chinese Walls and unifies the human race
- Marx’s ideas came true
- End of Cold War: relevance of Marxism increased with the passing of age of bipolarity & the new phase of economic globalization (neo-liberalism)
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9/11 showed that Marxism has little grip on the most fundamental realities of international politics
- Marxism assume the triumph of capitalism would be short-lived and would eventually lead to destruction and replacement by Communism
- Marxism has poor grasp of the importance of the nation-state and violence in the modern world, a point that Marxists conceded in the 1970s and 1980s
- Modern forms of globalization have been accompanied by renewed ethnic violence and national fragmentation, which Marx and Engels, insightful though they were about the march of capitalist globalization and growing economic inequalities, could NOT have foreseen.
Marxism’s Perspectives of Class, Production & IRs
Capitalism’s Impacts on Society
- Alienating & exploitative characters of industrial capitalism → Vision: democratization of labor forces
- Essence of capitalism:
- to ‘strive to tear down every barrier to intercourse’
- to ‘conquer the whole earth for its market’
- to annihilate the tyranny of distance by reducing ‘to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another’
- Tension between centrifugal & centripetal forces in capitalist societies
- Working class people doesn’t care about nationalism when trying to make a nation of all races (cosmopolitan)
Marxism Asperations
- an end to alienation, exploitation, and estrangement
- to understand the laws of capitalism
- to understand movement of human history
- Unification of the human race
- Marxists only believe socialism is good when its adopted globally
- Want to train and spread socialists studies
How G.W.F. Hegel neglected Karl Marx’s ideas?
Hegel neglected historical import of forces of production (Tech.) & relations of production (Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat) in creating the diverse types of self-consciousness.
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Hegel: many forms of religious, philosophical, artistic, historical and political thinking – the diverse types of self-consciousness – which the human race had passed through in its long journey of coming to know itself. (ideas)
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Marx: religious belief was not an intellectual error which had to be corrected by philosophical analysis but an expression of the frustrations and aspirations of people struggling with the material conditions of everyday life
Religion:
- “Opium of the Masses”
- “sigh of an oppressed creature”
- Critique of heaven → critique of the earth
What is the Marxist Structural Theory?
To Karl Marx , institutions and structural theories was only a device that kept capitalist in power and exploited the workers.
- Police and court protect capitalist property
- Make people not recognize their own rights or best interest
- give illusion of democracy
But capitalist are not to be blamed for their exploitation of workers, the political structure and institutions around them is what make them act in exploitative ways.
Questions
Why is it called Marxist-Leninism?
Lenin is the one who revised traditional Marx idea and published adding new ideas in the red book
A counter argument against “The end of the Cold War killed Marxism” is that: Marx’s argument that ‘Capitalism broke down Chinese walls and unified the human race’ came true. But how is that an argument for Marxism?