bisa paper - a. davenport

8/13/2019 BISA Paper - A. Davenport

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A. Davenport. Draft 13/6/13. Not for quotation without permission.

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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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