ing the Historical Sociology of 'the International', Marx, Trotsky and the Idea of U&CD, 25-02-11

8/3/2019 ing the Historical Sociology of 'the International', Marx, Trotsky and the Idea of U&CD, 25-02-11

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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex

Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the

idea of uneven and combined development

1

Theorising the historical sociology

of the international Marx,

Trotsky and the idea of uneven

and combined developmentLuke Cooper, University of Sussex

The recent upsurge of interest in Leon Trotskys novel idea of uneven and combined

development within International Relations (IR) has not simply found a new way to

challenge mainstream realist thinking with a social theory of the international. It has also

posed critical questions on the extent to which classical social theory provides us with the

intellectual tools we need for such a theory. Is Trotskys idea a breakthrough concept or didit share many of its methodological assumptions with Marxs original theory? This article

argues that Trotskys approach shared Marxs special form of multilinear historicism and

was premised on the idea of a philosophy of internal relations: the treatment of social and

natural life as differential but inter-connected totality. But Trotsky took these methodological

presuppositions and used them to make claims about the necessary properties of human

social development per se.


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How to theorise the international: Marxism and IR

How to account for that plane of social reality formed out of the interaction between national

units with its special properties of war, diplomacy, trade etc. which is the subject matter

of International Relations (IR): the international? In recent years IR theorists have

increasingly turned to the twin pillars of history and sociology to reach for an answer to this

long-pondered question (Hobden and Hobson 2002; Hobson 2004; Lawson 2006; Rosenberg

2006). On the one hand this has been driven forward by a now well-trodden critique of IR as

an impoverished discipline, necessarily restricted by the limits of its purview (Lawson and

Shilliam 2010: 70). But on the other hand there has even amongst historical sociologists

that are looking within the social for an explanatory account of the phenomenon of

international relations been a degree of introspection over the intellectual resources

classical social theory may or may not provide for such an endeavour.

One of the most profound challenges laid down in the course of these digressions, has come

from Justin Rosenberg, who fired a shot across the bows of the tradition of classical social

theory by arguing that it failed to incorporate the multilinear dimensions of social change so

important to theorising the international (Rosenberg 2006). This led him to invoke the idea

of an international historical sociology as a new idiom encompassing three methodological

predicates for social theory in IR that have hitherto remained occluded:

... A conceptual framework which, proceeding from the relational structure of societies as

explanans (sociology), systematically incorporates the causal significance of their asynchronous

interaction (international) into an explanation of their individual and collective development and

change over time (historical) (Rosenberg 2006: 335).

Identifying the potential of historical sociology for IR is not new, but can be traced to

observations made by Stanley Hoffman in the late 1950s (Hoffman 1959: 346-7). Yet,

distinctively, Rosenberg claimed the failure to fully realise the original aspirations in the

course of what is now a well-established engagement could not just be put down to thehegemony of realism in IR with its reification of the geopolitical as an independent object


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of analysis separated from individual and social realms , but also reflected the failure of

classical social theory to establish a social ontology for the intersocietal aspects of human

life (Rosenberg 2006: 307-313). Only once we get to this base level of social theorisation

will we, Rosenberg argues, be able to unpack the causal impact of the social interaction

among many societies for their individual, collective and historical development across

space and time (ibid: 335). Rosenbergs argument was not uncontroversial (for example see

Chernilo 2010) for it attempted to reverse the direction of inter-disciplinary energies away

from a tendency amongst historical sociologists to look to sociological concepts to form the

basis for non-reified conceptions of the international within IR (see Lawson and Shilliam

2010). Instead it developed a critique, albeit one also derived from a set of sociological

assumptions, of the theoretical lacuna of the international in social theory.

The answer to this absence the failure to develop a theoretical set of propositions about the

dispersed but interactive nature of social development itself is identified by Rosenberg as

the idea of uneven and combined development (U&CD) (Rosenberg 2006; 2007), which

was first formulated by Leon Trotsky in the opening decades of the 20th century (Trotsky

1962; 1967). According to Rosenberg, U&CD offers a powerful theorisation of the

irreducible dimension of social reality formed out of the co-existence of multiple societies;

this level, the international, is intrinsically uneven and combined, because multiple political

units and social forms co-exist (unevenness) and co-determine (combination) one anothers

development. Once the international is reconceptualised along these lines the idea is that,

problems like the domestic analogy fallacy i.e., failing to recognise the distinctiveness of

the international by making simple analogies to domestic properties , the treatment of the

impact of the international as simply externally related factors added in to a specifichistorical account, and dichotomous conceptualisations of the internal-external, can all be

overcome. Moreover, it also focuses social-theoretical attention on developmental

particularity without abandoning the causal impact of the wider social totality, because, the

unique specificities of each unit within the system are seen as partially determined by

system-level interaction between the units. In his most recent work, Rosenberg (2010) has

shown how U&CD is not constitutional of the international as such, but refers to anterior,

more fundamental, dimensions of social development, its interactive multiplicity, which

explains the emergence of the international as an historical phenomenon.


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This reaching back to classical social theory to resolve a problem that Rosenberg argued was

pervasive and general across the entire tradition itself, arguably reveals a certain tension in

the critique itself is it global or partial in its pretensions? And if the lacuna does indeed

have a global character then how does the apparent answer to it in the idea of U&CD fit

theoretically with the assumptions we find in the competing intellectual paradigms of

classical social theory? Trotsky himself, though his remarks on its status and impact on

historical materialism were fragmentary, would have certainly argued U&CD was a

distinctively Marxist concept, thereby locating it within the tradition of historical, materialist

and dialectical accounts of the social process Marx had pioneered. But Rosenberg has been

more circumspect, suggesting on occasion that there was nothing necessarily historical

materialist about the concept of U&CD, even though he insisted it had to be operationalised

within a general social theory to reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation

(Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008: 86). What is posed here is not simply the lineage of the

concept within social theory, but the meanings we attach to the uneven but combined

nature of the social process U&CD highlights that is, the mechanisms and actions which

give rise to the differential interaction among units within the system.

The outpouring of theoretical reflections on Rosenbergs claims in the contemporary debate

focused in the first instance on the proper meaning of Trotskys somewhat elusive concept

in particular, its temporal remit, as a general property of development or an historically

specific dimension of modernity (Ashman 2006; Callinicos 2007; Callinicos and Rosenberg

2008; Rosenberg 2006; 2007). But they quickly found more methodological excavation was

needed about the role of abstraction in historical materialism and how we can advance

concepts with a general explanatory power without losing sight of the intricacies in the

concrete historical process (Anievas and Allinson 2009; Ashman 2009; Callinicos and

Rosenberg 2008; Davidson 2009; Rosenberg 2010).

The recent discussion on U&CD indicates the vitality of historical materialist scholarship

within IR which has formed one component within the general rise of critical alternatives to

the realist mainstream in the last two decades. Indeed John Macleans complaint of the

strange case of mutual neglect between Marxism and IR, and his corresponding appeal for

greater intervention by Marxists into IR theory (Maclean 1988), has now largely been

answered. And indeed this has occurred not simply with recourse to the idea of U&CD, but

has embraced engagements with Marxs foundational social critique as a basis for a new


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international theory (Rosenberg 1994), the school of Political Marxism (Teschke 2003),

among a range of other intellectual sub-trajectories (see Anievas 2010).

This emergence of Marxist approaches has meant the traditional critique of Marxism made in

mainstream IR , for its failure to theorise inter-state relations, has come under challenge. For

Berki, Waltz et al, Marxism was a fundamentally hierarchical theory, whose concepts were

largely derived from the domestic and this meant that accounts of horizontal interactions,

such as those we see in the geopolitical relations between states, were basically omitted from

the explanatory categories. They were therefore inevitably treated as mere epiphenomenal

expressions of more fundamental (economic, etc) dimensions of social life (Berki 1971;

Cruickshank and Kublkov 1980; 1985; Waltz 1954; 1979). Central to this critique was the

assumption that Marxism failed to see history as a multi-faceted process with many

interactive but shifting pathways in the process of change. For the Marxian doctrine, wrote

Berki in a comment that epitomised the wider critique, the unilinear development of human

history is a fundamental truth (Berki 1971:101). Waltz and Berki saw the repeated

arguments on the national question amongst Marxists as an attempt to make a theory that

advanced a global egalitarian community as its goal, fit with a reality in which nation-states,

and not classes, were the fundamental actors in international relations (Berki 1971: Waltz

1954).

There was thus a twofold aspect to the traditional critique. Firstly, there was a conception of

Marxism as unilinear in its account of social change. Secondly, there was an alternative

vision in which the nationally defined community was seen as the fundamental actor in

international history. The first of these points reveals a basic misunderstanding. Marxism was

misconceived as a unilinear theory of history that was basically reductionist as its conceptscould either not account for non-economic phenomena or saw them as mere epiphenomenal

expressions of the more fundamental categories of the theory. But the second aspect to this

critique reveals a real irony. An equally totalising set of assumptions just as one-sided as

the conception of Marxism put forward about nationally-defined communities as

fundamental, transhistorical actors (the reification typical of realism) stood as the theoretical

counter-position to the supposed Marxist dogma. But until relatively recently (Rosenberg

1994) this critique and one-sided alternatives went unchallenged, while as Maclean once put

it, Marxist interventions often provided grounds for these criticisms:


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Marxists writers have themselves contributed... to the relative lack of consideration of their

approach within international relations... The way they have done so is... [by failing] to

distinguish... between Marxs long development of an innovative and distinctive epistemology

and methodology of social change on the one hand, and Marxs particular theory of the capitalist

mode of production... on the other. Thus, on the one hand, non-Marxists have argued that the

concepts... developed in Marxs analysis of capitalist production... are not relevant to the study of

international relations, because here, the basic unit of analysis is the state, and the purpose of

studying international relations is understanding relations between the states, or other discrete

entities that act internationally. On the other hand, Marxists have either abstracted these concepts

from the domestic level and applied them in doctrinaire fashion to international relations (and this

is an attempt to make Marxs historically relative concepts ahistorical) or they have simply

continued to concentrate upon theories of the state and class (and this is to reduce the

international system to claims about the state and/or classes) (Maclean 1988:298).

What is interesting about these remarks from Maclean, made now well over two decades

ago, is that they hint at the kind of theorisation of international relations Marxism may

provide if it takes as its starting point not simply the historically specific system of capitalist

property relations, but the distinctive epistemology and methodology of social change

(ibid) Marx outlined. The implication then is that concerns for security, territorial possession,trans-community relations, and the collective psychology present in notions of the inside

and outside within historical communities (in short, the subject matter of IR) indicate

features of social development that transcend modernity, despite all its radical economic and

political specificities, and thereby establish the need for a transhistorical theorisation of the

international. It could well be argued, that only with Rosenbergs recent work on U&CD

(2006; 2007; 2010) have Marxists sought to cross this bridgehead onto a wider plain that

reaches for a social and developmental explanation for international relations, because

previously the tendency had been to insist trenchantly, and indeed not incorrectly as such, on

the radical specificity of capitalist modernity and therefore of the international relations that

form part of it (Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003). And, indeed, this more traditional position

has often been vigorously defended by critics of Rosenbergs extension of U&CD in the

recent debate (in particular, Ashman 2009, Davidson 2009 and, less categorically, Avienas

and Allinson 2009). Macleans intuition here also opens up an interesting problem for those

who have taken up the idea of U&CD as a social ontology and theorisation of the

international: namely, how exactly it connects with the wider methodological ballasts of

historical materialism. We need to draw some conclusions about what the notions of the

historical and the material, as theoretical presuppositions about the kind of social theory


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we undertake, bring to bear on the type of theorisation of the social process we get when we

operationalise U&CD.

Although Rosenberg has engaged in a stretching of the concept of U&CD in the sense of

abstracting it from the wider body of social theory from which it emanated in order to test

the intellectual bounds of the concept in his account of the historical emergence of the

international he was impelled to introduce a foundational premise of Marxism: that social

reproduction depends on the nature of the means of subsistence human beings find in

existence and have to reproduce (Rosenberg 2010: 179-180). If this Marxist conception of

development had been left to one side, then a key component of the explanation of the

transition from Hunter Gather Band (HGBs) to sedentary communities would have been lost.

Without this understanding of the cumulative development of human social technique and

the ability of labour to harness resources provided unevenly by the diverse geographical

conditions faced by early human life, we would not be able to situate the transition between

these social forms within the material realities of this pre-historic period. As Rosenberg

himself conceded, the consequence of this was very clear, without this premise, we would be

left not with the powerful resolution of the problem of the international for social theory,

but with the separation of international and social theory once again reinforced and

perpetuated (Rosenberg 2010: 186). Arguably what this shows is that this third aspect,

development, in the triune conception of U&CD plays a crucial role for the abstraction in

its totality; such that were we to modify it by replacing a Marxist notion of development with

some other alternative we would end up with a very different idea altogether. Moreover, this

poses a general question, about what kind of intellectual content we attach to the notions of

unevenness, combination and development, and how our broader social theoreticassumptions affects the substance of our theorisation.

What this paper will proceed to do is explore further the role played by Marxs notion of

development within the idea of U&CD. My basic argument is that Trotskys articulation of

U&CD made explicitly theoretical claims about the idea of development which were only

implicit in Marxs historical materialism. But Trotsky built upon two key intellectual

assumptions already present in Marxs method. He firstly shared a notion of the historical

that orientated social theoretical research to the multiple pathways taken by human social

development. There was indeed a multilinearism in Marxs understanding of the historical


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process and this is particularly evident in the Grundrisse. Second of all, Marx and Trotsky

both shared a philosophy of internal relations approach, i.e. the treatment of social life as

an interactive totality of differential parts, in which the whole and the parts, both form

part of one anothers ontology. And this understanding is crucial to excavate if we are to

understand how Marx incorporated concretely the intersocietal aspects into his dynamic

account of the emergence of capitalism as an internal, global process. But neither Marx nor

Trotsky brought these premises either as philosophical presuppositions about the social

process (Marx) or explicitly theoretical claims and the nature of development itself (Trotsky)

to bear on the emergence of the international as an historical phenomenon. Thus, herein

lies Rosenbergs breakthrough, for he has built innovatively on these assumptions

(particularly in Rosenberg 2010) to tackle the problematic of the international within IR

and for social theory at large.

The line of argument below develops across four parts. Part one looks at the suggestive

references to international relations and uneven development in the Grundrisse,before

making a selective reading of Marxs account of the origins of the capital form in the same

textin order to show how the uneven and multilinear aspect of social change was

incorporated into his internal account of the emergence of capitalism. Part two looks at

comments Marx made in a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov on international relations

and the problem of the social division of labour. Part three draws on Bertell Ollmans

Hegel-inspired reading of Marxs method as a philosophy of internal relations, looks at

how Trotsky consciously shared this method and asks how it affected his idea of U&CD.

And a final section draws some conclusions for the contemporary discussion.

Capturing multilinear development? MarxsGrundrisse

Rosenberg (2007: 479) points out how Marx made a passing theoretical reflection in the

Grundrisse on the status of international relations for his wider social theory. One of several

points to be mentioned here and not to be forgotten, Marx, alas appeared toforget it, as he

never returned to theoretically reflect on the following observation:

Secondary and tertiary matters; in general derivative, inherited and not original relations of

production. Influence here of international relations (Marx 1973: 109).

It is in this extract we also find what may be the first reference to the idea of uneven

development which was to become such an important concept in early 20th century


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Marxism. And indeed, for whatever reason, it is certainly the case that in the Grundrisse we

find recurring expressions of Marxs non-linear view of social-historical development. But

what exactly could Marxs comments on international relations, as secondary, tertiary,

derivative and inherited mean for his social theory? IR scholars might have a tendency to

be critical of these observations for not asserting some kind of specificity to the

international. Another interpretive option however is to see it as a statement of the centrality

of the social for the international, with the latter deriving its existence from anterior

dimensions ofsocialhistorical development. Similarly, the idea of inherited influences,

perhaps from archaic state institutions that form part of the unit and system levels of the

international, is a formulation which also chimes with remarks Marx would make on the

same page about uneven development. Here we also find observations that are equally

suggestive but equally clipped too.

Marx describes uneven development as the disequilibrium between social and political forms

and material production in space and time (Marx 1973: 109). Forms of social consciousness

and activity such as artistic development exist in disproportion to material production, but

these are not so difficult to grasp as within practical-social relations themselves (ibid). The

contrast between European and American levels of modernisation, to the co-existence of

archaic legal forms (such as Roman private law) with modern social relations of production

(the really difficult point to be discussed), are the diverse examples of practical-social

relations Marx uses as cursory illustrations of unevenness in social change (ibid). The telling

warning he offered implied a sweeping criticism of the classical tradition in social theory.

Given this unevenness in historical development, he said, in general, the concept of progress

not to be conceived in its usual abstractness (ibid). After this critical aside on the existing

social theory of his day, Marx then appears to pass over the issue. No further reference to

uneven development is to be found in the rest of the manuscripts. Nonetheless, a multi-linear

historic process arguably remains an implicit theoretical assumption. This is evident for

instance in his treatment of the emergence of the capital form within conditions inherited

from existing modes of productive relations. If we follow this argument through, we can

illustrate the multilinearity of Marxs historical sociology and draw out its significance for

U&CD.

Marx is asking the recurrent question of European development, why did the capital form

emerge in this part of the world when it did and proceed to achieve such global reach and


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domination? Part of the argument he develops is theoretical: a claim about the nature of the

capital form itself. But the other aspect to it has to address itself to the contradiction-laden

process which led to the supremacy of the capitalist mode in real historical space and time.

What is interesting about this meandering narrative in the Grundrisse is that these

dimensions are brought together, to present a cursory account of the uneven spatial and

temporal emergence of capitalism. The theoretical aspect offers a claim about the

preconditions for the emergence of the capital form. Marx argues capital emerges when

socially accumulated wealth can be re-invested into labour power and for this to occur then a

material and social condition needs to be met: that there is a class of labourers no longer able

to produce their own subsistence and may be made dependent upon wages for their social

reproduction. For this condition to exist, then, revolutionary social change needs to take

place in the countryside to allow nascent capitalists to exploit the labour power of

impoverished free labourers. Crucially, for debates against the existing political-economic

theories Marx was contesting, this means the conditions for the emergence of capital are not

created by capital, but, rather, they develop through the historic process of dissolution of

the pre-capitalist modes (Marx 1973: 506). The relation of capital and wage labour is not

already commanding and predominant over the whole of production, but has to come into

being historically (Marx 1973: 503). In this way Marxs conception of capital as a social

relation leads to the introduction of social-historical premises, to elaborate the theoretical

argument about the nature of value and the capital form. Once these social and historical

dimensions become interwoven, the difficulty of unevenness immediately arises; for the

transformations in relations between labourers and landed property were spatially

concentrated. Marxs resolution to this problem tells us a lot about his broader understanding

of social development, because he continually emphasises the need for an historicaltreatment of the problem of the specific forms and patterns of development. His

understanding of capital thus recognises it does not emerge as a preformed, external

totality, but rather comes into existence within the confines of the old order (Wainwright

2008: 884). But yet conversely, the apparent paradox is that the capital form posits a

totalising set of social relations from the moment of its inception as the incessant search of

capital for new sources of value production and markets, therefore forces other modes into

submission to exchange relations.

This dialectical appreciation of the contradiction-laden emergence of capital as an uneven


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social-historical progress repeatedly comes to the surface. A few examples of this clearly

illustrate the kind of historical-sociology Marx is doing here. When Marx speaks of the

dissolution of the old modes of production, he does not mean they disappear in a single

temporal moment. Rather the emergence of monetary wealth and nascent capitalists develop

as a contradictory force within pre-capitalist forms of social property relations. The

capitalist inserts himself Marx writes, as (historic) middle-man between landed property, or

property in general, and labour (Marx 1973: 504). This is part of a subterranean process of

expanding market mediation, leading over time to the subordination of use-value to

exchange value (Marx 1973: 508-509). In this sense, capital appears in its original forms

alongside the old modes of production (Marx 1973: 510). Marx doesnt explicitly couch

this in the terms of uneven let alone combined development, but this view of how the

backward and the modern become interwoven in concrete space and time were to be the

subject of Trotskys U&CD.

There are also several examples of the spatial dimensions to this account of the uneven

emergence of the capitalist mode of production used. He points out how capital appeared

sporadically and locally in the manufacturing sectors of the emporiums like the Italian

cities, Constantinople, [and] in the Flemish Dutch cities, which were orientated to the

external market through over land and maritime commerce (Marx 1973: 510-511). In this

way, the spatial concentration of manufacturing within these more advanced urban centres

gives rise to an inter-societal dimension in the expansion of market-based social forms,

because a surplus in manufactured commodities necessitates striving for an external market.

The introduction of the intersocietal dimension into the account also involves comparatively

addressing the impact of divergent state institutional forms had on the process. Marx writes,

for example, of how governments such as those of Henry VIII play a contradictory role as

conditions of the historic dissolution process and as makers of the conditions for the

existence of capital, by policing the labour market brought into being by English landlords

through enclosures and dismissals of retainers to increase their share of surplus agricultural

product (Marx 1973: 507). Like Trotskys account of Russian Tsarism, Marxs suggestion is

that the reforming, more centralised, coercive, English state embodies and unites wider

social contradictions. The contingencies involved in such political processes, their success or

failure in creating the social and institutional conditions for exchange to subordinate use-

value (a la modern markets), touch at the heart of the uneven development of the social


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forces that were pressing towards capitalism.

Clearly playing heavily on Marxs thinking was how his political-economy differentiated

itself from the existing logical-deductive approaches he sought to transcend by way of his

historicism. The nature of his historical method was such that when challenging his

intellectual precursors approaches he would embrace, within a few pages of text, vast

temporalities of development. These historical digressions incorporated the multiple

pathways and intersocietal dimensions within an internal, theory-laden account of the

general process. So, when Marx wished to show the mutations in the form taken by general

economic properties i.e. the historically specific social forms they took in given epochs

he historicised them in order to challenge the reification of concepts that had plagued

classical political-economy. For instance in his discussion of the historical forms of property

(property in general), Marx argues that a materialist understanding of its origins should

start with the appropriation of nature by primitive communities, with the exact form it takes

depending on the social relations operating in any given historical community (Marx 1973:

490-491). But from this materialist base, Marx then introduces the dimension of multiple

societies, pointing out that nature appeared as a limitless resource to primitive communities,

so the barrier they confront to the exploitation of the natural earth is rival communities: thus,

warfare is therefore one of the earliest occupations of each of these naturally arisen

communities, both for the defence of their property and for obtaining new property (Marx

1973: 491). There is also the suggestion that this brutal form of interaction, can result in the

transformation in the form taken by property relations in a given community through

conquest by another (Marx 1973: 490). Marx thus draws attention to the sources of dramatic

social change that can come from outside a society. He assumes, in the outline of the

dynamic process he presents, these aspects of intersocietal causation. Indeed, they are

incorporated at the concrete level and contribute to the multilinear picture which is put

together from these historical lineages.

Overall, then, to capture the meaning and implications of this selective reading of the text for

Marxs wider social theory, requires of us that we get a handle on the special role played by

the historical in his method. The repeated use of the term provides a recurring indication of

Marxs break from abstract universalism. In the picture he paints which is a nothing less,

surely, than a textual panorama of uneven development in the emergence of capital we see

how Marx recognised, observed and studied the contradictory role played by the social


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forces of the old order in the development of capitalism. His method leads him to ground

the emergence of capital in these old conditions; but, moreover, and crucially, he also told a

story, one involving a great deal of spatial and temporal divergence and interactivity about

the nature of this historical process. The historical examples he cites do often take a

comparative or case study form, but they act as lineages of development within the argument

about the spread of capitalism as a social process. This allows Marx to treat it as a single but

variegated process, as a differentiated and contradictory whole. In this sense, the analysis is

imbued in a very powerful way with Marxs dialectical method, because he is seeking out the

inner-connection between contradictory historical phenomenon and attempting to unite the

general with the particular within his internal account of the process as a whole.

Yet, at the same time, despite the presence of multilinearity is there still a missing

theoretical element in this narrative? Marx is putting together here what is the end a political-

economic argument (albeit one which treats economic categories as social and historical

relations). Although he admits into the whole analysis a multilinear picture of the concrete

plain of development he takes as his theoretical and historical object, he doesnt offer the

conceptual tools that might tell us why exactly social-historical development has given rise

to these multiple pathways of social development. Marx tended to couch his idea of

development in terms of the increasing complexity of the social division of labour

successive transformations in the forms and patterns of social organisation. But did this

conceptualisation incorporate the uneven and combined dimensions? This was a problem

Marx confronted over a decade earlier when reflecting on ProudhonsPhilosophy of Poverty.

Proudhon has so little understood the problem of the division of labour

In 1846 Marx wrote a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, in which he made a series ofcritical observations on ProudhonsPhilosophy of Poverty (Marx 1979: 489-503). He would

go on to write The Poverty of Philosophy as a more thorough rejoinder to Proudhon, but in

this earlier piece, which is a quite brilliant polemical sally, Marx reflects more generally on

the issues of method involved without making the detailed interrogation he would in the

published work. It is an interesting document both for the way in which Marxs historicism,

i.e. his view of historical investigation as a primary analytical device for his social theory,

forms the central element of his critique of Proudhon, and for the presence within it of one of

Marxs fragmentary observations on the social ontology of international relations. Part of

Marxs challenge to Proudhon was that his notion of the social division of labour was both


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too abstract and too narrow, as it could not include within its conceptual bounds the diverse

range of phenomena that form part of successive changes in social organisation. Marxs

critique of Proudhon also underlines again his historicism and, more specifically, how it

affects the concepts he elaborates. The broad substance of Marxs attack on Proudhon is

concerned with his non-historical method of abstraction. Proudhon formulated his economic

concepts through a form of universal reason derived from the most idealist parts of German

philosophy, and, so, by seeking to break free of the constraints of space and time in pursuit

of an abstract universalism, he was unable to treat the capitalist social formation as a

transitory social form, the product of an historical evolution:

Mr Proudhon, incapable of following the real movement of history, produces a phantasmagoria

which claims to be dialectical. He does not need to speak of the seventeenth, the eighteenth or the

nineteenth century, for his history proceeds in the misty realm of imagination and is above space

and time (Marx 1979: 492).

Marx comes back to this point the primacy of spatially and temporally specific conditions

to elaborating any theory of social development many times in the letter. History is seen as

key to understanding the present; for the conditions that active human individuals confront

today, are the products of a historically determined process of social co-existence and

interaction among previous generations. In this regard, Proudhon does not understand, says

Marx, that social institutions are historical products of a certain pattern of development.

The primacy of history, should therefore affect the character of the social explanation

developed by determining the meaning and limits of any concepts informing a given

analysis. But for Proudhon the opposite is the case; so Marx writes of how Proudhon argued

that the development of labour, credit and machinery occurred to serve the idea of equality,

only to then note that they turned against the notion of equality and this is for him the

dialectical contradiction (Marx 1979: 496). Yet, of course, only if the idea of equality is

arbitrarily taken as the source of these historical social forms does this contradiction exist; so

as Marx cruelly puts it the contradiction exists solely between... [Proudhons] fixed ideas

and the real movement of history (ibid). Rejecting the whole notion of universal reason as

thought abstracted from the real conditions of space and time, i.e. from the material realities

of human life itself Marx diagnoses the fallacy as a failure to see that economic categories

are only abstract expressions of these existing relations and only remain true while these

relations exist (ibid).


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The historicity of Marxs concepts also means they have an elasticity and relativity

relative, that is, to changing conditions of existence , which was entirely alien to

Proudhons understanding of concepts derived from eternal reason. The social division of

labour is one such category that Proudhon holds to be an eternal universal and in contrast

Marxs use of this concept is very elastic, affording it a relativity which relates to the

penumbra of social-historical forms it takes. It is in this discussion that Marx introduces the

idea of international relations; he does so by criticising Proudhons failure to even discuss

the world market in his outline of the social division of labour:

For Mr Proudhon, the division of labour is something exceedingly simple. But was not the caste

system a specific division of labour? And was not the corporative system another division of

labour? And is not the division of labour in the manufacturing system... likewise entirely distinct

from the division of labour... in modern industry? Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he

neglects to do what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no

need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was still non-existent for

Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been

utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, when colonies were

already developed? And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are their

international relations, anything but the expression of a given division of labour? And must they

not change as the division of labour changes? (Marx 1979:493, emphasis added).

Once again we see Marxs historicism. The argument here being that the successive

transformations in human social organisation in space and time mean the evolving form of

even the most general properties of human existence like complexity in social organisation

and national and international divisions of labour have to be studied in their developmental

particularity. Otherwise the real movement of social historical change will never be truly

captured or explained. The focus on particularity is a powerful expression of the problem

classical social theory has confronted in applying its concept of social development to a

differential totality of human social relations. Indeed, Marx appears aware of this, because

directly following this passage, he goes onto complain that Proudhon has so little

understood the problem of the division of labour (ibid) but what exactly was the problem

that the French philosopher could not understand? The suggestion is that he does not

understand the difficulties in making its general concepts correspond to and explain

developmental particularity and multiplicity; i.e. the twists and turns in the historicalpathways of human social development. This comes across very clearly in the notion of


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international relations offered here. It is not that Marx is wrong to speak of an historic set of

international relations as a form of the social division of labour as a general statement it is

true enough. But the problem is the general conception (the evolving form of the social

division of labour) does not anticipate so to speak, at a theoretical level, the kind of

developmental particularities, historical specificities, and multiplicity of political and social

forms along with their interaction, which Marx recognises are essential to any historical

explanation of a given process. Marx was not alone in seeing this problem social theorists

of all varieties have often answered it by invoking what Rosenberg calls lower-lying

theorisations to register the empirical particulars of the social process (Rosenberg 2010:

182). It is here then that the issue arises of the need to reconceptualise historical

development in such a way as its multilinear and interactive aspects are incorporated at a

theoretical level; one that reaches a dialectical solution to the problem of differentiation and

totality. Adding the predicates uneven and combined help us to do this, by indicating the

properties of social development per se i.e. co-existence and social interaction among units

creating an irreducible system level that give rise to such evolving historical forms of the

social division of labour. Marxs argument can here be interpreted then as powerfully

reinforcing one of Rosenbergs core claims about the classical legacy; that its notion of

development led to the introduction of multilinearity at a lower-order level of concrete

analysis external and separate to the deeper assumptions of the social theory (Rosenberg

2010: 182).

Marx, Trotsky and the philosophy of internal relations

What is interesting about the way Marx dealt with the problem unevenness posed for the

categories of universal social theory is how, as we have seen, his notion of the historical is

mobilised ceaselessly to tackle the social evolutionist idea of development in its usual

abstractness. But at the same time, Marx stopped a long way short from invoking the kind

of radical historicism of Nietzsche and his followers, because he held onto the idea that an

explanatory account of social processes required the historical narrative was overlain by

theoretical claims. And there is indeed more than a mere reminder of the primacy of history

in his work Marx also helps us to think about historical developments in such a way, as it

draws attention to its contradictions. Although Marx did not revise the classical conception

of development to theoretically incorporate the multilinear by adding a set of predicates

which anticipated multiplicity in social and political forms, he did nonetheless outline a more


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general philosophical position important to this kind of reconceptualisation. Marx was a

grand theoriser in the tradition of German philosophy. A cornerstone of his special system

was the treatment of the processes involved in social change as part of a relational totality or

whole. This is what Bertell Ollman has summarised as the philosophy of internal relations

(Ollman 2003) and it is a key part of Marxs dialectical methodology.

There are two aspect of Ollmans philosophy of internal relations account relevant to our

outline here; one is ontological, the other is conceptual. Marx takes as his object a singular

totality of human relationships and their corresponding interaction with nature; but he sees

this as contradictory and differentiated. From Hegel, Marx holds onto the idea of the totality,

but his materialism means that he does not tend to ascribe qualities and features to this whole

in the manner Hegel did with his notions of Absolute Idea, Spirit, God, and Universal Truth.

Marx offers no such statements about the totality of social relations, because the whole does

not feature as an explanatory device, but as the ontological position about reality its inter-

connectedness that orientates the scientist. As Ollman says, it:

...remains the sum of all relations and that which is expressed in each but offers little help as a

distinct concept, in elucidating any of them. The real world is too complex, diffuse, and unclear in

its detail to serve as an adequate explanation for any of the events that go on inside of it (Ollman

2003: 42).

Once the world is understood as complex, diffuse and unclear, i.e. differentiated or uneven,

the task is posed of understanding the inter-connected set of processes going on within this

reality. The idea of treating this differentiated terrain as a logical whole is that we seek to

discover how each part is formed, in all its distinctiveness, through interactive sets of co-

constitutive relationships within general, relational and inter-connected processes. The

notion of totality plays a role in how the concepts are formed; because it gives them this

relational quality. Indeed, Marx treats all the concepts he elaborates as relational: what they

are and do is determined by the system of social relations they inhabit. So, how things

cohere become essential attributes of what they are (Ollman 2003: 72). Unlike most

contemporary philosophers that see things and relations as logically independent of one

another, Marx understands things as relations to interiorise their interdependence... in the

thing itself (Ollman 2003: 36-37). There is then this double movement: between the

ontological position that treats the social as a differential totality and in turn affects thenature of the conceptual apparatus.


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This double movement informs the type of historical sociology undertaken. One way of

thinking about the philosophy of internal relations is that it provides a methodological

recapitulation of the importance of historicism in social scientific investigation. Three points

can be drawn on here, which are relevant to how Marx formulated his notion of

development. Firstly, with concepts conceived as determined by their place within the wider

system of inter-connections, there can be no cause that is logically prior to and independent

of that to which it is said to give rise and no determining factor that is itself not affected by

that which it is said to determine (Ollman 2003: 71). Processes evolve together in space and

time, with the art of abstraction lying in the capacity to isolate and identify the most

important parts of the inter-connection operating in any general process. Secondly, Ollman

distinguishes between logical totality as a philosophical principle that states all processes are

co-determined and interactive, and the idea ofhistorically emergent totalities of social

relations such as capitalism; the latter have to come into being, and can exist more or less

depending on the concrete interrelations of forces (Ollman 2003: 72). Last of all, this

approach provides another angle from which to challenge abstract universalism, because by

recognising the non-external character of concepts, ahistorical variables are rejected, and

instead relational concepts which are historically transient are used: thus, they are,

something that emerged as a result of specific conditions in the lifetime of real people and

that will disappear when these conditions do (Ollman 2003: 69).

Ollmans point on how Marx used and didnt use the idea of totality is of particular

importance in understanding the special character of his critical universalism. Marx

chooses not to ascribe to the totality any moral or political qualities. He doesnt do so,

because his dialectics tell him this is a changing, transient, material world, subject to shifting

pressures, whilst his historicism leads him to explore the specific, differential but connected

processes operating within it. Both of these dimensions of his social theory reinforce the

other: dialectics reinforces historicism, historicism reinforces dialectics. Uniting the general

with the particular was arguably written into the DNA of this dialectical method, because

general processes are expected to elicit particular, unique and divergent outcomes. To

illustrate this recall again, Marxs account of the emergence of capital in the Grundrisse. The

philosophical assumption of totality is given logical priority and means the social processes

are treated as intrinsically inter-connected ones. But, at the historical level the totality is

found to be uneven and differentiated, requiring a move back to theory in order to explain


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what the most important connections and determinations are within this uneven landscape. It

is here that Marxs theoretical claims about the capital form itself, are crucial to the overall

native; for it is totalising in that it pushes ineluctably towards the global supremacy of

market forms of mediation, yet it does so unevenly, due to the mediation of pre-modern

social forms and the contradictory logics of capital itself as simultaneously centrifugal and

centralising. The result of this dialectical method then is an internal account of the general

process which elicits unique and particular developmental lineages. Elsewhere in the

Grundrisse from that part which occupied our attention, Marx famously said the concrete is

concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse

(Marx 1973: 101). Often shorthanded to the unity of many determinations, this second

aspect, diversity and unity, is arguably just as important, because it implies the need for a

reunification between the general (unity) and particular (diversity) in social theory. In this

formulation too, we see what Ollman means when he talks about transcending the

independent force a, causes the logically independent outcome b mode of reasoning in

social scientific investigation. By definition, for Marx, concrete outcomes will be the subject

of many social determinations; this gives history a primacy in explanation, but to uncover the

most important inter-connections in the process will require a wider set of theoretical claims

about the nature of the determinations themselves. The overall conclusion to draw, to my

mind, is that this dialectical method was an essential intellectual foundation to the critical

universalism of Marxs historical sociology because of the reunification of the general and

particular for social theory it pushes us towards. Marxs idea of development was thus

dialectical at its core, and this leads him to form a multinear conception of the process, even

if the multilinearity is only incorporated at an historical, rather than theoretical level of the

analysis.

What then are the implications of this philosophy of internal relations for U&CD? At a

conceptual level we can treat U&CD as a historically specific abstraction, which is premised

on the ontology and philosophical position provided by this form of historical, materialist

dialectics Marx offered. Trotsky himself argued U&CD was a dialectical concept. But he

never outlined what exactly it was that made it so. Arguably the reason is that it shared the

philosophy of internal relations approach Trotsky had taken from Marx. Although not in

reference to U&CD, Trotsky nonetheless says as much in the hisNotebooks on Dialectics:

If we visualise the fabric of life as a complex piece of knitting, then the concept can be equated


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with the separate stitches. Every concept seems to be independent and complete (formal logic

operates with them this way), in reality every stitch has two ends, which connect it with adjacent

stitches. If pulled at the end it unravels the dialectical negation of the concept, in its limitedness,

in its sham independence (Trotsky 1986: 75-77).

Here we have a philosophy of internal relations. The complex fabric of life is a unity of

many connections, with concepts mobilised to explain the form and nature of this

contradictory unity. There is an interesting dynamic here too, between the diachronic (across

time) and synchronic (at a single moment in time) aspects to the method he presents. The

complex fabric of life and its inter-connections is presented synchronically, but once we pull

at the concepts, through the course of historical time, they are negated, and so his dialectic

again reinforces the primacy of history to the conceptual apparatus. It also correspondingly

shows the historicism of the concepts. What we have here, put in explicitly methodological

terms, is a concern with the totality and the particular; the general historic processes, and the

multiplicity of unique, concrete social forms. This point is even more reinforced in the

following comments Trotsky makes on how dialecticians are interested in phenomena which

defy typical conceptual boundaries, smash the limited boundaries of [conceptual]

classifications, to reveal the real connections of the living process:

Some objects (phenomena) are confined easily within boundaries according to logical

classification, others present difficulties: they can be put here or there, but within a stricter

relationship nowhere. While provoking the indignation of systematisers, such transitional forms

are exceptionally interesting to dialecticians for they smash the limited boundaries of

classification, revealing the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process (Trotsky

1986: 77).

Although limited in their scope, these reflections are helpful in giving us an idea of the kind

of method Trotsky thought he was applying when he wrote works such as theHistory of the

Russian Revolution (Trotsky 1967)where he outlines most fully his idea of U&CD. The

suggestion is that dialectics is concerned first and foremost in helping us explain apparent

paradoxes of social development. It was the peculiarities of Russias development that

Trotsky was of course concerned to account for. But in his explanation of this apparently

paradoxical social form, he does not treat it as an exceptional case against a pre-defined

norm of development; say, for example, the bourgeois revolution in France. His dialectical

approach obviously shunned such notions of norm and deviant cases, and instead sets up a

general problematic that frames the analysis: how do particular social forms arise through


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general, inter-connected processes why is the totality so differentiated? Thats why Trotsky

gave the analysis a scope far beyond the bounds of the Russian case alone. Adding a

dialectical set of predicates unevenness and combination to the traditional notion of

social development anticipated the multiplicity of particular forms arising from pervasive

processes of social interaction.

Marxists often look to the Russian case to find evidence of the impact of this theoretical

approach on Trotskys substantive analysis. But in the same chapter in which Russian

development is his object, Trotsky weaves in comparative dimensions, examples of other

societies in different epochs of development, not just to illustrate difference in experiences,

but to show how these diverse, particular forms have a general significance for the concrete

historical developments which followed, one that impacted on the form taken by the Russian

Revolution itself. He writes, for example, of how the bourgeois revolution in England

developed under the guise of a religious reformation, where the goals for which the new

classes were struggling commingled inseparably in their consciousness with the texts from

the Bible and the forms of church ritual (Trotsky 1967: 31). For the English polity, Trotsky

argues, the experience of the Reformation continues to permeate its consciousness, but it also

opened up internationally to penetrate, irrevocably, on the consciousness of the masses

that brought into being the system of the Reformation (Trotsky 1967: 32). Not only do the

subterranean processes of social change the inter-section of determinations within the

whole process elicit particular and unique pathways of development, but these also act

back on the wider process.

Marxs historicism and the development and U&CD

One conclusion from these investigations is that U&CD should be understood as adistinctively Marxist and dialectical way of conceptualising the processes of social change.

The D in U&CD matters, because it gives it a materialist content and with this amongst

much more besides the importance of mode of production analysis for social theory. But

there is, I have argued, a deeper set of Marxian philosophical assumptions Trotsky brought to

bear on social development: totality and differentiation. Unevenness and combination are

treated as developmental totalities, i.e. part of the differentiated and interactive form taken

by successive transformations in the social division of labour across space and time.

Rosenberg of course comes to exactly this conclusion about U&CD in his re-

conceptualisation and extension of it. He moves it far beyond a statement about the


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contradictory forms thrown up by capitalist modernity, as it largely existed for Trotsky, to a

wider set of claims about social development per se, which can explain the existence of the

international as an historical phenomena (Rosenberg 2010). This kind of temporal extension

of the concept to a wider plain, still keeps it within the theoretical bounds Ive sketched out

above. But were U&CD to be taken up by theorists whose method was located in other

intellectual traditions, we would, I suspect, confront the problem of referential failure, i.e.,

the same term would be mobilised in very different explanatory accounts of the social

process.

The kind of extension Rosenberg makes certainly carries with it dangers. The danger of

excessive generality has been most starkly challenged by Neil Smith who has argued that

making U&CD a law-like property of social development per se will yield no explanatory

value at all: for it creates, he argues, a concept that is simply too general to be operable

(Smith 2006: 182). There are plenty of theoretical, indeed ontological, ripostes to this

position that might be made. But even so, there are enough examples out there of un-

historical Marxism to encourage us to treat Smiths challenge as a cautionary tale. It is one

that surely impels us to keep hold of the distinctive, theory-laden historicism that was the

cornerstone of Marxs own approach. U&CD as a general social historical abstraction can be

conceived at different levels. At the most general level it can refer to interactive multiplicity.

This is so general a term it comes very close to the philosophical positioning concept of

differential unity and could in the same sense, be said to describe intrinsic qualities of human

and natural development. As it moves down several steps in the ladder it can become more

and more concrete; with each step determining the form interactive multiplicity takes

within defined, historical conditions particularly within a given mode of production. There

is no problem in working with these different levels of the analysis so long as we are

conscious of them. Reification of the social process only occurs if we dont integrate more

historically concrete concepts into any given analysis. Keeping in mind the historicism is, in

this sense, essential, because it situates the concepts on a temporal plain, and recognises

them as historically transient, conditional on the continued operation of the social forms to

which they refer in the wider outside world. One conclusion this cautionary approach entails

is that we take care not to formulate U&CD as a general theory, but as a dialectical

foundation to the establishment of a broader range of more concrete, social theoretic

propositions.


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Notwithstanding the pervasive viewpoint that categories of Marxian thought are rigid and

dogmatic, this flexible approach expresses the kind of elasticity in conceptual thought

Trotsky also discussed in hisNotebooks. He conceived of the philosophy of internal

relations as an essential part of finding the inter-connections that break open categorical

boundaries. The multiple social forms thrown up by the processes of uneven and combined

development require an openness and flexibility in concepts precisely because of the

complex fabric of life and they all too often defy rigid categorisation. History then is a bit

a like a testing ground for concepts: we can use them with flexibility, so long as they help

formulate dynamic accounts of social change.Ergo we should treat U&CD as a framework:

a way of thinking about a diverse range of phenomenon. These might be anything from more

typically used examples such as the concentrated forms of industrial urbanisation against a

backdrop of agricultural backwardness, to the social and political physiognomy of pre-

modern China. Framing the analysis within the interactive dialectics of social change, the

role of U&CD with any application, surely, is to help us draw out the real historical

movement. The dialectic does not liberate the investigator from painstaking study of the

facts... it requires it, wrote Trotsky. He added, In return it gives investigative thought

elasticity, helps it cope with ossified prejudices, arms it with invaluable analogies, and

educates it in a spirit of daring, grounded in circumspection (Trotsky 1986: 92).

For the discipline of IR what we have here is a series of building blocks towards an

international theory. From Marx (1973) we have a materialist and dialectical account of the

process of social change in which history is conceived as multilinear and open-ended yet

also a general process, a differential totality. With Trotsky (1967) we get an explicitly

theoretical account that is, an account identifying historical necessities or laws of the social

process of the nature of development as one that must take place in an uneven and

combined manner. And lastly with Rosenberg (2010) we establish from these foundations a

theorisation of the emergence of the international a dimension of inter-unit interaction

with system-level properties such as war and diplomacy between units as an historical

phenomenon. Berki (1971), Waltz (1956, 1979) et alwere thus right to identify the

specificity of the international itself as distinctive form of social interaction but

unlocking the secrets of its emergence requires us to turn back to classical social theory.


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Documents

ing the Historical Sociology of 'the International', Marx, Trotsky and the Idea of U&CD, 25-02-11