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Vigilantism in international Relations: Kubálková, Cruickshank and Marxist theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Fred Halliday
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Extract

Over the past few years Vendulka Kubálková and Albert Cruickshank have produced a substantial and wide-ranging oeuvre on the issue of Marxism and international relations. Their first work, Marxism–Leninism and Theory of International Relations, published in. 1980, stressed the importance of engagement between these two bodies of thought, and this theme is restated in a more composed manner in their later Marxism and International Relations. The themes of these books have been reiterated in article forms and most recently in their essay “The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’” (in the July 1986 number of this Review). There is much that is disputable in their writings and their recent essay on the new cold war is no exception: but, before turning to some debatable aspects of their interpretation of the debate on the New Cold War, it may be worth emphasizing the points of more general value in their work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 1987 , pp. 163 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1987

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References

1. Respectively (London, 1980)Google Scholar, (Oxford, 1986).

2. For example, Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations, 5th edition (New York, 1978), pp. 48–57.Google Scholar

3. For discussion see Marcuse, Herbert, Soviet Marxism (London, 1958)Google Scholar.

4. Rozman, Gilbert, A Mirror for Socialism (London, 1985), especially pp. 259–65Google Scholar; Gellner, Ernest, ‘Soviets Against Wittfogel’ in Hall, John (ed.), States in History (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. See also Hough, Jerry, The Strugglefor the Third World (Washington, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hill, Christopher, ‘The Bourgeois Revolutions in Soviet Scholarship’, New Left Review, 155, January–February 1986Google Scholar.

5. Thus Kubalkova and Cruickshank do not even mention the most competent available survey of Marxism writings on international relations—Molnar, Miklos, Marx, Engels et la Politique Inter-nationale (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar.

6. Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, gives a magisterial survey of the ‘critical’ dimensions of Hegel's thought.

7. For a lucid assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Frankfurt School see Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

8. “The ‘New Cold War’”, Review of International Studies, xii (1986), p. 171.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 176.

10. Thompson, E. P. and others, Exterminism and Cold War, edited by New Left Review (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

11. Bahro, Rudolf, From Red to Green (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

12. See the contributions by Williams, Davis and Halliday in Exterminism and Cold War.

13. Lenin's writings on this are ably discussed in Harding, Neil, Lenin's Political Thought, vol. 2 (London, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapters 2, 3 and 11.

14. Mandel, Ernest, ‘The Threat of Nuclear War and the Struggle for Socialism’, New Left Review, no. 141 (September-October 1983), p. 49.Google Scholar

15. “The ‘New Cold War’ ”, p. 174.

16. Kaldor, Mary, The Disintegrating West (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Frank, Andre Gunder, The European Challenge (Nottingham, 1983)Google Scholar; Chomsky, Noam, Towards A New Cold War (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

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18. Most clearly stated in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Part 1.

19. For example Hall, John, Powers and Liberties (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolf, Eric, Europe and the Nations without History (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

20. Tom Kemp surveys the economic aspects in Theories of Imperialism (London, 1967)Google Scholar. Part III of Semmel, Bernard (ed.), Marxism and the Science of War (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar covers the social and military aspects.

21. Warren, Bill, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London, 1982)Google Scholar, chapter 3 provides a lucid Marxist critique of Lenin's writings on imperialism.

22. “The ‘New Cold War’ ”, p. 174.

23. World Marxist Review (May 1984), pp. 116–18. According to the reviewer my book is ‘punctuated with anti-Soviet snarls’. He criticizes me for ascribing the cold war to conflict between social systems rather than to what in his view is the correct source, namely the nature of imperialism. Like Kubalkova and Cruickshank, the reviewer also sees it as part of his duty to delve into motives: ‘Despite the quasi-scientific and not quite intelligible jargon, Halliday's design is clear: he wants people to believe that it is possible to combine lies with truth. This eclectic function is the basis for the thesis of “shared but unequal responsibility’ ” (p. 118).

24. “The ‘New Cold War’ ”, p. 175.

25. Thus, in my Threat from the East? Soviet Policy from Afghanistan and Iran to the Horn of Africa (London, 1982)Google Scholar, I try, on the basis of available information, to evaluate the validity of the thesis that Soviet instigation lay behind the late 1970s upheavals in the Arc of Crisis. No-one has, to my knowledge, contested in printed the argument that I advance there.

26. Holloway, David, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (Yale, 1982)Google Scholar; Steele, Jonathan, The Limits of Soviet Power (London, 1984).Google Scholar

27. See for example , Roy and Medvedev, Zhores in Exterminism and Cold War (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

28. There is no chapter on International Relations in: Roszak, Theodor (ed.), The Dissenting Academy (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Pateman, Trevor (ed.), Counter Course (London, 1972)Google Scholar; or Ollmann, Bertell and Vernoff, Edward (eds.), The Left Academy (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

29. The conventional presentation of Marxist theory on north-south relations presents only the ‘development of underdevelopment’ or dependency approach. The alternative ‘development of capitalism’ approach, epitomized by Warren, is given far less attention.

30. A fine example of critical but appreciative treatment of Marxism is Keohane, Robert, After Hegemony (New York, 1984)Google Scholar where a range of authors including Marx, Gramsci, Lenin, and more recent writers such as Fred Block and Harry Magdoff are discussed in a calm and positive tone. A similar approach is to be found in Susan Strange discussion of Ernest Mandel and others in Casino Capitalism (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

31. An important study of the internationalization of class conflict within specific states is given in Vogler, Carolyn, The Nation State (London, 1985)Google Scholar.