Marxism, inevitable war, and Khrushchev’s nuclear revolution

In the original formation of Marxist thought, international power politics and war were classified as aspects of the superstructure: as effects of the class conflict engendered by economic modes of production, rather than as independent phenomena. As Berki puts it, ‘international relations and conflict inhabit a world at a second remove from relations and conflicts that are really significant’.Footnote ⁹ To be sure, Marx, and particularly Engels, analysed the problem of modern war episodically, and indeed Engels paid close attention to it in his attempts to conceive of a military strategy of proletarian revolution. Both of them, moreover, acknowledged that armed conflict seemed to characterise intersocietal relations since the beginning of history, and that it therefore might derive from some political source independent of modern economic relations. But war for them remained secondary to the pressing issue of nineteenth-century capitalist class conflict. It would disappear as a problem after the working-class revolution, the objective to which they naturally devoted their primary political attention.Footnote ¹⁰

As several writers have suggested, Marx and Engels were surely influenced by the environment in which they wrote, a Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century that was characterised above all by apparent great-power stability – there had been no major war since Napoleon – and the stark inequalities and working-class turmoil in the emerging capitalist states. For them, the dominant story of their time was severe industrial exploitation in Europe (and the United States) and the rise of domestic political movements in response. The international scene was less convulsive. That, according to this narrative, was why they were notoriously unable to anticipate the decisions by working-class parties across Europe to support their nations’ march to war in the summer of 1914.Footnote ¹¹

There is more to that story, however. Engels discerned that major war could serve as an agent of progressive change, which was how he regarded the French revolution and Napoleonic wars. As the conservative diplomats at Vienna feared, international turmoil could foment domestic revolution, just as internal crises could trigger war. Marx and Engels agreed that certain kinds of wars, especially those fought for the achievement of bourgeois national independence from feudal imperial rule, were certainly on the right side of history.Footnote ¹²

However, these kind of domestic political crises and regional wars were not triggering the general political upheaval both men wished to see.Footnote ¹³ As W. B. Gallie put it, perhaps only major war among the leading capitalist states in Europe would provide ‘the opportunity, or act as the catalyst for, an effective revolutionary uprising’.Footnote ¹⁴ This led to a well-known intra-Marxist debate during the early twentieth century, but for Russian revolutionaries operating during the First World War, the answer was obvious. War was the encompassing condition of European politics, and it was war that would clear the way for revolutionary action.Footnote ¹⁵

The two dominant figures of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, had no doubts about this. Trotsky’s account of the Russian revolution, and his role in it, states simply that the Great War created the necessary conditions for Bolshevik victory in 1917. The ‘entire course of the revolution’, he argued in The Lessons of October, would have been ‘altogether different, if at the moment of revolution there had not been in the country a broken and discontented army of many millions’.Footnote ¹⁶

Moreover, Trotsky’s more academic consideration of international politics regarded great-power conflict as an agent of progressive change, something he believed was taking place at that moment. His idea of uneven and combined development regarded the unbalanced competition among more and less developed states as a particularly volatile feature of international capitalism. Central to this argument was the whip of external necessity, the pressure upon states to maximise their wealth in order to develop the technologies and armies required to defend themselves against more modern rivals. The whip of external necessity was an essential part of UCD because it explained the urgency with which governments sought to modernise, and their frequent focus upon, as Baruch Knei-Paz puts it, ‘economic-military’ rather than ‘economic-social’ development.Footnote ¹⁷ Trotsky foresaw a world in which developed states would be in incessant competition at the international level, while their working classes simultaneously worked for revolution domestically. War was the ‘inevitable’ outcome of a hyper-competitive international capitalism, and it would fittingly prove the catalyst of its demise.

It was this latter insight that led Trotsky to endorse the Bolshevik project to seize power and establish a Soviet state immediately in October 1917, even though the working class of Russia was miniscule and there appeared to be no corresponding revolutions erupting elsewhere in Europe. As Trotsky stresses in his history of the revolution, had Lenin not seized the opportunity to grab power in the autumn of 1917, the revolutionary cause in Russia would have ebbed away and then been crushed by imperialist forces. Trotsky oversaw the creation of the Red Army and worked tirelessly for the survival of the new Soviet regime because he believed that only as a functioning and defensible state could the USSR act as a base to export revolution throughout postwar industrial Europe on a permanent basis. The spreading of revolution to the rest of the industrialised world, in turn, would be necessary if the Soviet state were to survive over the long term.Footnote ¹⁸

Lenin, if anything, placed war even more centrally within his political project than Trotsky. It was his view, expressed before and after the revolution, that the imperialist stage of capitalism, with its frantic competition for territory, resources, and markets, made interstate war inevitable. Indeed, he called the period of late capitalism (as he thought it would be) the ‘epoch of wars and revolutions’. As Margot Light and Bernard Semmel show, Lenin believed that three kinds of wars would define this epoch. Wars among the imperialist states were the ‘locomotive of history’, the international events that would play a decisive part in determining when and where revolutions occurred. Wars of national liberation, bourgeois or socialist, took place on the domestic level, and reflected the dialectical advance of political history. Finally, there were the wars that imperialist states would wage against socialist ones. By exporting revolution throughout Europe and North America the new USSR would give the capitalists further reason to attack it, and the new socialist state was far from being able to defend itself against such an assault.Footnote ¹⁹

Lenin, therefore, regarded war and revolution as inexorable outcomes of the contemporary order no less, and probably more, than did Trotsky. He believed that intra-imperialist war was inevitable, and that proletarian victory over the bourgeois state was ‘impossible’ without revolution. ‘True Marxism’, Lenin wrote, ‘was based on violence’.Footnote ²⁰ Socialism in one country was not a policy of coexisting forever peacefully with the capitalists, but one of coping with the whip until the global revolution began.Footnote ²¹

The process of justifying, or rationalising, this preference for state survival over spreading proletarian revolution reached a new level with Lenin’s successor Stalin. Though he had, of course, repudiated Trotsky, writing him out of Soviet history and eventually ordering his assassination in Mexico, he adopted Trotsky’s idea of the whip of external necessity in toto. Stalin’s view, in hindsight probably an accurate one, was that the USSR had to industrialise rapidly in the 1930s lest it be crushed in the next intra-imperialist war.Footnote ²² That meant harnessing national resources toward the single objective of developing modern armed forces, avoiding blatant support of foreign revolutionary movements for fear of provoking the capitalists, and, for Stalin’s own sociopathic purposes, destroying every last remnant of internal resistance to either his industrialisation campaign or his own position as dictator of the USSR. Lenin’s decision to privilege socialism in one country over the advancement of world revolution had been driven by his belief that the inevitability of imperialist war threatened the Soviet experiment and hence socialism; Stalin took this logic to its extreme in the face of the Nazi threat.

The prospect of atomic war led many in the West to demand an alternative to an interstate order that seemed inexorably to lead to a nuclear Third World War, and this problem would soon be discussed in Moscow, as we shall see. For Stalin, however, nothing had really changed. In 1947 he denounced talk of peaceful coexistence, which could not withstand capitalist aggression.Footnote ²³ And not long before his death, Stalin wrote about the ‘peace movement’ and the arguments of the Comintern intellectual Eugen Varga, who suggested that intra-capitalist war was no longer certain. It was of course good, ‘even very good’, that movements in the West were demanding peace and threatening to remove ‘warmongering’ governments. But ‘this will not suffice to remove the unavoidability of war between the capitalist countries’, Stalin said. ‘To eliminate the unavoidablility of war, it is necessary to destroy imperialism.’Footnote ²⁴ Here, in a few words, is an apt summary of the Soviet/Marxist attitude toward war and power politics up to 1953.Footnote ²⁵

The three dominant figures of early Soviet politics – Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin – all regarded major war as an inevitable, and the central, feature of international relations, and so they naturally chose to incorporate it fully into their approach toward socialism at home and policy abroad. The threat of imperialist war and the ensuing extinguishing of the Soviet state pushed the USSR’s leaders steadily toward survivalist policies that shelved the imperative of fomenting violent revolution in the industrialised world. But this did not mean, at all, that they had abandoned Marxist interpretations of world politics altogether. Their belief in inevitable intra-imperialist war and the whip of external necessity merely intensified Lenin’s and Stalin’s drive to create a defensible Soviet state, from which it might someday become possible to resurrect a project of global revolution. In Stalin’s case, these assumptions surely underlay his unhesitating rejection of American overtures after the war to build a new world order, and his continuing belief that a third world war was inevitable even in age of atomic bombs.

Stalin’s death in early 1953 preceded by only a few months the Soviet test of a thermonuclear device, matching the US effort of a year earlier. The bombs that both superpowers had now built were capable of unleashing a destructive blast perhaps a thousand times as powerful as the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both nations began working to mass-produce these weapons, and to develop long-range missiles that could deliver them to the other side in a matter of hours. This marked the advent of the nuclear revolution, whereby a total war (like the Second World War), fought with the most destructive weapons at each belligerent’s disposal, could lead to the social and political extinction of all nations fighting it and threaten the existence of the human race.Footnote ²⁶

Even before Stalin’s death, Georgi Malenkov, who would for a time emerge as the leading contender to replace him, argued that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that the competition between the two Cold War powers would have to become a peaceful one, and that this was a competition the USSR could win. This issue constituted one of the main issues of contention between Malenkov and his apparent chief rival for power, the long-time foreign minister Vlachyslav Molotov. In a 1955 debate Molotov earthily took Malenkov to task for his revisionism, declaring that ‘Marx foretold the end of capitalism, so anyone who said that nuclear war threatened the end of civilisation didn’t have his head on his shoulders, but at the other end of the body’.Footnote ²⁷ Molotov was only iterating the core assumption of Soviet policy since Trotsky: the end of capitalism would come through war, so to say that war was no longer possible was to reject Marx.Footnote ²⁸

Khrushchev, early in the succession struggle, sided with Molotov: but this was only for tactical reasons. As Malenkov’s position receded, Khrushchev switched sides and began to attack Molotov on this very point. The veteran foreign minister’s reply, as historian David Holloway shows, confirms for us his traditional position:

Footnote ²⁹

Not long after his rise to the top of the Kremlin in early 1955, Khrushchev decided that Molotov’s thinking had become obsolete: nuclear weapons had invalidated the traditional Soviet view of interstate war. At the twentieth party congress in the summer of 1956, he announced his decision. The advent of thermonuclear weaponry had put an end to the presumption that violent conflict with the capitalist world was inevitable. Now, the policy of the Soviet Union and the communist world at large must be one of ‘peaceful coexistence’, whereby the two camps would eschew direct conflict and learn to live with another indefinitely. It was that, Khrushchev plainly said, ‘or the most destructive war in history. There is no third way.’Footnote ³⁰ This new order, as he spelled out at the congress and in later declarations, would require greater cooperation between the two sides, the formal rejection of war as a suitable means of resolving international conflict, and the strengthening of the principles of national sovereignty and non-interference in the domestic affairs of all nations.

Peaceful coexistence represented a thorough renunciation of the core Soviet approach to war and conflict. Not only was the inevitability of war, or at least war between the two Cold War superpowers, ruled out; so was the imperative of actively fomenting violent revolution in the industrial West – there was no other way to interpret Khrushchev’s emphasis upon sovereignty and non-interference.Footnote ³¹ More orthodox communist regimes, notably the People’s Republic of China, regarded peaceful coexistence as little more than ‘selling out to the capitalists’, as Margot Light has put it.Footnote ³² Molotov’s earlier criticisms remained on target: if coexisting with the West was now the pre-eminent objective, then what really was the USSR’s purpose? Almost immediately, Khrushchev’s position was denounced as ‘revisionism’ not only by Marxists in China and elsewhere, but also by Soviet military and political critics of Khrushchev (who would later employ this charge when deposing him in 1964).Footnote ³³

Khrushchev answered this by insisting that the victory of socialism would now come by means of non-military competition and turning the attention of Soviet foreign policy toward the ‘Third World’. The USSR would win its struggle with the West by outperforming it in peaceful pursuits, such as technological innovation and providing a decent material life for the masses. This is what Khrushchev meant when he told several Western diplomats that ‘We will bury you’ in November of that year. Moreover, insofar as the two superpowers would continue to compete aggressively, this would now take place in the decolonising world, where, Khrushchev reckoned, the Soviet Union could spread a socialist vision to peoples inclined toward anti-Western politics. The abolition of capitalism, wrote Kara, would come about ‘not as a result of war with the socialist countries but as a result of the maturing of changes that are an objective necessity with the capitalist countries’.Footnote ³⁴ As Light notes, claims such as this, clearly at odds with previous Soviet policy, represented ‘an act of theoretical cap-doffing to an outdated tenet which cannot be explicitly abandoned’.Footnote ³⁵

The nuclear revolution removed systemic war from the Soviet programme, and Khrushchev’s recognition of this reality, which was not predetermined, was one of the most important political decisions of the twentieth century. But, as Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko show, he took a second, and equally important lesson from it as well.

Nuclear weapons threaten absolute destruction, but by that very fact they can provide for a very effective form of defence. By threatening nuclear retaliation, any state, once it has attained the bomb, can deter an attack on itself relatively easily, and it can do so without having to spend enormous sums, deploy large standing armies, or keep up with the most advanced technologies, as the case of China today shows.Footnote ³⁶ For decades, the Soviet Union had faced an international environment of danger and, at times, the real possibility of national extinction. Nuclear deterrence gave Khrushchev a means of solving this problem. In the late 1950s, following on from the implications of his peaceful coexistence announcement, Khrushchev declared that it was precisely this new kind of security that would permit the USSR to focus upon a new consumer economy, technological innovation, and spreading the Soviet model to the third world.Footnote ³⁷ Defence could be assured by deploying a small retaliatory arsenal, freeing up billions of roubles to pursue ‘economic-social’ development.Footnote ³⁸

Khrushchev’s policies during the 1950s provide us with a vivid example of the collision between a conventional Marxist doctrine undergirded by the whip of external necessity and the spectre of thermonuclear war. Not only did he conclude that nuclear war had rendered the idea of inevitable war obsolete; he also envisioned, in his declaration of peaceful coexistence, a different kind of international order in which the whip of external necessity would be eclipsed by economic competition in a geopolitically stable realm. Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin all believed that the whip of external necessity still obtained, and so an ongoing and convulsive interstate order in which war would someday occur. Khrushchev showed that it was possible for a Marxist to conclude otherwise.

Uneven and combined development and the nuclear dilemma

The nuclear revolution persuaded Khrushchev that war must no longer be inevitable and that the unique threat of nuclear destruction necessitated a new Marxist conception of international politics. In this second section, I argue that the implications of this insight are fundamental and must be accounted for in any contemporary Marxian understanding of the international. To make this case specifically, I summarise Justin Rosenberg’s writings about uneven and combined development (UCD), and show how the whip of external necessity, upon which Trotsky’s conception of UCD relies, is transformed by the nuclear problem. I then conclude, following in particular an important 1971 article by Berki, that this transformation forces a revival of classic Marxist notions of supranational human unity.

Rosenberg has proposed, in several recent and path-breaking writings, that Trotsky’s idea of UCD can provide us with both a clear means of explaining epochal events in modern international history and a theory of international politics superior to that of the Structural Realist theory of interstate anarchy.Footnote ³⁹ Let us summarise the main arguments of UCD as Trotsky, and Rosenberg, describe it. Conflict among societies is characterised by volatile competition for the resources necessary for development. It is not a conflict among undifferentiated and autonomous states, however, because at any moment in history there will always be some societies that are more advanced than others, and they pursue their wealth and resources in a system in which their economies are intertwined, to a greater or lesser degree, with one another. The picture of the international drawn by UCD is more integrative and dynamic than the one drawn by structural realists. It moves forward.

UCD relies upon two ‘laws’, ontologically akin to Realist laws like the Balance of Power. The first is the advantage of historical backwardness. This is simply the ability of less developed societies to appropriate advanced technologies and economic strategies rather than spending decades developing them themselves, allowing them to advance far more rapidly than would have been possible in isolation. ‘Almost without highways’, Trotsky wrote, ‘Russia was compelled to build railroads’, which it did overnight by borrowing technologies and expertise from the West.Footnote ⁴⁰

The word ‘compelled’ gives us a flavour of the second law, which of course is the whip of external necessity – the pressure upon states to make technological leaps in order to contend with their rivals, and therefore to acquire the economic means to do so. This policy is captured by Knei-Paz’s notion of ‘economic-military’ development: states prioritise military power and external security over domestic social welfare in their use of wealth and modern technologies. Trotsky emphasises that the whip applies most urgently to weaker states. The pressure upon them to develop lest they fall prey to more powerful ones pushes them to rush toward capitalism, a process that both integrates the whip with the advantage of historical backwardness, as his comment on ‘railroads’ indicates, and so intensifies the larger dynamic of UCD. Rosenberg also stresses this point: for him, the whip simply ‘compels weaker societies to adapt in order to survive’.Footnote ⁴¹

But the larger relevance of the whip of external necessity speaks to the problem of violent geopolitical competition in general: the fact that states qua states contend with one another in an incessantly dangerous environment, where a failure to keep up with technological advancements and to have enough funds to build a large military invites violent defeat at the hands of a more powerful adversary.Footnote ⁴² To put it another way: obey the whip or become relatively weaker, with all that implied in the twentieth century. Trotsky sees this pressure as a state’s ‘fierce struggle for existence’; Jamie Allinson describes it simply as ‘the need to survive in a competitive international system’.Footnote ⁴³ As Alexander Anievas shows, this imperative affected powerful countries as well as weaker ones during the first forty years of the twentieth century;Footnote ⁴⁴ after the Second World War, to take another example, the Soviet Union had just defeated Nazi Germany and occupied much of Europe, but its frantic race to develop the atomic bomb and match US capabilities during the early Cold War provides us with a textbook example of the whip at work.Footnote ⁴⁵

The interplay of the privilege of historical backwardness and the whip of external necessity, coming under the larger structural dynamic of UCD, gives both Trotsky and Rosenberg a powerful means of explaining the origins of the two most important events of the early twentieth century: the Russian revolution and the First World War. According to Trotsky, the startlingly rapid Russian development into a capitalist state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven in part by frantic fear of a rising Germany, but also by Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, established a small proletariat in major cities without any corresponding rise of a middle-class bourgeoisie or any spread of modernity whatsoever to the vast Russian countryside. This gave disproportionate political power to a radical working class and Marxist intelligentsia, particularly (as we have seen) at a time of devastating war and the moral bankruptcy of the Russian ruling class. Historical backwardness and geopolitical pressure, vivid and violent, weaved together seamlessly.Footnote ⁴⁶

In a recent article, Rosenberg puts forward a preliminary means of explaining the origins of the First World War along similar lines. For him, the particular circumstances of German development in a context of European UCD is crucial: Germany’s relatively late turn to industrial capitalism created internal political divisions long smoothed over in competitors like Britain and France, who were able to exploit their early advanced economic power to establish far-flung overseas empires. But its belated industrialisation also allowed Germany to take advantage of historical backwardness, thereby hastening its military development in the late nineteenth century. A politically immature Germany behind in the race for colonies but brimming with a modern industrial economy and a technologically advanced military was primed to demand an overturning of the European status quo.Footnote ⁴⁷

In both cases geopolitical pressure, as it was conventionally and universally understood, plays a crucial role in the larger explanatory power of UCD. Neither analysis makes sense without incorporating the problem of major war, and the vivid spectre of national defeat it raised.Footnote ⁴⁸ The whip of external necessity is about obtaining the economic and technological means of waging major war, rather than leaving oneself outgunned and open to defeat. It is this core insight that must be stressed when asking how it is affected by the nuclear revolution.

We have suggested that the nuclear revolution fundamentally transforms attitudes about major war, and so therefore the very meaning of ‘geopolitical pressure’. Let us elaborate upon this claim and describe its effects upon contemporary international relations. Khrushchev concluded in the 1950s and 1960s that nuclear weapons do two things. First, he came to believe that a major war between the two superpowers would be a catastrophic disaster, unwinnable in any politically meaningful sense. The avoidance of great-power war became his overriding concern. Second, he concluded that even a small Soviet arsenal would provide his state with an effective and relatively inexpensive means of national protection. The United States, or any other state, would never deliberately launch a major war to threaten Soviet existence: the costs of doing so would be far greater than any benefits.Footnote ⁴⁹

Today, the nuclear revolution can wield conservative effects upon the foreign policies of major powers in precisely the same ways. Most obvious, industrialised, advanced states can either defend themselves by developing nuclear arsenals, or by allying themselves to nations that have done so: in either event they count on the existential danger of nuclear war to protect them.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus the problem of national security that lies at the centre of the whip of external necessity imperative can be dealt with without having to devote large amounts of wealth to military spending or racing to keep up with the latest technologies, as has been seen for decades in Europe, but is also now the case with China, which overcame its ‘backwardness’ quite readily by building a nuclear arsenal in the 1960s, and continues to spend comparatively little on its military.Footnote ⁵¹ All states, and particularly those with nuclear arsenals and their allies, possess a common and overriding interest to avoid major conflict and nuclear war.

What is more, because large industrial states no longer have to frantically prepare for major war, they are more easily able to concentrate upon ‘economic-social’ rather than ‘economic-military’ development, to focus upon development and innovation as Khrushchev hoped to do in the late 1950s.Footnote ⁵² This permits such states, of which contemporary China is again the most obvious example, to pay far less attention to the military advancement of its rivals than major powers did in previous eras, and to zero in on domestic economic growth. During the past three decades, China has not followed the Soviet model of the postwar era, racing to match US power. Instead, it has accepted US preponderance and prioritised economic growth, in the belief that its basic nuclear arsenal will provide it with security irrespective of the US lead.Footnote ⁵³ China may still call itself a communist country, but the last thing it wants is international convulsion, as this would threaten both its newfound wealth and its physical existence.

Thus, if the nuclear revolution and its effects on international politics are accepted as outlined above, it undermines or perverts every important element of Trotsky’s conception of the whip of external necessity. Nuclear weapons give major powers easy security and radically increase their aversion to major war. They therefore permit them to concentrate on social economic development rather than frantic military and technological competition; they incline them to suppress violent or convulsive change and support a conservative, institutional international order; and if a major war happens anyway it is now an irredeemable catastrophe rather than a normal event after which politics, and so the process of UCD, continue as usual.

Of course, the foregoing claims about the transformative effects of the nuclear revolution are not universally accepted.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nuclear strategists, particularly in the United States, argue that nuclear war remains politically sensible under certain conditions and that states have considered, and will continue to consider, waging it for rational political ends. This is a position generally associated with the right wing in the US, but if the whip as Trotsky characterised it is to remain salient with respect to geopolitical competition among the great powers today, its proponents must be prepared to make similar arguments. Trotsky was clear that the kind of war UCD foretold resulted not from accident or randomness but from the conventional material calculus facing states in his time: they prepare for, and fight, wars to prevail in their ‘fierce struggle for existence’. If this same kind of struggle continues to obtain despite the nuclear revolution, as the strategists argue, then UCD theorists must accept as well that states continue to have reason to wage nuclear war, and that they will do so for the same reasons that states fought in Trotsky’s day.Footnote ⁵⁵

This kind of argumentation is not normally associated with Marxist IR, to say the least, but if it wishes to maintain that the whip of external necessity continues to shape great power geopolitics, it cannot reject, or ignore it. If UCD theorists agree that nuclear weaponry makes major war among large nuclear powers unthinkable, and deterrence easy for them to sustain, the whip of external necessity simply cannot explain this kind of politics in the way Trotsky, and Rosenberg, want it to do. If they want therefore to reject these implications of the nuclear revolution, they must maintain that nuclear war remains politically meaningful. They could concede that even though nuclear war may no longer be politically meaningful, it could still happen: but this move would simply avoid the problem, by putting to one side Trotsky’s core assumption that war occurs because states deliberately resort to it as a means of survival, as well as his view that such a war is incorporated within a progressive political process.

UCD theorising claims that historical backwardness and the whip of external necessity explains international conflict among major states in a capitalist world better than any other structural theory. Today, the war that would ensue from such conflict would be fought among states that possess nuclear weapons. The implications of that must be confronted if UCD theorising is to apply in the contemporary era.

Back to basics: the supranational third way

Rosenberg revived the notion of UCD as a means of contending with Structural Realism, the prevailing theory of the international in IR. Central to his original argumentation was his claim that UCD provides us with a means of understanding systemic international change that Structural Realism does, and can, not. By accounting for the dynamics produced by competition among differentiated and intertwined nation-states, Rosenberg maintains, UCD is the first theoretical conception to capture the international in a way that cannot be reduced to a domestic counterpart.

The possession of nuclear weapons systems by many of these states raises fundamental problems for anyone attempting to use UCD to explain contemporary international politics. As I see it, this problem can be addressed in three ways.

First, it can accept that the nuclear revolution affects the practice of interstate politics along the lines proposed above. To do so, however, UCD theorising must discard the whip of external necessity and its associated assumption of regular interstate violence: it must get rid of Trotsky’s assumption that major states frenetically compete with one another to prepare for war, that it is a matter of course that such a war will occur, and that this war constitutes part of a historical process. By eliminating the whip, however, the larger dynamic Trotsky foresees in UCD comes to an end. If major nuclear war is a catastrophe rather than a political event, then UCD amounts to a characterisation of an order in which either this catastrophe simply takes place, and it is nothing other than a disaster, or it does not take place. Under the latter scenario, uneven and combined economic competition among powerful nation-states continues, and the privilege of historical backwardness obtains, but the conflict that ensues is contained beneath a static geopolitical condition.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some nations may increase their wealth and power, and others decline, but the concomitant military competition that Trotsky regarded as a necessary ingredient of UCD is constrained beneath the level of actual great-power war.

Second, it can reject the argument that the nuclear revolution has transformed interstate politics. This move would permit UCD theorists to retain the whip of external necessity, and so to regard the contemporary international order as subject to the same convulsive dynamics of economic and military competition as Trotsky identified a century ago. But they would also then have to agree with Trotsky’s view that a war produced by these convulsive forces would not constitute a senseless catastrophe but rather fit within a progressive historical process that would continue onward after such a war. As we have shown, Trotsky, like Lenin and Stalin, believed war was a consequence of inevitable imperialist conflict, and while none of them actively welcomed war they all regarded it as a natural feature of historical development.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was this view that Khrushchev rejected in 1956.

Third, it can reject interstate politics. Nuclear weapons demand the acceptance of either a static geopolitical order or the political utility of nuclear war for any materialist theorist who takes interstate great-power conflict as a given condition.Footnote ⁵⁸ For such Marxist theorists, there is nowhere else to turn, just as was the case in practice for the USSR.Footnote ⁵⁹ So as long as the state remains the unit in Rosenberg’s conception of the international – as long as he conceptualises the political order to be assessed as international – then he must choose between a UCD deprived of the whip and hence foreseeing only peaceful economic competition, or one in which nuclear war plays the same historical role that conventional war did for Trotsky.Footnote ⁶⁰

Yet as Berki, and more recently Andrew Davenport, remind us, there is no reason why a Marxist approach to international relations must wed itself to the interstate model. In his seminal article ‘On Marxian thought and the problem of international relations’, Berki develops several points highlighting the core conflicts between the original Marxist project and the embrace of the nation-state by twentieth-century Marxist-Leninists. Berki gleans from Marx that capitalism ‘perpetually engenders international conflict’, paving the way for the emergence of an alienated proletariat without national loyalty.Footnote ⁶¹ The internationalist character of the working class is taken as a given: it embodies the dialectical advancement beyond a capitalist system characterised precisely by the ongoing existence of ethnic and national divisions.

Indeed, Berki suggests, following Marx’s early writings, that intersocietal divisions and the wars fought under their banner are products of the international capitalist order, and so regarded equally by Marxism as doomed for the ash-heap of history.Footnote ⁶² ‘Nations themselves in Marxian theory’, Berki insists, ‘are not absolute, but historical, and hence ephemeral units.’Footnote ⁶³ What this means, and here Berki follows the ‘second-image’ reasoning of Kenneth Waltz’s foundational work Man, the State and War, is that the capitalist problematique cannot, by definition, be solved within an interstate order, even if all states became nominally socialist, a goal the Soviet Union ostensibly sought to achieve during the Cold War.Footnote ⁶⁴ An ‘economically integrated world’, Berki argues, ‘still consisting of separate nations is, whatever the internal structure of these nations, a capitalist world’. Globalised socialism, in a continuing interstate system, would simply be ‘the highest form of capitalism’.Footnote ⁶⁵

In his recent article ‘Marxism in IR: Condemned to a realist fate?’, Andrew Davenport picks up on this theme. By accepting ‘geopolitical fragmentation’ as a given condition, Davenport argues, Rosenberg (and other Marxian scholars) politically cede the entire field to Realism: Marxist analysis becomes a variant of Realism which stresses economic competition and change, but which lacks any political component to envision or demand something different from that fragmentation. As long as intersocietal competition, the multiplicity of the global order, is accepted, alternative theories such as UCD are useful to explain social change in the past but only ‘at the expense of effectively naturalising the Realist concept of political community’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Realism, Davenport notes, ‘there is not and never has been a global social subject’: this is a fact Realists purport to be comfortable with.Footnote ⁶⁷ But it is an odd position for a Marxist to take.

The tension between a cosmopolitan and supranational Marxism and one wedded to an international order of sovereign states is nothing new. Anti-nationalist Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg fought this battle a century ago, and were defeated by nationalists like Lenin who saw in her internationalism a recipe for the destruction of the revolution and total victory for the capitalists. This debate has not gone away.Footnote ⁶⁸

In 1916, Lenin and Trotsky could (and did) finesse the inconsistency between Marxist internationalism and their own focus on state survival by assuming that the intra-imperialist convulsion and war produced by forces such as uneven and combined development would lead to the violent unravelling of the interstate order, which the new Soviet state would work to foment. But as we have seen, today the violent unravelling of the interstate order portends nuclear war. Unless one is prepared to argue that such a war remains justifiable, then the finesse available to Marxists a century ago no longer is available.

This leaves the Marxist project with another place left to turn: cosmopolitan anti-nationalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ Berki argues for a supranational position that partakes of Marx’s original vision of human unity and, crucially, equates intersocietal conflict with the capitalist system.Footnote ⁷⁰ The case for this can be made on his own terms, as his approach offers a far more decisive alternative to mainstream IR theories, and breaks cleanly from the abject failure of socialisms in one country over the past century, above all that of the USSR. If one adds the implications of the nuclear revolution expressed above to his argument, however, Berki’s alternative becomes far more compelling. What is more, by placing the logic of supranational nuclear politics and human unity against the current neoliberal/interstate order, the neo-nationalisms this dynamic has produced, and the omnicidal warfare it portends, scholars interested in reviving the insights of Marxist IR have the opportunity to develop an original praxeology that speaks vividly to the demands of the twenty-first century rather than the history of the twentieth.

Biographical information

Campbell Craig is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University. He has held senior fellowships at Yale University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the European University Institute, and Bristol University, and is the author of several books, including, with Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: the Politics of Insecurity (Harvard). His forthcoming book (with Jan Ruzicka), on US unipolar preponderance and nuclear nonproliferation, will be published by Cornell University Press.