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Beyond Immanence:
History and Materialism in IR Marxism
Abstract: This paper critiques IR Marxisms mode of historical thinking. Against
entrapment by Realist stasis and repetition, Marxism has typically insisted on a
dynamic, developmental understanding of history, tracing long-term patterns of
causality and change, as historical sociology. It is argued that this is a
simplification of the complex, contradictory thematics of Marxs philosophy of
history, and that the validity of such an immanent and future-orientated conception
of historical thought is assumed rather than theoretically justified in Marxist IR.
This conception is shown to derive ultimately from Marxisms belief that its
revolutionary subject would become the subject of history, fulfilling from within
historys developmental trajectory. In this, despite its claims to materialism,
Marxism remained deeply tied to a bourgeois-idealist notion of universal history,
and this continues to mark IR Marxism. Further, the collapse of Marxism as a
political force means that the immanent idea of history, which derived its
justification as radical theory from a postulated revolutionary subject to be
produced by the historical process, has become problematic. Thus the logic of IR
Marxisms characteristic manner of historical thought has been undermined and the
paper concludes by calling for a rethinking of what a materialist history through
Marx might now be.
--------------------------
Introduction
History is internal to Marxs thought. This is so in the straightforward sense that,
like any substantial authorship, it is marked in multiple ways by the social and historical
circumstances of its origins, in this case the high liberal epoch of the mid-19 thcentury. But
it is also true in a deeper way, in that, as the attempt to understand the laws of movement
of society, the theorys own meaning and emphases must change as its object, society,
itself changes. In this second sense, history exists within the theorys innermost elements;
they are not immune to time. Thought that would draw upon Marx may thus not rest upon
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received verities but must rather continually measure itself against what it seeks to
understand, the contemporaneity of society. It must, as it were, periodically tap upon itself
to determine whether it still has substance, or whether time has made it hollow. 1If this is a
principle of interpretation, then it has to be asked: what has history done to Marx, and to
the tradition of thought and practice that claimed his name? Evidently, a substantial part of
the answer must be: enormous damage. What characterises the current situation seems to
be a final and complete scrambling of almost every aspect of the historical narrative that
Marxism had constructed for itself and imagined it could rely on. To mention only the
most obvious: the unopposed triumph of global capital; the continual subjection of welfare
states to market imperatives; extraordinary development of the forces of production
without any effect on the relations of production; the incorporation of the Second and
Third Worlds without either successful anti-imperialist revolution or global inter-
imperialist war; the integration of a huge part of the worlds non-Western population into
the global working class without the formation of class consciousness (let alone
revolutionary class consciousness); global financial breakdown without class revolt or
even the remotest prospect of destabilisation of the capitalist order as such; the total
extinguishing of any alternative within the political space, which has contracted to
unidimensionality;2and, above all, the seemingly unstoppable expansion, beyond all
comprehension, of an entirely irrational and uncontrollable economy that enslaves
humanity as a whole. Everything that once thought it was historically beyond capital has
been swallowed whole. Doubtless, the development of Marxism in the last third of the 19th
century was itself testimony to the already declining historical momentum of bourgeois
society, and the failure of the radical challenger starkly reveals the contradictory
temporality of capital triumphans. So, while society blindly commits itself to the headlong
stampede of bewildering technological development, this is accompanied by the deeper,
pervasive sensation of historical exhaustion: the energies unleashed in the social field long
ago in the age of the creation of capitalist society, its heroic, revolutionary period, have
1Jacques Derrida asks in relation to Marx and Engelss anticipation of their own possible aging and their
intrinsically irreducible historicity: What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit
fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses? Not only in view of some
progressive enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order of a system but so as to take
into account there, another account, the effect of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in
advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques and
new political givens? (Derrida 1994, pp.1314).2
Such that protest, when it does periodically coalesce, can only express itself through the suggestive but asyet inchoate longing for another world altogether, recognising, at least implicitly, that any change that stays
within the logic of the existing order is impossible.
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long run their course. All that is conceivable now is regulation of the existing, permanent,
order: realism, in the absence of any alternative.
In Marxist commentary, this historical fate is often registered soberly as epochal
defeat, but without that of necessity calling into question the narrative of contest between
left and right. The struggle goes on, albeit in reduced circumstances.3However, the extent
of the defeat of the radical left, the dismissal of so much that it once held dear, raises the
suspicion that defeat is itself the wrong word already too favourable. It grants too much
and thereby misleads. Who now imagines that the Paris Commune, the October
Revolution, May 68, form an immanent historical counter-narrative, markers of an
insurrectionary tradition and harbingers of a revolution that will one day explode capitalist
society from within? They are not just in the past they belong to another, vanished, age.
What was once thought to be their meaning cannot any more be taken as such: instead of
bursting the bounds of history, leading out into the liberated future, they have been
subsumed and neutralised, rendered harmless. They no longer speak to us. Critical
thought, looking in retrospect, is thus left to wonder whether it was not a sort of delusion
to have supposed that there was ever really a contest in the first place, at least in the sense
in which Marx expected from his mid-19th-century standpoint, a struggle over the
fundamental nature of society. Was the rhetoric of left against right, progress against
reaction, not always in fact deceptive appearance, which served to obscure the reality of
the single, relentless trajectory of the expansion of capital? As bourgeois thought long ago
recognised, conflict is the phenomenal medium through which the development of the
universal takes place, and is immanent to it.4At the end, when it is no longer possible to
believe in the old assumptions about opposition and struggle, 5 the recognition is
ineluctable that even the apparent setbacks and challenges that capital has endured during
its history were only so many parentheses or punctuation marks within the overarching
narrative of the development of the all-encompassing world market.
3See, for instance, Perry Andersons editorial statement on the relaunch of New Left Review (Anderson
2000).4Kant 1991, esp. the Fourth Proposition.
5The extent of this pacification and the importance of taking its full measure in rethinking the possibility of
opposition, breaking with outmoded forms, has been forcefully articulated by T.J. Clark: How are we to
understand the arrival of real ruination in the order of global finance and the almost complete failure of
left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful? Or to put the question another way: if thepast decade is not proof that there are nocircumstances capable of reviving the left in its nineteenth and
twentieth-century form, then what would proof be like? (Clark 2012, pp.545. Emphasis in original).
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because history is taken by it to be the scene in which subjectivity, agency and practice are
validated and justified: to insist upon the historical, the immanence of the process of
history, is to bring the transcendent down to earth and to introduce time into the timeless.
In this way, history serves a more than strictly social scientific purpose: it acts as a
category of freedom. To appeal to history is to break open static, reified structures,
demonstrating their historical becoming and their origin in the in-principle open creative
capacities of human practice. However, actual history has produced the opposite of
freedom. What, then, is the consequence for theory of the eclipse of so much of what
constituted Marxism? This paper inquires into the logic of the understanding of history
typical of IR Marxism, what underlies its equation between history and freedom, and
considers the effect that the failure of history to fulfil the Marxist teleology has on
Marxisms use of history, and on the temporality of Marx. It argues that the failure of the
Marxist political/revolutionary programme entails not merely the rethinking of Marxisms
narrative of modern history but that it brings into question its idea of historical thought.
The category of history itself needs to be reconsidered.
History and theory in Marx
We know only a single science, the science of history.6While a turn to history
was central to Marxs attempted break with the legacy of German Idealism, his interest
was never primarily historiographical, but remained a philosophical one. For Marx,
historical understanding was inseparable from the philosophy of history: the purpose of
thinking history was to try to comprehend its inner coherence and potential as the
progressive development of humanitys capacity for self-determination and rational
control of its own existence. What matters is not how it happened but what it means. For
all his rejection of philosophy, the problems of historys rationality and teleology are as
central to Marxs thought as they were to that of his Idealist forebears. He may have
rejected purely philosophical solutions, but like them he strove to construe history as an
intelligible totality. In this, and somewhat schematically put, there are two sides to Marxs
thinking about the structure of history. One is his theory of its dynamic, progressive
movement, the dialectic of the forces and relations of production: any societys productive
capacity develops within its established social relations to a point where the demands of
6Marx and Engels 1968, p.28
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furthering the practical and intellectual control of nature through productive activity come
into conflict with those social relations. At that point the organisation of society is
transformed in its basis in order to accommodate the imperatives of increasing the range
of the productive forces. This schema, as a logic of change, posits a directional trajectory
of social development, designed to explain the inner movement of history as the evolution
of societys capacity to reproduce itself. It is central to the doctrine of historical
materialism and is classically set out by Marx in the Feuerbach section of the German
Ideology, as well as supplying the argumentative structure of the Communist Manifesto.
This idea of the dynamic of history is also what sustained Marxs belief that the
communism would necessarily succeed bourgeois society because the contradictory nature
of bourgeois relations of production made them inadequate to the continued increase of
the already massively expanded forces of production. As such, it was fundamental to
Marxism.
That is one side of Marxs thinking of history, a progressive, directional
conception. The other side is the critique of history as a system of oppression and
entrapment. Accepting the legacy of Idealism at the same time as he broke with it, Marxs
thinking of history is intent on the fundamental question that motivated Idealist thought as
a whole, and certainly its thinking of history, that of freedom.7To think history meant to
think the possibility of a free, rational, self-aware social existence or to attempt to
comprehend why that possibility has been blocked. Marx both sustains and develops the
motif of freedom and attempts to wrestle it free from the restrictions of Idealism. So,
where the Idealists strove to construe bourgeois society as itself the realisation of freedom
in history, Marx unhesitatingly condemns it as just the latest episode in the age-old,
perennial story of domination. The perception that the history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles 8reconfigures the progressive philosophy of
history: the present, the world of capital, remains chained to the past and all progress
hitherto achieved has an illusory quality because all progress has only taken place within
and continually reproduced antagonistic, self-divided society. As such, persistently in
Marxs imagination history expresses a sort of false temporality, what Derrida
summarised as Marxs theme of times being out of joint, its non-contemporaneity with
7Adorno observed that, even before any substantive content, the concept of history, as opposed to myth,
already in itself implies freedom (Adorno 2006, p.271). To that extent, the question of freedom could be saidto be the basic problem of historical thought.8Marx and Engels 2002, p.219.
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itself.9So, in the text entitled Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right. Introduction, not
only is 1840s Germany historically behind France and England the present German
regime declared an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally accepted
axioms, the futility of the ancien rgime displayed for all the world to see10 but the
advanced countries themselves, in the vanguard of history, cannot fully liberate
themselves from the insistent presence within their modernity of their squalid, oppressive
past. Geopolitical conflict is also a conflict waged against the past in the name of the
future: The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of
modern nations, which continue to be harassed by reminiscences of this past. 11 In the
Manifesto, a document obsessed by the disjointedness of time, Marx declares that in
bourgeois society the past dominates the present.12The post-Napoleonic restoration
illegitimately stalled the temporality of modernity, the continent held in thrall to its own
past and a ban placed upon the future, as all the old powers of Europe have entered into a
holy alliance to exorcize this spectre [of communism].13But, the revolutions of 1848
failed to bring the decisive movement into the future that would set time to rights, and
Marx was left to reflect on the agonised, contorted form of historical time, in which
history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, the second as farce,14and the new, the form of
revolutionary transformations, only comes into existence as a mimetic iteration of the old,
timidly conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past 15 in a process of world-historical
necromancy.16Throughout, to understand history is not primarily a matter of causation
and narrative reconstruction, but a philosophical problem of emancipation, liberation from
the burden of the past. History, all the old filthy business17of self-preservation through
conflict and domination, remains always the nightmare18weighing on the minds of the
living, from which humanity longs to awaken. Its continuity, its logic of causation, is the
continuity of domination, repeated from generation to generation,19creating a continuum
of power, mastery and exploitation.
9Derrida 1994, Ch.1
10Marx 1992, p.247.
11ibid.
12Marx and Engels 2002, p.237.
13ibid., p.218.
14Marx 1973, p.146.
15ibid.
16ibid., p.147.
17Marx and Engels 1968, p.47.
18
Marx 1973, p.146.19Hitherto, every form of society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed
classes (Marx and Engels 2002, pp.2323).
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These two perceptions of history, progress and stasis, exist alongside each other in
Marx in an unresolved way. Rather than their being theoretically mediated through an
exploration of the contradictory temporality of history, at their point of intersection, the
vanishing point, Marx places the figure of the proletariat and the idea of communism.
They are his solution to the riddle of history. It is through the revolutionary activity of the
proletariat that the contradictory dialectic of history is to be resolved, by means of a sort
of practical coup de main against theory. As the medium through which the liberation of
the forces of production from the constrictions of antagonistic society is brought about, the
proletariat represents the triumph of the immanent linear, developmental movement of
history the absolutisation of what Adorno termed Marxs metaphysics of the forces of
production.20The resolution of times disjointedness, its finally being set to right, is to be
achieved when the dynamic side of the dialectic of historical time trumps the static, and
the breakthrough is attained.
Marxism against Realism
Something of this intention of escape has always been evident in IR Marxism in its
response to Realism. It may be because of its particular understanding of history, and the
challenge it poses to traditional Marxist thought, that Realism, rather than liberalism, has
generally been Marxisms principal target of attack in IR. Realisms denial of substantive
historical change has always offended the progressive, dynamic side of Marxism. From
Morgenthaus six principles of political realism, 21 through Waltzs structural
reformulation22and on to Mearsheimers statement of Realisms five assumptions about
the international system,23Realism sets inviolable boundaries to the possibilities of
international existence, permanently circumscribing the limits of political experience.
Anarchy and its attendant dynamics of conflict and equilibrium are effectively
insurmountable. Humanitys political existence at the highest level, the international,
remains always beyond its capacity for rational control and order. Whatever degree of
freedom may be attained within a particular, delimited political entity, the whole is always
20Adorno 2008, p.96.
21
Morgenthau 2006, pp.416.22Waltz 1979.
23Mearsheimer 19945, p.10.
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unfree. As a result, history in Realism, as has often been observed, and not just by
Marxism, becomes essentially null and void: the present is always the same as the past and
the future likewise, hence the familiar statements about repetition and recurrence. Change
in the international arena is only ever superficial and insubstantial, altering nothing of real
significance. Thus when Realism considers history, what it so often sees are identities
between the past and the present:
One who reads the apocryphal book of the First Maccabees with events in and after
World War 1 in mind will gain a sense of the continuity that characterises
international politics. Arabs and Jews fought among themselves and over theresidues of northern empire, while states outside of the arena warily watched or
actively intervened. To illustrate the point more generally, one may cite the famouscase of Hobbes experiencing the contemporaneity of Thucydides.24
The present is unable to break itself free from the constraints of the past. It is continually
inhabited by the archaic, which insistently reasserts itself through all social and historical
change: the newest is always also the oldest. In this sense, Realism refuses the
unidirectionality of linear time. Instead, what characterises the time of the international in
the Realist imaginary is the continual recurrence of the eversame.
Marxism in IR wants to protest this. It wants to rescue the possibility of something
really new, something different. Where Realism, in its negation of historical change at the
level of the international, denies the meaningfulness of human social practice, rendering it
shadowy and substanceless, Marxism has desired above all to represent practice, and
therefore history, as a scene of dynamic change and potential liberation. It recognises the
threat Realism poses to the possibility of freedom, the deepest impulse of Marxian
thought: that if Realism cannot be disproved, Marxism in IR is rendered impotent as
radical theory because its most precious ambition is foreclosed. So, Marxism wants toshow that history is not a rigid objective structure of endlessly repeating laws but is rather
fluid and unpredictable, continually made and remade through the actual practice of social
struggles. It takes as its text Marx and Engelss famous nominalist credo from The Holy
Family: Historydoes nothing, it possesses noimmense wealth, it wages nobattles. It
is man, real living man, that does all that, that possesses and fights; history is not a
person apart, using man as a means for its ownparticular aims; history is nothing butthe
24Waltz 1979, pp.667.
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activity of man pursuing his aims.25IR Marxisms strategy for countering the Realist
threat is therefore to appeal to history as a perpetually unfolding process created by actual
subjects. If the past can be shown to be different from the present, then the future may, at
least in principle, be different again. The closed structure may be forced open, the human
subject have its self-creative dignity restored and change reinstated as a live potential. In
this way, the banner of history has always been the standard under which IR Marxism has
waged its struggle against Realism.
Thus Robert Cox famously condemned Realism as problem-solving theory,26
inherently conservative, seeking only to manage the existing order, not to transform it.
Critical theory, intent upon far-reaching social change, must seek to break the embalming
of the present by rediscovering the movement of history and the human agency that
produces it. Eschewing structuralist, Althusserian Marxism, which shares some of the
features of the neorealist problem-solving approach,27Cox promoted a Marxism which
reasons historically and seeks to explain, as well as to promote, changes in social
relations.28For Justin Rosenberg, in his early work, Realisms twin focuses on anarchy
and the state as national territorial totality29obscure the social processes that produce the
characteristic dynamics of international relations in any given epoch:
If we displace for a moment the realist concern with anarchy, we see that the history
of the states-system has a live political content and it is apparent that to
understand the realm of the political we need a conception of human agency as a
dispersed property of human societies which state organizations will always attempt
to mobilize, but which is never reducible to state policy.30
In direct opposition to Realist ahistoricism, Rosenberg proposes what, in Robert
Keohanes terms,31might be designated a Marxist research programme, a prospectus for
an alternative history of the international system,32seeking to recover for IR the immense
historical upheavals imperial expansion, migrations, revolutions and world wars
associated with the global development of capitalist society, the actual social and
25Marx and Engels 1956, p.125 (emphases in original).
26Cox 1981, p.128 (emphasis in original).
27ibid., p.133.
28ibid.
29Rosenberg 1994, p.36. The phrase is Fred Hallidays (Halliday 1987, p.217).
30
Rosenberg 1994, p.37.31Keohane 1998.
32Rosenberg 1994, Ch.6.
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historical content of the abstracted anarchy of the modern states system and its form of
sovereignty. Coxs and Rosenbergs works were important early Marxist contributions to
what Benno Teschke identifies more generally as the historical turn in IR 33 the
investigation of the origins and history of the modern states system in response to
contemporary debates about globalisation and the supersession or attenuation of state
sovereignty. Teschke specifically characterises this as a progressive movement within the
discipline away from Waltzian neo-Realism,34under whose captivating spell history turns
into a non-problem,35and away from grand, teleological abstractions from the historical
process, towards theory that emphasises the priority of historical particularity and the
differential outcomes of localised struggles. From this radically historicist perspective, the
sin of Waltzian theory, in particular, is that its reliance on the twin premises of anarchy
and variations of capability among the units makes it effectively useless for purposes of
historical causal explanation: Waltzs structuralist model with the exception of the
persistence of anarchy itself is completely indeterminate in its predictive and
retrospective, that is, historically explanatory, capacities.36Like Cox, but even more so,
Teschke is hostile to any manifestations of abstract, structuralist rationalism,37as straying
too far from the vital energies of the actual historical material and the in-principle open
and alive potentialities of human praxis. The reliance on Robert Brenners theory of
social property relations is intended to emphasise this openness, explaining the historical
process as the product of the variable and unpredictable outcomes of localised social
struggles.
History is thus the central category in IR Marxisms claim to be radical,
oppositional theory. It is the medium through which activity, change and freedom are
rediscovered as inalienable to human subjectivity and practice, and by which life and
meaning are returned to the agents of social contestation, freeing them from Realist
reification. The assumption is that history can always be turned to as an active field both
of contestation and struggle and of change and development, and so be irreducible to the
axioms or laws with which Realism would like to fence it round. However, if history is to
bear this weight of theoretical significance for IR Marxism, then the latters own mode of
33Teschke 2003, pp.12.
34ibid., Ch.1.
35
ibid., p.15.36ibid., pp.1415.
37Detecting it residually even in Rosenbergs otherwise path-breaking work (ibid., pp.3941).
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historical understanding deserves, even demands, investigation: any critical position must
surely be reflexive about its theoretical presuppositions. So, what does Marxist IR mean
by history? What is its mode of historical understanding? Strikingly, there is a lack of
theoretical reflection on these questions within IR Marxism. Of course, there is abundant
advocacy and discussion of different heuristics for social and historical analysis, from the
venerable classics of imperialism theory, through the historic bloc, passive revolution
and hegemony of the Neo-Gramscians and Political Marxisms theory of social
property relations, to the more general rubric of uneven and combined development.
Each of these, in their different ways, represents an attempt to organise the stuff of history,
identifying motivating dynamics. But none of them raises the deeper problems of what it
means to try to think the past at all, what experience of the past is understood in the term
history. What, instead, requires reflection is the form of an epochs comprehension of
the relationship of the past to the present; that is, the mediatedness of history, the
societal and historical content sedimented in the form of historical knowledge. By
contrast, what has been typical of IR Marxism has been the assumption of a particular
notion of what constitutes historical thought, and then debate about the merits of different
epistemological devices usable within that frame. In this sense, it has been blind, or at
least inattentive, to its own theoretical grounding.
That assumption, the notion of historical thought characteristic of Marxism in IR,
can be summarised under the term historical sociology.38 The guiding interest of this
type of enquiry into the past is to find certain patterns in history, asking are there long-
term structures that determine the character of events, and can these be the subject of
analysis?39The aim is to delineate the identity in the non-identity, to specify the structural
factors that give coherent, intelligible shape to the historical process. According to John
Hobson, the most important contribution to this project that International Relations
scholars can provide is the provision of an approach to global structures that allows for an
understanding of change and causality.40As a social science, historical sociologys
principle of knowledge is essentially causation: to identify the primary motivating forces
at work in the social field and then, by reference to these, to reconstruct the logic and
38 Some are more explicit in their self-positioning within historical sociology than others, but, generally
speaking, all the Marxist schools are in the same area to the extent that they are all primarily concerned with
developing theoretical constructs that enable the mapping of processes of historical causation.39Hobden 1998, p.37.
40ibid., p.196.
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sequencing of events as they occur in the flow of directional, linear time. The contingent
and quotidian are to be explained through the general, by being inserted into their place in
the context created by the deep, long-term structures of the historical process. In this way,
the matter of history is to be connected up and bound together into a whole and, ideally, a
continuous, encompassing narrative structure created.41IR Marxism, situating itself within
historical sociology, has shared this ambition for the thinking of history.42So, for Benno
Teschke, the principal fault of the geopolitical deficiency43of the Marxist tradition is that
it has led to a failure to account for the international dimension of historical development,
the causal importance of the inter-societal. As a result, to this day the tradition still stands
in need of devising a theoretical framework wide and open-ended enough to conceptualize
the nexus between social reproduction, power and inter-spatial relations across the entire
spectrum of human history.44 His own critique of the myth of 1648 is designed as a
comparative historical sociology committed to causal inquiry.45The focus, too, of
Justin Rosenbergs work is the causal role of interactive multiplicity in social
development,46and his on-going work on uneven and combined development is designed
to explicate the causal significance of the international for accounts of social and historical
development. Similarly, Adam David Morton argues for the contribution Gramscian ideas
can make to historical sociology in understanding the uneven development of the states
system and the international causal dimension of transitions to capitalist modernity.47
Everywhere in IR Marxism, the interest is in reconstructing the dynamics of the historical
process, from the grandest scale of human history as a whole right down to accounts of
individual historical events. This sort of historical thinking is the signature of Marxist
thought in IR, what, indeed, Marxism largely is in the discipline.48
41 A recent statement of the ambitions of historicist historical sociology in IR claims that it seeks out
general patterns of causation and development, while remaining sensitive to historical discontinuities and
rejecting transhistoricism (Hobson and Lawson 2008, p.429).42
Although, of course wanting to achieve it through the use of Marxist or historical materialist principles of
explanation, hence the perennial disputes between Weberian and Marxist historical sociologists (for the
latest round of which, see Lapointe and Dufour 2012), in which the assumptions about history that both
sides share are in fact much more significant than what divides them.43
Teschke 2008, p.184.44
ibid.45
Teschke 2003, pp.45 (emphases in original).46
Rosenberg 2008, p.28.47
Morton 2007, p.619.48So much so that, at one point, Justin Rosenberg goes almost so far as to identify Marxism with historical
sociology (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p.81).
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The history of history
If, for IR Marxism, it is through appeal to history that Realist reification and
ahistoricism are to be negated, self-reflexive theory would have to show how historical
sociology is to achieve that task. What underlies the assumption that it is the appropriate
form of Marxist historical thought, that it can fulfil the ambition of freedom? Again, what
is most striking is the absence of explicit consideration of this question. Without any great
degree of metatheoretical reflection, an immanent, linear-causal, reconstructive inquiry is
presumed to do sufficient justice to the question of what the meaning of Marx might be for
thinking history. There is, of course, again considerable discussion of what sorts of
broadly Marxist concepts can most profitably be used for the purposes of historical
sociology, but there is no questioning that a Marxist understanding of history ought to
have a historical-sociological form.49
The logic of this commitment seems to be that the
aim of Marxist history should be to produce more or less orthodox causal historiography
but to do so using distinctively Marxist thematics (class, exchange, revolution, and so
forth), to demonstrate that it is these categories, and historical materialism generally, that
most convincingly account for the dynamics of the historical process. History would thus
remain history in the ordinary sense, but alongside the mainstream there would a radical
history, in the form of Marxism. This is surely the assumption that lies behind much
Marxist writing about history, which is content to take the form of historical knowledge
and the temporal consciousness it implies as given and is primarily concerned to elaborate
a putatively Marxist content. However, this assumption that the form is neutral and it is
the content that is radical or conservative is more than questionable. History is not simply
history. Rather, the mode of objective, quasi-scientific knowledge about the past that
modern scholarship imagines to be authoritative and valid was itself the product of an
epochal social change, and is marked through and through by those historical origins:
history as form has its own history. So, on Constantin Fasolts account, history was
wielded as a powerful weapon in the early-modern destruction of the medieval order of
the world:
49What this reflects is the primacy of scientific over philosophical activity and the relegation of
philosophy to being a second-order discipline that Peter Osborne notes has always been characteristic ofMarxism since Marxs youthful polemics against the poverty of post-Hegelian philosophy (Osborne 1995,
p.32).
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History jumped on the scene of European mental life with the force of a revolution
against a specific form of governance. If it involved new knowledge about the past,
it did so not simply out of intellectual curiosity, but because a definite attitudetowards the past was integral to the rule of the two chief surviving representatives of
so-called medieval universalism, the Roman emperor and the Roman pope.50
Pope and Emperor claimed universality in space and in time. They insisted that they were
in communion with eternity, and both sought to embody the past as though it had endured
over the centuries without change.51Although they were well aware of the temporal
distance between themselves and antiquity, they understood it through different, pre-
modern conceptions of time, of the shape of history and of the relationship of past and
present, in which the present order derived its eternal legitimacy from its continuity with
the past. What Fasolt terms the historical revolt was part of the early-modern revolutionagainst this form of time consciousness and the authority and social order through which it
was constituted, a revolution that happened simultaneously across many fields and that
marks the break between the old medieval ordo and the new world of modernity. The
measure of the success of the historical revolt was that it imposed a new periodization on
history,52a new understanding of the shape of time and of the historical process.
Sweeping away as illusory the variety of temporal and historical schemas in use in Europe
before modernity, the new historical consciousness naturalised as self-evident a single
temporal span stretching from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, to the modern world.
And once [the humanists] succeeded in destroying the unity of the period, it did not take
long before expectations of the end of the world gave way to an unbounded future
extending without limits to all eternity53 the infinite, homogenous, abstract continuum
of Newtonian absolute time.54At the same time as history was opened up to new
categories of knowledge and new conceptions of evidence and validity, it was also, in a
sense, closed down, in that the old relationship between time and eternity was done away
with and replaced by a single linear plane of time, an entirely immanent and quantitative
conception that could seemingly encompass all time, so that no qualitative difference
could rupture the time continuum. The world and all of history could be subsumed to this
new temporal form.
50Fasolt 2004, pp.1617.
51ibid., p.17.
52
ibid., p.18.53ibid., p.19.
54On the centrality of absolute time to modern historiography, see Wilcox 1987.
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The creation of modern historical consciousness was, so Fasolt argues, neither
natural, the replacement of falsehood by truth, nor the result of an advance in disinterested
scholarly enquiry. It was the product of the overthrow of one form of social order and its
replacement by another. In this sense, before all content, history is in and of itself
political.55 It acted both as a force of destruction and a force of liberation. By finally
breaking the medieval sense of the implication of past and present, the historical revolt
definitively relegated the past to the past, as what is gone and immutable, creating the
modern sense of anachronism. This new distinction between past and present
undergirds history as a whole;56as such, it deserves to be called the founding principle of
history.57 This reformulated division between past and present not only neutralises the
past and makes it available as the object of study it also frees the present, which, by
virtue of the same distinction, is that which the past is not: it is right here and now (not
gone) and it can change (not immutable).58Once the authority of the past over the present
is removed, the present and the future are opened as fields of potentiality and opportunity
in which it is possible for the subject, released from the constraints of tradition, to fashion
its own existence. Present and future lie on the same side of the great divide between the
present and the past. They belong together like freedom and changeability. They are
united in opposition to the past.59This new understanding of the relationship between past
and present was integral to the coming into being of a new conception of freedom, for the
self and for society. Only through being freed from the restrictions that the authority of the
past once imposed could the new form of sovereign power come into being. Sovereignty
is thus temporal as well as spatial: freedom in space (and limits on its territorial extent) is
merely one characteristic of sovereignty. Freedom in time (and limits on its temporal
extent) is equally important and probably more fundamental.60Modern sovereignty and
its associated form of subjectivity asserted themselves through a self-proclaimed liberation
from the restrictions of the past, for no state could be sovereign if its inhabitants lacked
the ability to change a course of action adopted by their forefathers in the past. No
citizen could be a full member of the community so long as she was tied to ancestral
55 Fasolt 2004, p.xix. Political is arguably too narrow a term here; what Fasolt outlines is the intrinsic
connection between the new social form and the new temporal and historical consciousness. On the
intertwinement of the development of historical consciousness and the political and social struggles of early-
modern Europe, see also Davis 2008.56
ibid., p.6.57
ibid.58
ibid.59ibid.
60ibid., p.7.
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traditions with the community might wish to break.61The temporal border between past
and present is a marker of sovereign power and of the freedom and autonomy of the new
political subject that was produced by the dividing line that was inscribed between past
and present:
This individual subject, with his presence, his autonomy, his freedom from all laws
except laws of conscience, laws of nature, and positive laws sanctioned by the
unconstrained expression of his own free will, with his ability to transcend all
circumstantial limitations this subject is the cause that history serves.62
This subject, the subject of what history had come to mean, is the bourgeois subject.
Although Fasolt himself does not use these terms, the transition he is concerned with from
medieval to modern is the movement form the feudal world to the capitalist one, from asocial form still largely based upon personal relations to one everywhere mediated by
exchange, from a world that was still to a degree qualitative to one that is everywhere
ruled by objectified, quantitative equivalence. History, he declares, is directly and
systematically linked to citizenship, sovereignty, and the state.63That is, history as form,
as the mode of understanding the past and the relation of past to present, is inseparable
from bourgeois, liberal-capitalist forms of social authority and validity. The historical
revolt was the revolution of these new forms of bourgeois social being against the
medieval order; the freedom that it proclaimed expressed the idea of freedom cherished by
the new bourgeois citizen of a clearly bounded sovereign state: If history is the form in
which we contemplate a past that is immutably divided from the present, then citizenship,
sovereignty, and the state are the categories by which we declare our freedom to change
the present into the form that we desire for the future. 64 What Fasolt describes is the
historical sociology of history as a form of knowledge, the inalienable connection of what
is now taken for granted as simply history with a specific social transformation and with
the structure of power that established itself in the early-modern period. History so
understood is inseparable from this social form. It expresses it in its very being: History
and politics reinforce each other.65
61ibid.
62ibid., p.9.
63ibid., p.7.
64ibid. Put in Kantian terms, this new temporal understanding released time from its restricted scholastic
concept into its universal world concept, a universality achieved by means of the inscription of preciseboundaries and limits.65
ibid.
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Closing the horizon
The historical revolt reconfigured the shape of time, producing modern temporal
and historical consciousness. This new, bourgeois understanding of history banished
transcendence, relocating authority inside, into the self-grounding, autonomous, sovereign
subject, and the metaphysics of this now entirely immanent, developmental conception
were given their fullest articulation in Hegelian universal history, as the progress of Spirit
towards absolute knowledge. Not only did classical Marxism unquestioningly adopt
modernitys idea of historical understanding but it also claimed universal history for itself,
attempting to appropriate the Hegelian notion and fill it with a revolutionary content. In
this construction, communism was supposed to grow more or less necessarily out of
capitalism, the proletariat supplanting the bourgeoisie as the development of the forces of
production impelled a change in the relations of production: capital produces its own
gravediggers and class society sublates itself. The revolution thus both transforms history
and is, equally, within it, of a piece with it: the decisive change evolves out of history by
the latters own momentum, the logical final step as the irresistibly developing forces of
production at last throw off the restrictions of class society. This peculiar structure of the
revolutionary vision simultaneously inside and outside its historical setting, the process
of immanence begetting its own transcendence is bound up with the complex nature of
Marxs purported break with Idealism. In the 1840s, German society, so Marx thought,
was trapped in the past by its infatuation with Idealist mysticism and it was to dispel
such intoxicating reveries that he turned to the analysis of actual social categories,
ultimately those of political economy. Yet even in doing so, Marx stayed true to the
Hegelian dialectic, which was to be wrested from the camp of reaction and won over to
the revolutionary cause.66Hegel would be stood back on his feet: the rational kernel of the
dialectic of Absolute Idealism made evident through explication of the workings of the
societal process of production. This materialist dialectic intends to set the Idealist one the
right way up, bringing out explicitly the historical process of objectification through social
labour that is cloaked in the movement of Spirit in Hegels philosophy. The motor of the
dialectic is revealed to be the movement of antagonistic society rather than the self-
66
Thus Marxs famous comment in the Preface to the second edition of volume 1 of Capital that in its
mystified form, the dialectic seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists but in its rational form it is a
scandal because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, andtherefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything,
being in its very essence critical and revolutionary (Marx 1990, p.103).
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actualisation of the Concept, the Absolute Idea to be the latest form of class exploitation,
but there remains a trust in the efficacy of the historical process, that the necessary motion
of the dialectic will itself produce its sublation. The culmination of the immanent
movement of history is to be not bourgeois society but the communist one. In essence,
then, the Marxian conception remains within the internal, developmental logic of the
historical process, which the proletarian revolution is to crown.
Though it has long since become unfashionable, something of an embarrassment
even among Marxists, this conception profoundly shaped the form of social and historical
analysis typical of Marxism. Confident in the possibility of revolutionary political action,
and in the agency of organised Labour as the subject of history, the characteristic idea of
Marxist political thought was that analysis should identify the various forces active in the
social field at any particular time and, if it was acute enough, specify the opportunity that
opens for concerted intervention: to recognise both the tendency and the critical moment,
and to strike. By an act of spontaneity, the revolutionary movement inserts itself at the
decisive moment into the societal sequence of cause and effect and seizes power. The
unfolding historical process was thus assumed to be susceptible of transformation, indeed
to demand it by its own logic. The movement of society was on the side of the revolution
and causal analysis of the social field drew its validity from this telos. This may indeed
have seemed plausible in Marxs mid-19thcentury context, when society was much more
fluid, open and transparent in its structure and relations than it was to become: when the
working class was still not integrated into society proper; when, even in an advanced
country such as France, the structure of society was sufficiently pliable that it still made
sense, in fact was at the forefront of critical insight, to analyse politics, in the manner of
The Eighteenth Brumaire, in terms of Bonapartism, class fractions and so on; when it
seemed a reality to be able to change the world by taking to the streets and erecting
barricades; and, above all, when the revolution appeared imminent and all theory and
practice were to be devoted to that prospect. But history gave the lie to Marxs confidence
in the historical process and the movement of the universal the belief in the revolution.
From about the decade of Marxs death, the integration of society in the advanced
countries accelerated such that by the early 20th
century the socialist parties had
succumbed to reformism as the more plausible hope for their cause and the ambition of
revolution had migrated to the Russian semi-periphery where the old order was crumbling
without the new having yet come into being and the opportunity of fundamental change
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appeared to offer itself. Revolution in this backward context required a considerably more
developed awareness of the international situation than had ever seemed necessary to
Marx, who expected the breakthrough to take place in the powerful metropolitan centres
hence the development of the theory of imperialism, which, with its analysis in terms of
epoch and conjuncture, continued to have a transformational ambition, being intended to
inform and guide revolutionary practice. Through the second half of the 20th century,
however, as capitalist society became ever more deeply entrenched and consolidated,
actually existing socialism a despotism confined and integrated into the world system, and
the meaning of revolutionary political action vanishingly obscure, the traditional form of
causal analysis was retained but its substance progressively drained away. So, the surveys
of the contemporary scene to be found in Marxist journals, precise and perceptive though
they often are, increasingly constitute not much more than dismal and exhausted tracings
out of the inexorable advances of capitalism and its accompanying depredations. The
Marxist idea of social transformation having lost its validity, they tend towards ordinary
historical narrative, merely with a long-suffering, oppositional tone: abstract negation. The
result is the crisis of meaning of this sort of Marxist thinking as radical theory.
At the centre of that crisis sits the question of historical time. Marxisms
appropriations of bourgeois history and of Hegelian universal history entirely relied for
their plausibility on the assumption that a revolutionary subject could become the subject
of history thus understood. If radically bourgeois ideas of time and history were to be
made to do radically unbourgeois work, it had to be possible for them to be grasped by a
radical subject. Marxism always trusted that that could be so. However, the historical fate
of practical Marxism disqualifies that assumption because it is precisely this side of
Marxism that has had the most damage done to it by history. After 150 years, it is evident
that capital does not produce its own gravediggers and that the development of societys
productive capacity does not necessarily lead to a revolution in its relations of production.
The belief in the transformation of society and history from within can no longer be
maintained. Rather, what history itself has demonstrated is that only the bourgeois subject
can be the subject of bourgeois history, and only capital, not the proletariat, can be the
identical subject-object of universal history. The forms of bourgeois society cannot be put
to radical use; they can only express bourgeois existence. With the disappearance not just
of classical Marxisms revolutionary proletariat but of any plausible agency offundamental social change, Marxism has lost its vital perspective on freedom, the telos
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that justified its reconstruction of the historical process. The death of the Marxist subject
broke the nexus between immanent, causal analysis and freedom that has sustained IR
Marxisms commitment to historical sociology. As a result, the status of that form of
historical analysis as radical theory becomes questionable. The interest in historical
causation loses all point and substance as enlightenment when tomorrow can appear only
as a repetition of today and today as a repetition of yesterday. In the absence of a social
practice of freedom that promises the possibility of intervening in the causal sequence and
making it its own, causality reverts from being an instrument of liberation to just the
uncontrollable play of blind fate, the working out of the inexorable social process, which
takes place, as Marx said, behind the backs67of those subjected to it, its victims.
Reflecting on what 20th-century history did to the concept of practice, Adorno observed
that the validity of causality decomposes correlative to the downfall of the possibility of
freedom because causality itself makes sense only in a horizon of freedom.68It is that
horizon that has been closed, and with that closure Marxism has been trapped. What it
once understood as the vital link uniting theory and practice, the link that justified its
mode of historical reasoning and that was supposed to lead to breakout, has been
definitively severed, and the difficulty this sundering produces is revealed where Marxist
theorising still attempts to make a gesture towards practical relevance. So, a recent survey
of Marxism in IR concludes with an outline of the perceived tasks at hand:
Marxism needs to reconceptualize how balances of social forces affected the
historical evolution of political communities to reconstruct the changing
dynamics of their interactions and interpenetrations, and to specify the full range of
spatial orders devised by them in order to reproblematize the variable relations
between domination and exploitationand chances of resistance to them.69
The apparently ambitious intellectual work called for amounts, in truth, only to historical-
sociological reconstruction of processes and patterns of social causation. Nothing
theoretically binding or logically convincing leads from these purportedly urgent
theoretical tasks to decisive social change (which has, symptomatically, shrivelled in its
ambitions to chances of resistance). Where the text really demands a causal link,
between the theoretical labour and the practice to be derived from it, a yawning gap opens,
67
Marx 1990, p.135.68Adorno 2001, On the Crisis of Causality.
69Teschke 2008, p.184.
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the exiguous measure for spanning which, a bare dash, only exposes the breach all the
more. The fabled unity of theory and practice has come completely apart.
Beyond history
A consequence of the prolonged collapse of Marxist practice was, of course, the
eclipse of Marx as radical theorist during the 1970s and 80s. However, for as long as
society remains capitalist society, no final dismissal of Marx is possible.70 Instead, it is
necessary, more than perhaps with any other thinker, to judge how history has affected the
body of the theory. The central question of interpretation is the extent to which, in his
construction of materialism, Marx broke with bourgeois-Idealist forms of thought. Thiscuts especially deeply into the question of Marx and history, and his understanding of the
historical meaning of capitalist society. What motivated Marxs critique of capital was not
just that it is exploitative but, more profoundly, that it fails to do justice to what he
understood as the teleology of history. The antagonistic relations of production are a fetter
on the forces of production: because the former are irrational, the development of the
latter can only be irrational and chaotic as well, and so capital is unable to further the
productive capacity of society to the fullest degree. Communism is therefore to be the
legitimate inheritor of the dynamic of the historical process only it can do justice to the
necessity of promotion of the forces of production.71Communism, as the transformation of
society, is understood in a double way: as breaking with the historical process insofar as it
brings class society to an end, but also as, in a larger sense, remaining within it because it
is the full realisation of what has always been essential to the dynamic of history. This
peculiar articulation of the dialectic of inside and outside, runs throughout Marxs thought.
So, the emancipatory potential of the proletariat lies in the fact of its exclusion from
bourgeois society, as a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a
class of civil society.72This is what gives it its universal claim, untainted by particular
interests, that is to make it the liberator of society as a whole. Yet, as organised Labour, it
is to become internal to society, transforming itself into an active political force on the
70Cf. 2003, in which he argues that, despite all developments, the fundamental categories of Marxs analysis
of capital retain their necessity.71
Thus, in the famous chapter on the fetish-character of the commodity, Marx imagines the transcendence of
capital as an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and
expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single labour force(Marx 1990, p.171).72
Marx 1992, p.256 (emphasis in original).
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stage of the nation, fighting to attain state power. The excluded is to fulfil itself by
becoming included the outside is to be brought inside, as the proletariat takes up its
rightful bourgeois inheritance. Because the assumption that socialism was the necessary
successor to capitalist society was constitutive of Marxism from the beginning, the
conviction was characteristic of the Marxist tradition that an essentially bourgeois form,
one intrinsic to the bourgeois experience of the world, could be filled and made good with
a radical content. The values of liberty, equality and fraternity that the bourgeoisie
proclaimed formally but traduced in practice would be given actuality and content by
socialism. In the same way that Marx attacked Idealism but retained the dialectic,
Marxism rejected bourgeois politics as mystificatory but yet espoused a revolutionary
politics that was to take place in the same political scene.73Politics and the dialectic were
to be won for the revolution, but it was not asked whether the political can actually admit
of revolutionary politics, or, for that matter, whether the dialectic can be anything other
than Idealist.
Nowhere is this ambiguous relation to the bourgeois legacy more pronounced than
in regard to history. If, as Fasolt argues, modern historical understanding was the product
of the revolt against medieval universalism, was political and revolutionary in its origins,
then Marx wanted to take up that revolutionary energy for communism, to claim
bourgeois societys own dynamic for the revolt against bourgeois society. He intended to
appropriate the forward movement of time that typified the bourgeois representation of
history, as it separated itself from and overcame an outmoded social order.
Quintessentially, in texts such as Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right. Introduction,
the Communist Manifesto, and theEighteenth Brumaire, Marx makes the same move that
Fasolt suggests characterised the historical revolt, seeking to consign the past to the past in
order to liberate the present and the future:
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can only create its poetry from the
future, not from the past. It cannot begin its own work until it has sloughed off all its
superstitious regard for the past. In order to arrive at its own content therevolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.74
73Was not Marxist politics always secretly just an imitation of bourgeois politics, organised along party
lines within a national setting, committed to a struggle for popular support and state power? Perhaps this
accounts for the double bind it found itself in in the Western countries that it was impossible for it, asradical, to be incorporated into parliamentary politics, but also impossible to be extra-parliamentary.74
Marx 1973, p.149.
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Throughout Marxs early writings, the rhetoric, undeniably coruscating but also often
belligerent, fever-pitched and obsessive,75bespeaks a sort of historical desperation. Living
after the high noon of the bourgeois ascent, as revolution gave way to restoration and
progressive energy drained from the bourgeois class as the bearers of the World Spirit,
Marx wanted to reanimate history. He wanted to compel the onward movement of time,
but recognised that the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of playing that role on the world-
historical stage. So the proletariat is inscribed into the drama as the new protagonist of
historical progress: it will open the way into the Promised Land that the bourgeoisie could
lead up to but never enter. The bourgeoisies own dynamism is to be taken up and
extended, and history thereby rescued from relapse into stasis. Although for a hundred
years, during what might be termed the epoch of Labour, this vision exerted immense
fascination and suggestive power, it was from the beginning a misconstrual of historical
time. In an essay from the mid-1970s Perry Anderson makes the observation that Marx
and Engels accorded a great deal of insightful theoretical attention to revolutionary
movements up to about 1850 and almost none at all (and that notable for its failure of
perception and fallibility of judgement) to the sweeping political and social changes in
Germany, Italy, the USA and Japan during the second half of the 19th
century that
properly instantiated the rule of industrial capital in those major powers.76The implication
is that their conception of revolutionary transformation was tied to a historical age that
even in their lifetimes, while Marx was writing Capital, had passed. To this extent, they
misrecognised the real temporality of capitalist society, blinded by the progressive,
immanent narrative structure generated by the Idealistic metaphysics of production. The
obsession of 20th-century Marxists with the thematic of imperialism is, in its way, further
testimony to these historical limitations of Marxist thought: the less actual developments
in the core capitalist countries accorded with the canonical Marxist notions of political
theory and practice and of historical progress, and the less Marxists who cleaved to
orthodoxy could say anything that touched the developing actuality of those societies, the
more attention was shifted to the periphery and semi-periphery, where, as in Tsarist
Russia, superannuated power structures were disintegrating and the historical dynamic
briefly had a fluidity such that the Marxist conception appeared to retain some relevance.
However, from the perspective of the 21st-century globalised world, the conclusion is
75Cf. Derrida on Marxs argumentative pursuit of Max Stirner in the German Ideology, a hunt, insistent and
redundant, both brilliant and ponderous, the relentlessness of which, carried on for page after page, Derridareads as being symptomatic of Marxs own fear (Derrida 1994, p.174).76
Anderson 1992, pp.1056.
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evident that revolution, a concept drawn from the pioneering age of bourgeois society but
so dear to the Marxist tradition, could only lead into the world of capital, not out of it. 77
For all the polemics against post-Hegelian philosophy and the turn to political
economy, Marxs understanding of history remained bourgeois-Idealist in form. Hardly
anywhere so idealistic as in the relation to the totality,78he affirmed the developmental
process of the universal: history has a necessary cumulative momentum and the world-
historical transformation is itself immanent to that movement. Of this retention of the
Hegelian schema at the origins of historical materialism, Adorno remarked: It was a
question of the deification of history, even in the atheistic Hegelians Marx and Engels.
The primacy of the economy is supposed to ground the happy end with historical
stringency as immanent to it; the economic process would produce the political
relationships of domination and would overturn them until the mandatory emancipation
from the coercion of the economy.79This construction expresses the trust Marx placed in
history. He expected capital to be a transient social form, one that would expire quickly of
its own contradictions and be succeeded in short order by socialism; for the energy of
history was really on the side of the revolution. But he was wrong, and the trust was
misplaced. So far from being left behind as inadequate to the dialectic of production,
capital has not only successfully resisted every attempt to overcome it but has subsumed
all opposition. As a result, what has been left behind, as inadequate, is the Marxist
conception of historical time. Marxism always conceived of itself as being within the
same immanent, linear temporal and historical plane as bourgeois existence. It registered
no substantial contradiction, let alone a qualitative difference, between the time of Capital
and the time of Labour. Further, because the proletariat, given birth to by capitalist society
as the agent of its own supersession, was to be the true bearer of the historical dynamic,
the Marxist subject was imagined as the proper inheritor of history: bourgeois time was
really its time. This construction of the temporal relationship between the bourgeois,
capitalist present and the socialist or communist future was intrinsic to Marxism, and it is
what underlies the Marxist commitment to historical sociology in IR, and its concern to
historicise the international. What the Marxist tradition meant by historicisation was
77T.J. Clarks judgment is surely correct: Marxism in the twentieth century became the ideology of state-
formation in conditions of primitive accumulation. That is not said to denigrate the Marxisms of the
Second and Third Worlds, but to bring into focus the kind of work Marxs ideas were called on to do in
those worlds, in the face of what constraints (Clark 1999, p.294).78Adorno 2001, Antagonism Contingent?.
79ibid. On the Idealism of Marxs optimistic view of history, see Adorno 2006, pp.4954.
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always dependent on its understanding of an immanent, directional historical movement.
With its sequencing of modes of production, Marxism was convinced it could displace the
historical present of capitalist society because, essentially if not in detail, it already knew
what was going to succeed it, what would come after. It imagined that it was in a position
to regard the present from the perspective of the immanent future. The intention of
historicisation, especially in relation to Realism in IR, was foremost an appeal to freedom
against closure and entrapment, and such an appeal drew its validity from the theoretical
construction that told Marxism that capital was not the final word on the historical
process. With the demise of that construction and the disappearance of what was once
imagined to be the future beyond capital, the logic of this idea of historicisation becomes
clouded. Their teloshaving been removed, Marxist history and historicisation are pulled
back into Realist repetition and recurrence: to show mere change is of little moment unless
it contains within it the potential of breakout, something that can no longer be imagined in
the old terms. And, in any case, Marxism in IR has always intended more than simple
change by its appeal to history. Believing itself to be the subject of history, Marxism
assumed it could historicise capitalist society from within the structure of bourgeois time.
But capital cannot be temporally displaced through its own temporal form: only bourgeois
society can inhabit bourgeois time. As it is, the enormous expansion of capital and its
absorption of everything that once tried to stand against it have undermined the possibility
of historicisation in anything like the sense Marxism assumed. What does it mean to
historicise when what might come after capital is so completely opaque? How does one
historically displace what gives every appearance of being itself the end?
Marxism wagered on history and lost. And so, precisely in its insistence on the
historical, Marxism in IR is itself unhistorical. For it has failed to take the measure of what
time and history have done to its theoretical commitments and its association of history
and freedom. Undeniably, the 20th century destroyed the validity of the historical and
temporal consciousness of Marxism as progressive political practice, and this necessitates
a reconsideration of the temporality of Marx. What now might Marx, the critique of
capital and the critical theory of society mean for history? The attempt to solve the
historical dialectic and set time to rights by cutting the Gordian Knot, using the proletariat
as the decisive weapon, fell short of its aim. Marxs valorisation of the immanent
dynamism of history resolved into stasis. As a result, it is no longer possible to continue
with the old Marxist understanding of historical time. Rather, it is necessary to think again
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about the entwinement of progress and regression in history, why change and repetition
continually reproduce each other. For the study of Marx, this means renewed attention to
the thematics of time and history being out of joint, the entrapment of capitalist
modernity within the past. For Marx in IR, it means a reassessment of the significance of
Realisms implicit philosophy of history, of the international as endless recurrence, the
eternal return of the eversame. Marxism fell victim to the negativity of history because it
imagined that it could win its immanent developmental process for itself. In doing so, it
remained, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, entangled in Idealism. Consequently, after
the downfall of Marxism, it becomes evident that what would be the determinate negation
of bourgeois temporal form, the time of materialism, still awaits imagining.
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