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Adam David Morton, Mainstreaming Marxism: on the anarchic structure of world economy, International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 3, May 2023, Pages 1253–1272, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad065
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Abstract
This article carves out a focus on certain authorized mainstream perspectives and their theorizations of world order, and how they have become dominant at the expense of excluded and silenced contributions. This task begins, first, by asserting that the anarchic conditions of world order have been mainstreamed at the expense of contributions to Marxist political economy. Here, my focus extends the methodological approach of juxtaposition to explore competing understandings of anarchic orders in Kenneth Waltz's and Nikolai Bukharin's work to disclose, in the latter, the anarchic structure of world capitalism. Second, the method of juxtaposition enables me to cast attention to the parallel profiles of E. H. Carr and C. L. R. James and their weighty understandings of world revolution to reveal, in the latter, neglected classed conditions of racial capitalism. In a fresh manner, then, my approach juxtaposes key figures that have been present (Waltz, Carr) and absent (Bukharin, James) in understanding world order through the anarchic structure of the world economy and racial capitalism. In conclusion, the argument left for academic study and the elucidation of policy is the extent to which a necessarily historical materialist moment to understanding world order can and should be further extended and deepened.
Introduction: Imitatores! Servum pecus1
The purpose of this article is to further the theoretical reorientation of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) by attending to different routes at the centre of their constitution and wider world order studies. The article will ventilate understandings of the structure of world economy and engage with the different pathways that lay at the organization of world order in the twentieth century. Some of the intellectual roots of this diversity are regarded as resting on the political economy insights of groundbreaking work in the mid-twentieth century. Among others, E. H. Carr has been presented as a figure who broke with a straightforward set of reflections on the anarchic structure of international politics to, instead, identify wider recurrent operative principles and ‘scope conditions’ of world order.2 Rather than simply accepting the premises of great power rivalry—that would dominate the debates on anarchy forged by Kenneth Waltz—Randall Germain has presented a persuasive vision of Carr as a political economist who connects the structure of world economy, and the development of its institutions, to the changing intersubjective meanings at the constitution of world order. As a result, according to Germain, ‘Carr's pathway to political economy thus travels, via the mode of historical reasoning, to consider the fundamental transformations that mark out the middle decades of the twentieth century’.3 But what if the project of retrieval at the centre of this pre-history of IPE was widened to reflect on a more diverse multiplicity of different trajectories? More crucially, what if the debates and ideas at the centre of ‘nearly modern’ IPE can be reworked to offer an alternative understanding of the unfolding of anarchic world order to retell its history? The endeavour here is to rework reflections on world order from the unfolding of familiar and distinct constructions to offer a reformulation from previously dispersed peripheries.
This alternative spatializing of theory enables an understanding of world order as a coexistence of multiple trajectories, experiences of different positionalities, an appreciation of wide-ranging geographical embeddedness and an understanding of knowledge production itself.4 As a result, spatializing a wider history of world order enables reflection on parallel profiles in mid-century IPE that have been mainstreamed in understanding the structure of the world economy. If Fred Halliday's invocation is taken seriously that ‘those who do not want to talk about capitalism, should not talk about international relations or globalization’,5 then what re-narrativization of world order in IR and IPE is produced by spatializing theory away from the mainstream? My argument seeks to underscore two coexisting but silenced trajectories within the spatializing history of world order. These two silenced trajectories, it is argued, pierce the heart and soul of nearly modern IR and IPE and deflect attention away from dominant perspectives towards Marxist theorists that have been previously mainstreamed.
Raising voices about capitalism from outside the accepted speaking-space of world order enables me to embark on a set of two pairings that are anchored through the methodological approach of juxtaposition. The method of juxtaposition, as fashioned by Juliet Hooker, is an historical–interpretive approach to thinkers who have been previously viewed as unrelated but who are situated anew as proximate and placed side-by-side to reveal resonances and connections. Juxtaposition as method ‘enables reading thinkers and traditions that are viewed as disparate alongside each other’.6 To be clear, the methodological alternative of juxtaposition, as compellingly advanced by Ian Bruff, transcends comparison by revealing the intrinsically political practices of research.7 In my summary, whereas comparison is based on additively separable concepts and conditions, or ontological exteriority, juxtaposition takes a relationally connected approach to tease out questions of political power.8 Put differently, there are ‘cycles of silences’, including race and class blindness, within foundational assumptions and canonical texts, which are deeply entrenched in world order studies.9 Hence my examination here of some of the framing gestures by the canon and their exclusions of minoritized perspectives aims to extend the reverse-tutelage claims developed elsewhere and show how knowledge from the margins has been stifled by the mainstream.10
As a result, my first pairing juxtaposes the work of Kenneth Waltz with that of Nikolai Bukharin on their competing understandings of anarchic orders. What has been erased from the inner structure of world order is the anarchic structure of capitalism as constitutive of imperialism in the world economy. Retelling the theory of the anarchic structure of world order necessitates positioning Bukharin and his theorizing on imperialism and world economy as central to mid-century IR and IPE and their present-day challenges. In my second pairing there is a meeting-up and juxtaposition of E. H. Carr and C. L. R. James and their weighty understandings of world revolution, resulting in a spatializing of the theory of world order and nearly modern IPE even further. For James, this is especially so in relation to his consideration of the self-activity of subaltern classes and the raciality of imperialism. As will be revealed, the work of James reaches geographically from the Atlantic through to pan-Africanism to provide an alternative critique of capitalism and a reconstruction of Black radicalism on the basis of subaltern class self-activity.11 In a fresh manner, then, my approach juxtaposes key figures that have been present (Waltz, Carr) and absent (Bukharin, James) in understanding world order through the anarchic structure of the world economy and racial capitalism. This approach allows both familiar and distinct issues in the construction of world order to be raised while revealing the mainstreaming of Marxism within considerations of the anarchic structure of world economy. As a result, by way of conclusion, the argument that a necessarily historical materialist moment to understanding world order has to be engaged in IR and IPE is also further extended and deepened.12 The hope is that this could then lead to gate-opening political economy, with a focus on inducing dialogue by furthering critical debate, rather than gate-keeping by the mainstream.13 By asserting the necessity of historical materialism to analysing the anarchically structured world economy and racial capitalism, mainstream approaches can then be revealed as a ‘slavish breed of imitators’ when it comes to understanding IR and IPE from the mid-century to the present. The clarion call of Imitatores! Servum pecus (‘Imitators! You slavish breed’) might then, indeed, be cast against Waltz and Carr in mainstreaming the Marxism of Bukharin and James.
The anarchic structure of the world economy
Of all the ink that has been spilled on the enduring anarchic character of world order, Waltz's treatment of theories of imperialism is surely most revealing about the privileged angle of vision and the taking over of space that it has achieved. Even for a figure such as Ken Booth, ‘Waltzian structural realism remains the most persuasive theory explaining the continuity of the “causal weight” of the international level of world politics’.14 But could there be a theory of the ‘causal weight’ of the international level of world politics predicated on the anarchy of the world market? To be sure, in Theory of international politics, Waltz engages with Bukharin and accepts the latter's novelty in positing the ever-thickening networks of interdependence in world economy.15 Much dismissed then and since, though, has been Bukharin's originality in and beyond Imperialism and world economy in reflecting on the intertwining of capital and the extensive and intensive deepening of networks of international trade, exchange and a widening world market. In this ‘vortex of capitalist life’:
The growth of world market connections proceeds apace, tying up various sectors of world economy into one strong knot, bringing ever closer to each other hitherto “nationally” and economically secluded regions, creating an ever larger basis for world production.16
More profound, though, is the theory of the anarchic structure of world economy that is clearly evident in Imperialism and world economy. After all, Bukharin himself admitted that it ‘is beginning to dawn even upon bourgeois writers’ that geopolitical conflict and economic crises would still continue because of the anarchic connections established between states.17 Subsequently, to what extent was Waltz one of these writers, and is there a reverse pedagogical aspect in the structural theory of anarchy that is Marxist?
An exploration of these issues commences first with the theoretical elegance that is so much a feature of the structural theory of international politics. According to Waltz, an elegant theory is one that is based on the severely simple principles of parsimony, namely an ability to explain a great deal based on only a few elements. Simplifications are therefore a necessary requirement of theory-building enabled by isolating factors in order to deliver internal consistency and explanatory and predictive powers. At the core of this theory construction is an attachment to inductive reasoning based on hypothesis generation and testing in order to generate laws that are observable and repeatable. ‘Simplifications lay bare the essential elements in play and indicate the necessary relations of cause and interdependency’.18 An elegant theory, then, incorporates only a few elements and states them simply in a logical, coherent, plausible manner so that concepts link just a few variables in order to contrive hypotheses that can be inferred and tested.19 ‘A theory has explanatory and predictive power. A theory also has elegance’.20
The process of abstraction is perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of these principles of parsimony and the striving for theoretical elegance. For Waltz, ‘the maximum of abstraction allows a minimum of content’.21 While accepting of unobservable relations and complexity, the desire to abstract the world as logically made up of things that are external to each other and relatively isolated and static is irresistible.
A theory indicates that some factors are more important than others and specifies relations among them … everything is related to everything else, and one domain cannot be separated from others. Theory isolates one realm from all others in order to deal with it intellectually.22
The result, then, is that whereas in domestic politics there is an order of hierarchy, the international structure is decentralized and based on an order of anarchy with the states as units functionally carrying out the same roles, albeit with differentiated capabilities. States in a world order of anarchy are functionally the same; the differences exist in capabilities. Moreover, the principle of self-help is deemed to pervade international politics, whereby states necessarily seek survival in an anarchic order. The distinctive and dominant characteristic of an international ‘states-system’ based on the order of anarchy is therefore the compulsion to engage in the imperatives of survival.
These imperatives of anarchy, whereby the international system underpins the compulsions of survival and, as a structure, ‘shapes and shoves’ the units are to be read through what I call here a market allegory.23 The structural theory of international politics projects its normative dimension in the form of market allegory: the story is one of states as units in a system, operating as firms in a market economy as an allegory of the embattled situation of survival within recurrent violence. ‘Just as economists define markets in terms of firms’, states Waltz, ‘so I define international-political structures in terms of states’.24 Market allegory is the fulcrum of structural realism where the system-wide condition of anarchy is deemed to shape states just as it is assumed to shape the compulsions that drive firms. This process of market allegorization is explicit. ‘International-political systems, like economic markets, are individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended’, all based on self-help principles. The allegorical structure of international theory as a story of market structure is a normative conscious move.25 ‘Market structure is defined by counting firms; international-political structure, by counting states. In the counting, distinctions are made only according to capabilities’.26 Perhaps in one of the most dubious uses of market allegory, given the actual transformations in state formation that followed, Waltz stretches his theoretical elegance to a deeply unattractive extreme.
Few states die; many firms do. Who is likely to be around 100 years from now—the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, Thailand, and Uganda? Or Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Massey-Ferguson? I would bet on the states, perhaps even Uganda.27
The market allegory is therefore the pinnacle of the structural theory of international politics with self-help as the necessary imperative and principle of action in an anarchic order, whether the units be states or corporations. Market allegorization proceeds in this macro-theory of international politics to show how the compulsions of the international system and the order of anarchy shape and shove states through the imperatives of power maximization, security enhancement, and relative rather than absolute advantage. But for Marx, ‘it is a false abstraction to treat a nation whose mode of production is based on value, and organized capitalistically into the bargain, as a unified body simply working for the national needs’.28 This critique affords an opening to explore the relationality of capital within the anarchic structure of world economy from historical materialist theorizations of imperialism.
For Alex Callinicos, the outward drive of imperialism in the works of Nikolai Bukharin shifted from underconsumptionist accounts (or shortage of effective demand) to ‘locating it instead in Marx's conception of the circuit of capital as it is transformed from money, through the purchase of labour-power and means of production on the market, into its employment in the productive process that leads to the creation of new value (including surplus-value), which is then realized by a return to the market, where the commodities embodying this value are sold’.29 This is not the place to embark on an excursus of ‘new imperialisms’, past and present, although it is worth noting Waltz's own statement on such ‘reductionist’ or systemic theories that ‘Marxists have it both ways: earlier, the dependence of richer on poorer countries to absorb surplus capital; later, the exploitation of poorer by richer countries through the repatriation of profits on investment’.30 What escapes Waltz here is a grasp of dialectical contradiction, or the imperialist tendency to fix on colonies to absorb surplus capital and exploit them at the same time. What is surprising, though, is the silenced reference to Bukharin's own structural theory of anarchy within the organization of world economy. It is as if Bukharin has been airbrushed from the history of theorizing on anarchic orders, purged once again, as before, but this time by the mainstream of political science.
For Bukharin there is a condition of anarchy that marks capitalist competition.31 Put differently, the anarchic structure of capitalism finds expression in economic competition:
The anarchic character of capitalist society is expressed in the fact that social economy is not an organized collective body guided by a single will, but a system of economies interconnected through exchange, each of which produces at its own risk, never being in a position to adapt itself more or less to the volume of social demand and to the production carried on in other individual economies. This calls forth a struggle of the economies against other, a war of capitalist competition.32
The world economy is therefore taken as a dialectical unity, meaning that there is an internal relation between the world totality of capitalism, or the anarchy of the world market, and its parts constituted by state forms.33 In Bukharin's Imperialism and world economy the presentation of this theory of anarchy receives its fullest form. From the intertwining of national capital there proceeds the internationalization of capital, generating ever-thickening networks of interdependence. Although the growth of world economy results in ‘the process of bringing separate geographic points of economic development closer to each other’, the result is nevertheless one of ‘anarchic internationalization’, meaning the centralization of capital, rather than ‘organized internationalization’ through the formation of a single world state.34 The world economy is therefore underwritten by the continued prevalence of uneven development with the prevailing order ‘emanating from the anarchical economic structure of capitalism’.35
World economy in our times is characterized by its highly anarchic structure … This anarchic structure of world capitalism is expressed in two facts: world industrial crises on the one hand, wars on the other.36
The anarchy of capitalist competition is therefore a structuring condition at the scale of world order in which a fusion of state forms and capital concentrations is embedded. The gradual internationalization of capital through finance was becoming increasingly constitutive of imperialism as ‘the all-pervading form of capital, that form which, like nature, suffers from a horror vacui, since it rushes to fill every “vacuum”, whether in a “tropical”, “sub-tropical”, or “polar” region’.37 One example Bukharin provides of the fusion of state and capital under the anarchic structure of world economy is the Deutsche Bank and its construction of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway through the Ottoman Empire. The ‘horror of empty space’ is symbolized by the export of fixed capital through railroad construction, with such investment reinforced by territorial military subjugation. For ‘wherever the capitalists do not possess territory, they possess other forms of financial power’, resulting in a combination of militarist and political economic levers of accumulating capital.38 As Lenin asked:
What means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?39
The anarchic structure of capitalist competition can therefore generate widely different forms but can be linked to the expansion of capital and commodity export as a ‘way out’ of crisis conditions as well as to geopolitical war as the ripening of new conflicts on the basis of such interstate rivalries.40 Hence, despite the tendency to ‘greater state homogeneity’ and the abstract possibility of a ‘world capitalist organization’, there is the continual prevalence of antagonistic interests between states because of the tendency of capital to rely on such state structures.41 ‘Capitalism has attempted to overcome its own anarchy’, concludes Bukharin, but ‘by pressing it into the iron ring of state organization’.42 Rather than leaning on a simple market allegory, though, the anarchic structure of capitalism is theorized as internally relating military struggle and capital accumulation. In the very pages of Foreign Affairs, we can find Bukharin railing against the ‘prattle’ of contemporary geopoliticians to instead focus on the perpetuum mobile of war as a special form of capitalist competition.43 Capitalist world order therefore drives—with elemental regularity and as a compulsory law—both military rivalry and economic competition between capitals. As Bukharin summarizes, ‘this irrational current of life is the consequence of the anarchic character of the capitalist structure’. Moreover, rather than reliance on simple market allegorizing, ‘the law of value expresses itself as the elemental regulator of socio-productive life’ within the anarchic structure of capitalism, which then drives competition between capitals and military rivalries among states.44
Although missing the uniqueness of this structural theory of anarchy as capitalist competition, it is for the above reasons that Bukharin has been regarded by Callinicos as exemplary in offering an early first-cut theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical.45 This contribution eviscerates the misplaced assessment by E. H. Carr himself towards Bukharin that, ‘as an original thinker, as a twentieth-century critic and expositor of Marxism, he stands far behind, say, Luxemburg or Gramsci’.46 The result is a theory of imperialism that incorporates a conception of the states-system and the relationality of capital into a non-deductive argument. By extension, it is the anarchic structure of world economy that thus captures the tendencies of both the internationalization and the statification of capital by internally relating the states-system as a dimension of the capitalist mode of production. Features emanating from the anarchic structure of capitalism thus include class antagonisms, competitive struggles, capital accumulation and crisis-tendencies that reproduce uneven and combined development within a multiple states-system. It is this theory of the anarchic structure of capitalism, excised from the ‘fairy-tale’ textbooks of international politics, that can offer an understanding of the internal relation between geopolitical expansion and capitalist competition. However, in so doing, the theory of the anarchic structure of capitalism is not an extension of mainstream precepts, based on a mere market allegory, or a necessarily realist moment in historical materialism.47 Departing, instead, from the slavish breed of imitators of the mainstream, my argument here is that the anarchic structure of world capitalism extends the claims for a necessarily historical materialist moment in the theorizing of world order.48 Consequently, attention now turns to the competing accounts of world revolution in the understandings of Carr and James, to address further the silenced trajectories of world order theorizing in nearly modern IPE. Once again, the goal here is to deflect attention away from mainstream perspectives by spatializing the history of world order through peripheric theorists to advance distinct political economy ways of framing world order, in this case inclusive of the raciality of empire. We start with Carr, described by Tamara Deutscher as ‘essentially a nineteenth-century liberal who had become exceedingly impatient with the anarchy of modern capitalism’.49
The world order of racial capitalism
If the first of my imitators came firmly from the mainstream of American political science, then the second to beware of derives from the revered origin story (or fairy tale) of the discipline of international politics itself. As the fourth Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Carr would become an acclaimed theorist of world order. Recovering his contribution to understanding the structure of world economy within nearly modern IPE is an important endeavour, as already stated, and my contribution here is part of that reorientation. At the same time, it is necessary also to reflect on his elitist background as someone who ‘grew up in an entirely sheltered environment of public school, Cambridge and the Foreign Office’, before entering academia.50 Analysing his contributions to IPE on world market economy is therefore important, not least because of his method that was ‘radical and materialistic without ever being properly defined as Marxist’.51 Interestingly, in The twenty years' crisis, Carr described György Lukács as a ‘consistent, though perhaps indiscreet, Marxist’.52 Carr himself then might also be aptly described as at best an inconsistent, though perhaps discreet, Marxist, especially on the grounds of his scepticism about the permanency of world revolution, class struggle and the labour theory of value.53 Hence, spatializing past and present theorizing of world order beyond a figure such as Carr—always surely of the establishment—towards the commonly perceived as marginal James is essential to widening the optic of nearly modern IPE, especially when it comes to understanding the racialized character of capitalism. This process of retrieval begins with Carr's pathway to political economy through his reflections on laissez-faire, planned economy, geopolitics and racial capitalism. My attention then turns to a treatment of James's corpus as a coherent totality and how it provides a Black radical pathway to political economy through considerations on world revolution, geopolitics, class struggle, and Black resistance. In the recovery of Black struggle within these themes by the Trinidadian intellectual, Marxism was not something that was a prior commitment before being abandoned as unsatisfactory.54 Here we should pay heed to the advice that C. L. R. James should not be treated as some sort of decolonial ‘cultural guru’, or a pan-Africanist who was disconnected from class struggle.55
Grouping together the wide insights from Carr on the problems of market economy is an essential first step in his retrieval as a political economist. Although scattered and less systematic, the parallels between Carr and his contemporary Karl Polanyi are especially striking on the ‘liberal creed’ of laissez-faire and the endorsement of planned economy.56 If The twenty years' crisis was the great power classic in search of a theory of political economy, then The great transformation was the rise and fall of market economy classic in search of a theory of international politics, despite the latter's more holistic treatment of the international system. With a similar ethos, Carr stated the view very early on in The twenty years' crisis that ‘economic theory long retained its utopian character’, and, ‘even today some “classical economists” insist on regarding universal free trade—an imaginary condition which has never existed—as the normal postulate of economic science’.57 The nineteenth century was surveyed as the climax of liberal internationalism that witnessed the transformation from a multiplicity of national economies to a single world economy, with London as ‘the seat of government of the world economy of the so-called age of laissez-faire’.58 Even though it was emphasized that absolute laissez-faire had never been obtained anywhere, its principles of market competition, private enterprise, individual self-interest and free labour markets were regarded as essential to the ‘utopian creed’ of liberal internationalism.59 The application of liberalism at the level of world order, through mechanisms such as the League of Nations, was regarded as emblematic of laissez-faire principles in striving towards a harmony of interests. Acknowledging its utopian background, then, enabled Carr in The twenty years' crisis to argue that ‘in international politics, there is no organized power charged with the task of creating harmony; and the temptation to assume a natural harmony is therefore particularly strong’.60 Balanced with his realist critique, it was the harmony of interests assumed by laissez-faire principles that was found so wanting in the scramble for Africa by the late nineteenth century and the rise of economic nationalism in the interwar period of the twentieth century. Although he stopped short of defining either of these periods as one of inter-imperialist rivalry, Carr nevertheless grapples with the shifting spatiality of economic expansion that defined world order at the time. Hence ‘the struggle was intensified by the creation of new states and new economic frontiers’, so that, ‘most important of all, there were no more open spaces anywhere awaiting cheap and profitable development and exploitation’.61 Expanding on this through his grammar of satisfied powers (as those states wanting to uphold the status quo by seeking a return to laissez-faire) and dissatisfied powers (as those pursuing the overthrow of the existing order through national socialism or revolution), Carr held that the economic crisis of the interwar period was due to the breakdown of the laissez-faire system and the profit motive as its moral imperative.62 As he details in his crisis-book sequel, Conditions of peace: ‘Perpetual expansion was the hypothesis on which liberal democracy and laissez-faire economics were based. There were physical limits to this expansion; and by the end of the nineteenth century they had nearly been reached. The frontiers of the civilized world had ceased to advance’.63 The same spatial imaginary is again present in the assumption that ‘the urgent need now is to alter not the location, but the meaning, of frontiers’.64
The flip side of ‘the economic whip’ of laissez-faire was, of course, the case that Carr made, instead, for planned economy.65 Against the anarchy of production under capitalism, Carr argued, state intervention in every function of market economy and nationalization was advanced, not as a temporary expedient but as a sequel to the Russian revolution.66 To counter the commodification of labour power, a process of transition was underway to a social and economic order based on the ‘social service state’, or welfare state, or just simply socialism where the economy would be reintegrated with society from housing, to public works, to transport policy, to ruralizing industry and to industrializing agriculture.67 With a twist on Polanyi and the socially embedded economy, Carr also arrived at a more embedded position:
The principle of state intervention and control is tacitly admitted; the only difference is in the greater or less efficiency of the intervention and in the greater or less frankness with which the role of the state is admitted.68
The socially embedded planned economy would be organized around a minimum wage, family allowances, social insurance, progressive income tax and the welfare state, with the ‘New Europe’ as its initial locus and prelude, ultimately, to creating a world order.69 On the moral foundations of world order, Carr argued that ‘a world divided between a multiplicity of sovereign states presents difficulties for the creation of world order’.70 Carr's utopia, then, signalled as early as The twenty years' crisis, was one where ‘employment has become more important than profit, social stability than increased consumption, equitable distribution than maximum production’.71 Later, the state as the territorial unit of power was not taken as a given but, rather, regarded as evolving through a world economic planning authority and world security organization with pooled resources to fulfil the demands of social justice.
The prospects for such internationalism and social justice are not devoid of an awareness of racial exclusions. A world order equating propertied classes and white privilege was deemed ‘no longer acceptable’.72 Most explicitly, Carr argued that ‘so long as discrimination between individuals on grounds of race, colour or national allegiance is commonly practised and accepted as normal or permissible, the first essential foundation of a moral world order is lacking’.73 Consistently, then, discrimination based on processes of racialization, albeit recognized as endemic in liberal democracies and the wider international community, was refused legitimacy.74 That said, a certain colonial gaze could not be evaded. Two examples of this come through an embedded spatial imagination of empire. First, witness Carr's reflections on how to secure the ‘New Europe’:
Instead of setting out to dispense a uniform European or world order, it may be wiser to think of ourselves as making a modest clearing in the jungle of international relations and attempting within this clearing to apply those conceptions of political cooperation and international order which we are prepared if necessary to defend.75
The dispossessive practices of annexation assumed here as central to constituting a new world order should be clear. Also sobering are contemporary reincarnations of this mindset, not least in Josep Borrell's 2022 speech as High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, referring to ‘Europe as a garden’ surrounded by the ‘jungle’ of the rest of the world.76 Second, observe Carr's terminology in the search for geographical order:
In a world whose focus of power is in Washington, our modern Far East lies somewhere in the countries of the so-called Iron Curtain, and our Far West along the eastern coast-line of Asia. The vast land mass of Europe and Asia located between these two lines has become terra incognita almost impervious either to our military or to our missionary efforts, a territory no longer effectively belonging to our world at all, and resembling one of those no-mans-lands of early maps which the cartographers used to decorate with the comprehensive and sweeping inscription ‘Here be savages’.77
The vision of the world here reflects tones of pioneer frontier settlement across wild blank spaces, rather than a case for revolutionary decolonization. Hence the crucible of world war was regarded by Carr as something that ‘the colonial peoples were objects … not motive factors in it’.78 Of course, in the same year as The twenty years' crisis was written, C. L. R. James would inform all potential readers that ‘the only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians’.79 One of James's readers was, indeed, Carr, as a peripatetic reviewer for International Affairs. The classic text World revolution, 1917–1936 was accepted by Carr as ‘a dogmatic and controversial, but decidedly useful book’, albeit one that ‘exhibits a rather pathetic faith in the salvation of the world by the “Fourth International”’.80 Let us now turn to the radicalism and revolutionary vision of James to open up a Black Marxist perspective on the world order of racial capitalism.
Set against the grain of the Woodrow Wilson Chair's view of ‘the tragicomedy of the Communist International’,81 James embarked on an analysis of the international revolutionary movement that was deliberately pitched to depart from a focus on great power relations between states.82 Published in 1937, World revolution, 1917–1936 positioned C. L. R. James as Roald Amundsen to E. H. Carr and The twenty years' crisis as Robert Falcon Scott in their respective explorations—of the interwar period, rather than the Antarctic.83 Although somewhat forgotten today, even in the recovery of Black radicalism and the project of decolonization, James's text is regarded as part of a classic Marxist trilogy alongside Leon Trotsky's The revolution betrayed and Victor Serge's Russia twenty years after, all published in 1937.84 Rather than the painful fence-sitting exhibited by Carr—who concluded his The Soviet impact on the western world with his admission ‘to find a compromise, a half-way house, a synthesis between conflicting ways of life’85—there is a coherent Marxist method that links James's analysis on world revolution. Starting with ‘the most turbulent twenty years in all history’,86 that method addresses world revolution through a focus on the uneven development of capitalism. ‘The uneven development of Capitalism [sic] in various countries meant invariably the uneven development of the proletariat, and for this and other historical reasons a different correlation of class forces in each country’.87 Drawing further inspiration from Lenin's statement that ‘we are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states’,88 James consistently articulates a Marxist analysis of uneven development. Hence, ‘not only was Russia tied to world production, but the collective system in isolated backward Russia was at a disadvantage against even Capitalist anarchy on an international scale’.89 This methodological assertion of the structuring conditions of uneven development as central to understanding the anarchic law of value was also allied with a dialectical and anti-colonial move towards agency through biography. As we shall see, whether it was through the writings on world revolution and the Comintern, or the San Domingo Revolution and Toussaint L'Ouverture, or the struggle for self-rule against crown colonial government and Captain Cipriani, or the Ghana Revolution and Kwame Nkrumah, the structural forces of uneven development and self-activity of subaltern classes were dialectically related. Equally, within this appreciation of structure and struggle was an explicit emphasis on the global history of Black resistance and self-determination as central to anti-colonial politics.
These elements are all combined from the analysis in World revolution through to the examination of postcolonial futures and pan-African revolt in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. The dislocation of foreign capital in Russia precipitated the see-saw of uneven development and crisis conditions.
It was European capital, inevitably seeking new markets and as inevitably creating the means of its own destruction, which provided the basis for the revolutionary Marxist party in Russia, and thereby paved the way for the first great breach in the Capitalist system.90
While Lenin was praised for recognizing the need to repair errors, including ‘too great a caution of power in the summits of the party’, James offers warnings about the petrified forces of counter-revolution and degeneration under Stalinism. The advocacy of ‘socialism in one country’ in opposition to ‘permanent revolution’, embodied by the cancellation of Comintern meetings, is spotlighted as revealing the falsity of trying to separate the Soviet Union from the modern world economy.91 Key to the erosion of world revolution, for James, was the abandonment of Abyssinia to an Italian invasion (1935–7) that involved the slaughter of 275,000 Ethiopians. The ‘stench from the corpse of Abyssinia’ revealed the ineptitude of both the League of Nations and its ‘capitalist ballyhoo’ of Collective Security, as well as the missed opportunity for mass Black resistance and class struggle within world revolution.92 A Black radical tradition can thus be traced at the origin of these reflections on world revolution and uneven development, not as an abandonment but as a continuation of Marxism. It was this commitment that was carried through into the activism of the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, advocating decolonization in Africa.
These strands are woven through in important ways in both The Black Jacobins and Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. In the former, James grasped the centrality of the slave trade and Black resistance as well as the class dynamics of abolition to such a degree that Christian Høbsbjerg argues that the study of Atlantic slavery is an outstanding treatment of the theory of uneven and combined development.93
Those who see in abolition the gradually awakening conscience of mankind should spend a few minutes asking themselves why it is man's conscience, which had slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time that men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery as a method of production in the West Indian colonies.94
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) against French colonial rule forced abolition as an issue and reconfigured the whole geopolitics of the world economy, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slave emancipation in 1833 as events that are ‘components of a single historic process’.95 Two features of this focus on Black resistance, though, have to be recovered from the pages of The Black Jacobins. First, the study of revolution in San Domingo, present-day Haiti, was articulated as an endeavour to reveal ‘more and more of its affinity with revolutions in more developed communities’.96 In a recursive move, it was also evident that the violent conflicts of the present seen elsewhere in circumstances of world revolution would ‘enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore’.97 ‘Revolutions’, as George Lawson clarifies for us rather wonderfully, ‘are not occasional punctuation marks, but the very grammar of modern world history’.98 In The Black Jacobins, then, an anatomy of the revolution in San Domingo is detailed which addresses one of the pathways that revolutionary processes may follow but also serves as an account of inter-societal revolutionary change. Second, racial divisions are not elevated in this anatomy of revolution at the exclusion of class conditions. ‘The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics’, states James, ‘and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental’.99 The dialectic of both Black resistance and class struggle has to be centred within the roots of such Black radicalism. Hence why, in San Domingo and across all of revolutionary France, there was a virulent hatred for the colonial whites as ‘aristocrats of the skin’.100
In Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution these two features of Black resistance resurface. Once again, a consistent emphasis is placed on uneven development and the concomitant pressures of developmental catch-up induced by advanced capitalism. The social explosions in Africa, inclusive of the anti-colonial struggle for independence in the Gold Coast led by Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party (CCP) in 1957, would face the common antagonisms of party and government, leaders and led. In a most intriguing additional essay, entitled ‘Lenin and the Problem’, written in 1964 (included in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution),101 James notes that the dilemmas of uneven development have not so much disappeared from history (or, put differently, they have not been forgotten), ‘because they have never been noticed’. In a self-criticism on World revolution in the same essay he states how his own treatment of the issue of uneven development and revolutionary transition, in relation to Lenin, was inadequate. But he also finds poor treatment of them elsewhere. Perhaps striking back for that 1937 review in International Affairs, even in ‘authoritative and extensive examinations of the whole Russian revolution by Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr, you find the same blank incomprehension’.102 Embarking on a most original set of insights drawing from a trilogy of Lenin's essays on uneven development and planned economy from 1923, James reflects on how the Soviet state apparatus was ‘largely a survival of the old one’ that had been ‘repainted on the surface’ yet for Lenin ‘it was not the new Bolshevism but the old tsarism from which Russia, after six years, was bleeding’.103 After all, drawing from World revolution, James noted that ‘planned economy, much more than the actual overthrow of Capitalism and the political seizure of power, is the most difficult task that faces a revolutionary party’.104 Hence, the anti-colonial struggle of the CCP would face similar issues in the struggle for state power and how ‘the violence in face of which the imperialist power retreats … can burst out after the imperialist departure’.105 It was essential in a planned economy of state capitalism to avoid bureaucratic rigidity and the centralization of the party form by demanding ceaseless and vigilant checks from below.106 The role of intellectuals caught between revolution and counter-revolution would also be crucial. So, too, was the dialectic between Black resistance and class struggle. Black radicalism was clearly at work in the Ghanaian revolution because ‘the racial consciousness which has been so mercilessly injected into the Negro is today a source of action and at the same time of discipline’.107 Again, the social structures emergent from racial capitalism become a means of agential force and self-activity for subaltern classes. But ‘[t]he basis of this unity was not in its black skins, but the unity of the conditions under which it lived’ as the ‘cementing power’ of revolution in Ghana.108 As summed up in James's conversations with Trotsky, in Mexico in 1939, Marxist analysis gives an insight into the development of Black liberation like ‘nothing else can’ when it comes to addressing the basis of economic struggle and the fight for the abolition of racial discrimination.109 Summarizing aptly from Callinicos, the citizen of the ‘Black Atlantic’ in C. L. R. James developed a critique of contemporary capitalism and reconstructed the history of Black radicalism, all as part of a process of class emancipation.110
An important bookend to the above critique of the domestication of revolutions and racial capitalism is the foray into literary economy through an engagement with Herman Melville's Moby Dick that James produced while detained by the United States Department of Justice on Ellis Island in 1952. The vision of the world to come that is anticipated in Moby Dick is ‘written across continents in letters of blood and iron’ with a focus on the processes of racialization at the centre of the novel.111 Captain Ahab is taken as the embodiment of totalitarianism, the ascendancy of science and the mastery of Nature. Through the narrator, Ishmael, the fires of civilization's perdition are explored as well as the social hell of whiteness as a colour that induces terror across the oceans and continents of the globe. As Melville relays in Moby Dick, whiteness has accumulated associations with whatever is honourable or sublime, conveying pre-eminence, dominion, prestige, majesty or divinity—for example, ‘giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe’. Nevertheless there lurks ‘an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood’.112 Through the appalling whiteness of the whale, then, James picks up on the racialization processes at the centre of the novel: ‘[S]ymbolise whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealised significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul’.113 Hence, for James, Moby Dick and its reflections on the selling of dried human heads as curios, its ruminations on scalping, and its representation of whiteness as a synecdoche for barbarism come to represent the imperial vision at the heart of civilization and ‘the extermination of the alien as a malignant pest’.114 In Moby Dick there is a history of the ‘untold blood and treasure’ of the modern social hell of capital and its origins in the condition of primitive accumulation.115 Extending this literary economy approach, it is not coincidental that the racialized thread in the tapestry of Herman Melville's Moby Dick especially pervades Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to produce a diptych on the racialized origins of capital and its bloody frontiers of expansion across the terraqueous globe.116
Conclusion: die-hard theory
Carr once quipped that ‘theories die hard and frequently outlive the conditions out of which they arose’.117 My contribution here has been to reflect on two main accounts of theorizations of world order in IR and IPE that have become dominant at the expense of excluded and silenced contributions. These two counts of die-hard theories have been 1) the anarchic theory of world order offered by Waltz and 2) the pathway to political economy and world revolution offered by Carr himself. My argument has been that these two approaches to world order theorizing in IR and IPE have mainstreamed contributions to Marxist political economy. Controversially, these balance-of-power takes on the international system can be regarded as imitators of the more complex critical theorists that they echo, namely Bukharin and James.
What is obscured by the two counts of imitation is the degree to which historical materialist analyses of the anarchically structured world economy, on the one hand, and racial capitalism through the uneven development of world revolution, on the other, are necessary to understanding world order. The ‘slavish breed of imitators’ examined here emerges from a milieu embedded within mainstream theory. Taking the first of my imitators in the form of structural realism, Marxism is assumed to refer to a set of variables that exist externally to one other; only on the basis of such separation (or ontological exteriority) can ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ come into contact. As Richard Ashley forewarned as long ago as the 1980s, the result is that such theorists uncritically take over ‘the advanced capitalist state's own public legitimations’ to naturalize and universalize a given order.118 The second imitator to beware of is far more interesting in delivering a form of classical realism and a pathway to political economy, but one that still emerges from a certain dominant milieu. Here, as Ashley also usefully reminds us, a life of participation in statecraft is evident, and thereafter the relay from foreign office to academia, to reveal a certain level of organic intellectuality reflected in specific silences of the tradition it interprets.119 Emblematic here is Carr's stress in What is history? on ‘those peoples which have succeeded in organizing their society in some degree [and] cease to be primitive savages and enter into history’.120 But compare the tone in the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, drafted in 1960, by Carr in What is history? with the lectures delivered by James, also in 1960, at the Adult Education Centre in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and published as Modern politics. The latter book (suppressed in its home country) resonates with the theme of subaltern class self-activity through Black radicalism, class struggle and the women's movement in shaping modern politics.121 As Lenin surmised, we have here the clear divide between armchair force, on the one hand, and living, active force on the other hand.122 The case for the relevance and pertinence of historical materialism as an explanatory approach to capitalism is left for academic study and the elucidation of policy.123 As Fred Halliday suggested in the pages of International Affairs, ‘if we should avoid the conceit of being wholly abstracted from contemporary events and changes, it is often by being less involved in immediate debate that a social science can contribute most to the elucidation of policy issues’.124
What if, then, there was a necessarily historical materialist moment—or encounter—within considerations of the anarchically structured world economy that ensured a genuine Marxist curiosity in engaging with and addressing some of the existing blind spots and exclusions in IR and IPE? Could this lead to gate-opening political economy, with a focus on inducing dialogue by furthering critical debate, rather than gate-keeping the mainstream? What if, in 1936, David Davies had been willing to appoint a Black radical—C. L. R. James—as the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth? And if James had accepted, how different would the fairy tales of international theory now look? Would there now be a C. L. R. James Chair, rather than an E. H. Carr Chair, in International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth? Drawing on the inspiration of the citizen of the ‘Black Atlantic’, would a focus on world revolution and uneven development at the centre of the making of the international states-system be our priority in the reconstruction of world order studies, attentive to the history of Black radicalism and the process of class emancipation? Would there be recognition in the structural theory of anarchy of the fusion of the economic competition between capitals and the military rivalries between states? Would there be an amplified and wholly present analysis of pan-African revolt as part of a focus on global Black resistance and class relations constitutive of racial capitalism? Would there be space for literary economy as pivotal to the critique of capitalism through a rumination on Herman Melville's Moby Dick and wider literary sources of empire? These are some of the academic and policy questions today for radicalizing past and present world order studies.
Footnotes
The slogan Imitatores! Servum pecus is a reference from Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 [1894], intro. Ernest Mandel, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 305, footnote†, that paraphrases the Roman poet Horace, to describe followers of the political economist David Ricardo as a ‘slavish breed of imitators’.
Randall Germain, ‘E. H. Carr and IPE: an essay in retrieval’, International Studies Quarterly, 63: 4, 2019, p. 952, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz065; and Randall Germain, ‘Nearly modern IPE? Insights from IPE at mid-century’, Review of International Studies 47: 4, 2021, p. 535, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210521000309.
Germain, ‘E. H. Carr and IPE’, p. 956.
Doreen Massey, For space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 62–4.
Fred Halliday, ‘The pertinence of imperialism’, in Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith, eds, Historical materialism and globalization: essays on continuity and change (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 77.
Juliet Hooker, Theorizing race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois and Vasconcelos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 15.
Ian Bruff, ‘The politics of comparing capitalisms’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53: 6, 2021, pp. 1273–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X21997125.
This relational approach is developed in more detail in Adam David Morton, ‘The Limits of Sociological Marxism?’, Historical Materialism 21: 1, 2013, pp. 129–58, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341284.
Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the past: power and the production of history (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 96; Robert Vitalis, White world order, Black power politics: the birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Kathryn Starnes, Fairy tales and International Relations: a folklorist reading of IR textbooks (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 12–36.
Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 8, 130.
Stuart Hall, ‘C. L. R. James: a portrait’ [1992], in Stuart Hall, Selected writings on race and difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), p. 274.
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, Global capitalism, global war, global crisis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 3–23.
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, ‘Gate-opening political economy’, International Relations 35: 1, 2021, pp. 188–94, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117821991878.
Ken Booth, ‘Problem-solvers of the world, unite! Waltz and the critical project’, Australian Journal of Political Science 49: 3, 2014, p. 563, https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2014.937377.
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 140.
Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy [1917], intro. V. I. Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1929), pp. 28, 39.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 54, footnote 1.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 10.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 17; Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of international politics: a response to my critics’ [1986], in Kenneth N. Waltz, Realism and international politics (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 43.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 69.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 97.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 8.
Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of international politics’, p. 78 and Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Realist thought and neorealist theory’ [1990], in Waltz, Realism and international politics, p. 54.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 94.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 91.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 99.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 95.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 991, emphasis added.
Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and global political economy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009), p. 52.
Waltz, Theory of international politics, p. 34, footnote *.
Extending Marx's theory of anarchy, see Justin Rosenberg, The empire of civil society: a critique of the realist theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 142–58.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 115.
Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Toward a theory of the imperialist state’ [1915], in Nikolai Bukharin, Selected writings on the state and the transition to socialism, trans. and ed. Richard B. Day (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), p. 27; and Nikolai Bukharin, ‘The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ [1919], in Nikolai Bukharin, The politics and economics of the transition period, trans. Oliver Field, ed. Kenneth K. Tarbuck (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 37.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, pp. 61, 120.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 93.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 53.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 58.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 100; Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Imperialism and the accumulation of capital’ [1924], in Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the accumulation of capital, ed. and intro. Kenneth J. Tarbuck, trans. Rudolf Wichmann (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 206, 216–17.
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline [1916], in V. I. Lenin, Collected works, vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress, 1974), original emphasis.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, pp. 95, 112–13, 147–8.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, pp. 145, 137.
Bukharin, Imperialism and world economy, p. 169.
Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Imperialism and communism’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 14, 1936, pp. 563–77.
Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Theory and practice from the standpoint of dialectical materialism’ [1931], in Nikolai Bukharin (ed.) Science at the crossroads: papers from the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, 1931 (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 29–30, emphasis added.
Callinicos, Imperialism and global political economy, pp. 50–52.
E. H. Carr, ‘The legend of Bukharin’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 Sept. 1974, pp. 989–90. On Luxemburg, see Andreas Bieler et al., ‘The enduring relevance of Rosa Luxemburg's The accumulation of capital’, Journal of International Relations and Development 19: 3, 2016, pp. 420–47, https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.18; and on Gramsci, Adam David Morton, Unravelling Gramsci: hegemony and passive revolution in the global political economy (London: Pluto, 2007).
Alex Callinicos, ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20: 4, 2007, pp. 533–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570701680464.
Bieler and Morton, Global capitalism, global war, global crisis, pp. 3–23.
Tamara Deutscher, ‘E. H. Carr—a personal memoir’, New Left Review I/137, 1983, p. 84.
Michael Cox, ‘Introduction’, in E. H. Carr, The twenty years' crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. xxx.
Cox, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxv.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, 1919–1939, p. 65. On the merits of Lukács, see Sırma Altun et al., ‘The life-nerve of the dialectic: György Lukács and the metabolism of space and nature’, Review of International Political Economy, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2022.2032267.
Michael Cox, ‘Will the real E. H. Carr please stand up?’, International Affairs 75: 3, 1999, p. 647, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.00098.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: the making of the black radical tradition [1983] (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 5, 313.
Selma James, ‘Striving for clarity and influence: the political legacy of C. L. R. James’, in Selma James, Sex, race, and class—the perspective of winning: a selection of writings, 1952–2011 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), p. 284.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, p. 27; Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 137–8.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, p. 7.
E. H. Carr, Nationalism and after [1945](London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 12.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, p. 71; Carr, Nationalism and after, p. 11; E. H. Carr, What is history? [1961], 2nd edition, ed. R. W. Davies (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 83.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, p. 50.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, p. 58.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, pp. 194–5; E. H. Carr, Conditions of peace (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 102.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 106.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 241.
E. H. Carr, The Soviet impact on the western world (London: Macmillan, 1946) and E. H. Carr, The new society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 46, 58.
Carr, The Soviet impact, p. 48; Carr, The new society, pp. 46, 58.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 12; Carr, The new society, p. 36.
Carr, The new society, p. 31.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 271.
E. H. Carr, ‘The moral foundations of world order’, in Ernest Llewellyn Woodward et al., Foundations for world order (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1949), p. 271.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, pp. 218–19.
Carr, Nationalism and after, p. 34.
Carr, ‘The moral foundations of world order’: p. 71.
Carr, The twenty years' crisis, pp. 68, 148; Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 19, footnote 1.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 209.
‘Opening remarks by High Representative Josep Borrell at the inauguration of the pilot programme’, European Union External Action (13 Oct. 2022), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/european-diplomatic-academy-opening-remarks-high-representative-josep-borrell-inauguration_en. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 28 Feb. 2023.)
Carr, The new society, p. 80.
Carr, The new society, p. 96.
C. L. R. James, ‘Revolution and the Negro’ [1939], in Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc, eds, C. L. R. James and revolutionary Marxism: selected writings of C. L. R. James, 1939–1949 (New York: Humanities Press, 1994), p. 77.
E. H. Carr, ‘Review of World revolution, 1917–1936: the rise and fall of the Communist International by C. L. R. James’, International Affairs 16: 5, 1937, pp. 819–20.
Carr, Nationalism and after, p. 17.
Christian Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in imperial Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 106.
See E. H. Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); and E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Macmillan, 1984).
Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in imperial Britain, p. 212. For more on Serge, see Adam David Morton, ‘The Urban Revolution in Victor Serge’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108: 6, 2018, pp. 1554–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1471387.
Carr, The Soviet impact, p. 116.
C. L. R. James, World revolution, 1917–1936: the rise and fall of the Communist International [1937], ed. Christian Høgsbjerg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 353.
James, World revolution, p. 84.
V. I. Lenin, ‘Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party: report of the Central Committee, March 18’ [1919], in V. I. Lenin, Collected works, vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress, 1969), p. 153, original emphasis.
James, World revolution, p. 166.
James, World revolution, pp. 94–5.
James, World revolution, pp. 189, 296–301.
James, World revolution, pp. 153–97, 372.
Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in imperial Britain, p. 177.
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution [1938] (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 311.
C. L. R. James, A history of pan-African revolt [1938] (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), p. 58.
James, The Black Jacobins, p. xvii.
James, The Black Jacobins, p. xix.
George Lawson, Anatomies of revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 7.
James, The Black Jacobins, p. 230.
James, The Black Jacobins, p. 98; C. L. R. James, The life of Captain Cipriani: an account of British government in the West Indies [1932] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 104.
C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution [1977] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, p. 160.
James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, pp. 170–71.
James, World revolution, p. 296. Yet also see the underrated albeit, again, later essay that looks at theories of primitive socialist accumulation: E. H. Carr, ‘Revolution from above’, New Left Review I/46, 1968, pp. 17–27.
James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, p. 211.
James, World revolution, p. 298 and C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, State capitalism and world revolution [1950] (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).
James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, p. 47, emphasis added.
James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, pp. 42, 48.
George Breitman, ed., Leon Trotsky on Black nationalism and self-determination (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), pp. 41–2, 55.
Alex Callinicos, Theories and narratives: reflections on the philosophy of history (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 201.
C. L. R. James, Mariners, renegades and castaways: the story of Herman Melville and the world we live in [1953] (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2001), pp. 12–13, 90.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick [1851] (London: Harper Collins, 2010), pp. 193–4.
Melville, Moby Dick, p. 197.
James, Mariners, renegades and castaways, p. 143.
James, Mariners, renegades and castaways, p. 12.
See Adam David Morton, ‘A geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space’, Political Geography, no. 91, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102486; and Adam David Morton, ‘The warp of the world: geographies of space and time in The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 5, 2015, pp. 831–49, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815604919.
Carr, Conditions of peace, p. 67.
Richard K. Ashley, ‘Three modes of economism’, International Studies Quarterly 27: 4, 1983, p. 490, https://doi.org/10.2307/2600557.
Richard K. Ashley, ‘The poverty of neorealism’, International Organization 38: 2, 1984, p. 275, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300026709.
Carr, What is history?, p. 127.
C. L. R. James, Modern politics [1960] (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).
V. I. Lenin, ‘A contribution to the history of the question of the dictatorship’ [1920], in V. I. Lenin, Collected works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress, 1966), p. 359.
Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 72–3.
Fred Halliday, ‘International Relations and its discontents’, International Affairs 71: 4, 1995, pp. 735–6, https://doi.org/10.2307/2625095.
Author notes
This article was presented as a paper at the ‘Global orders: past and present’ workshop, Australian National University, Canberra (15–16 Sept. 2022); at the Political Economy Centre, University of Manchester (26 Oct. 2022) where the author was a Hallsworth Visiting Professor; at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, Nottingham (7 Feb. 2023); at the 13th Australian International Political Economy workshop, Melbourne (9–10 Feb. 2023); and at the International Studies Association annual convention, Montréal (15–18 March 2023). I would like to thank Sırma Altun, Andreas Bieler, Chris Hesketh, George Lawson, Madelaine Moore, Robert Smith and Kathryn Starnes, as well as this journal's anonymous reviewers and its editor, Andrew Dorman, for their feedback and support.
