I have been working on completing the introduction for my new book (an adaptation of my PhD dissertation) and reworking a paper for a journal, hence the gap since my last posting. The final draft version of my introductory chapter does cover very well the general structure of my worldview which I hope some of you will find an interesting read, although a bit longer than the usual post.
A Promising Liberal Past
During the 1960s and early 1970s there was an increasing recognition of the negative ecological impacts of economic growth, an example being the book Silent Spring (Carson 1962) which documented the environmental impacts of the widespread use of synthetic pesticides. The publication of Limits to Growth (Meadows et al 1972) triggered a larger discussion about whether or not endless exponential economic growth was possible within a finite Earth System. Reforms were implemented, especially in the higher-income nations; such as the limitation of the worst pesticides, clean air acts and the establishment of environmental regulation agencies (e.g. the US Environmental Protection Agency). The questioning of the viability of continued exponential economic growth found significant and widespread resistance from the business community, western governments and mainstream social science (e.g. economics and sociology). A result of this resistance was the development of the concepts of Sustainable Development and Eco-modernism, which embody the assumption that continued economic growth is reconcilable with ecological limits.
In 1979 the first World Climate Conference took place and came to the conclusion that anthropogenic climate change was a major issue that required further research and policy recognition. Through the decade of the 1980s momentum for action slowly grew among the scientific community and policy makers (Gupta 2010; Bodansky, Brunnee & Rajamani 2017). Climate scientist James Hansen’s testimony to the U.S. Congress (Shabecoff 1988), together with the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, both in 1988, helped to bring climate change to a mass audience. The momentum for change crested with the Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” in 1992, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) was adopted and opened for ratification. This was to provide the framework under which international climate agreements would be negotiated. The general objective of the UN FCCC as stated in article 2 was the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, with article 4.2., providing a non-binding commitment to return anthropogenic emissions of GHGs to 1990 levels (UN 1992). The Earth Summit also endorsed Sustainable Development as a viable basis for action with respect to environmental issues; removing those issues as a constraint to economic growth.
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new de facto leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Professing that "it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat", Deng moved the focus away from ideological purity and toward the economic growth of a nation whose gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was at the same level as sub-Saharan Africa. What followed was a policy of focused liberalization; starting with the agricultural sector that employed the majority of China’s population. The late 1980s brought increasing inflation and pressures for greater democratization that threatened the position of the CPC. Faced with these pressures, the CPC economically retrenched and rejected the previous levels of political opening; suppressing popular demonstrations and placing the prominent supporter of political reforms, Zhao Ziyang, under house arrest. After a few years of consolidation, and with inflation under control, Deng’s Southern Tour of 1992 restarted the process of controlled economic, but not political, liberalization.
In 1982, the 75-year old leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Leonid Brezhnev, died after 18 years of rule. He was replaced with another ailing leader in Andropov, who stayed alive for only another 15 months. Then Chernenko, who spent most of his 13 months in office in a hospital bed before passing away. Then at last the generation of leaders that had survived the vicissitudes of Stalin’s reign released the grasp that they had had on power in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death in 1953. There had been glimmers of reform to the communist system during the 1950’s Khrushchev Thaw and the 1960’s Kosygin Reforms but both had been scuttled by the threatened political and economic power centers, and the Soviet Union had settled into an increasingly bureaucratic, sclerotic and corrupt status quo. In 1985, the mantel of leader of the Russian reformation fell to a much younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had tasted the possibilities of reform in his youth during the Khrushchev Thaw; together with many of those that he surrounded himself with. Like Deng, he was looking for ways to reinvigorate the economy of his nation, one that had stagnated for over a decade but at a much higher standard of living and complexity than the Chinese economy. The first two years of relatively small steps, carried out under the mantra of perestroika (restructuring), were resisted by the interest groups that had built up their independent power bases during the increasingly corrupt stasis of the post-war years; especially under Brezhnev’s reign. In reaction, from 1988 onwards, Gorbachev set about undermining the inertial power of the Communist Party through both political and media liberalization under the slogan of glasnost (political opening), structural changes to reduce the pre-eminence of the Party, and increasing support for private economic structures. Over seven decades the Party had subsumed society and centralized control, leaving little room for a liberal civil society or any of the institutions necessary for the functioning of liberal capitalism, while constraining the centrifugal forces of the many regional nationalisms. By undermining the Party, Gorbachev risked its dissolution and the unleashing of chaos within Soviet society. This process rapidly gained a momentum that he could not control, with centrifugal societal forces tearing apart both the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union within three years. As Deng was carrying out his Southern Tour, all of Eastern Europe and what had been the Soviet Union was opening up for Western business, while the Cold War ended in a very unexpected peace. Instead of the more dynamic economy that Gorbachev had hoped for, the post-USSR nations were taken over by extractive, corrupt capitalist elites while their economies plunged into a depression greater than that of the 1930s in the West.
Together with the ending of the License Raj in India in the early 1990s, approximately half of the global population became open for business. In addition, the Soviet bloc no longer existed as a counterweight to Western interests in such places as Africa and the Middle East. Liberal capitalism was seen as triumphant, epitomised by The End of History (Fukuyama 1992). The ecological challenges to this triumph had also been ideologically banished through the concept of sustainable development enshrined by the United Nations Our Common Future (WCED 1987) as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Then blessed in 1992 by a World Bank that forcefully rejected the assumptions of any environmental limits to growth stating “The view that greater economic activity inevitably hurts the environment is based upon static assumptions about technology, tastes and environmental investments” (IBRD 1992). Both of these positions aligned with the concept of a self-correcting “reflexive modernity” (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994; Beck, Bonss & Lau 2003; Beck 2009) conceptualized by European mainstream sociologists. The path was cleared for continued growth and the exploitation of a massively increased global workforce made available to capitalist development; aided by a peace dividend as nations reduced their defence expenditures with the end of the Cold War.
A Threatening Present
Three decades after the liberal optimism of 1992, humanity is faced with a deeply threatening present, in contrast to the rosy futures envisaged for it at that time. The UNFCCC process rapidly met the realities of the power of the fossil fuel sector, especially within the United States. The coal-driven rapid industrialization of China in the first decade of the new century then made a mockery of the commitments made in Rio; since which anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have risen by more than 60% (Global Carbon Project 2019). Since that first climate conference in 1979, the atmospheric concentration of GHGs has risen from 382 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2e) to 508 ppm CO2e in 2021 (NOAA 2022); with the rate of change in the present being higher than in the 1980s (3.7ppm per year vs. 3.2ppm per year). Climate conferences have come and gone with much fanfare, but with little real action. In 2015 in Paris, the nations of the world once again came together in an attempt to resuscitate the international drive to combat climate change but could only agree on voluntary commitments to reduce GHG emissions; with no enforcement mechanism. China and India only committed to peaking emissions prior to 2030 (China’s recent commitment to “carbon neutrality” by 2060 does not alter this). The “voluntary” part was taken to heart by most nations, with their commitments not matched by actual policies. With the Trump presidency, the US went a step further and outright rejected the whole UN FCCC process (the Biden administration started the process of rejoining in early 2021). The international community continued its three decades of failure, with extremely disruptive climatic change become increasingly likely. One academic likened the UN FCCC process, with its grand international conference spectacles full of non-binding promises, to an “empty institution”; presenting to the world all the pomp and circumstance of the appearance of action, while covering up the actual absence of meaningful action (Dimitrov 2019).
With fossil fuels providing the energetic basis of society, and many nations heavily dependent upon fossil fuel rents, any replacement of fossil fuels may have significant political and economic ramifications both within the domestic arena and for the international system. The sheer scale and complexity, in technical, economic and sociological terms of the global energy system has been well documented by authors such as Smil (2010, 2017, 2017a), Hall and Klitgaard (2012) and Yergin (2011, 2020). The longer that the international community delays substantive actions, the greater and more difficult policy actions will become, and the more difficult it will become for the international community to act together for the greater good. Such a dynamic could produce dysfunctional and conflict-ridden reactions within and between nations which may significantly undermine the international community’s ability to act effectively in the face of a possible existential crisis.
In addition, the international community has not been transformed into the peaceful and cooperative liberal capitalist future that seemed possible at the beginning of the 1990s. The end of the Cold War was followed by just over a decade of inter-state conflict; the two Iraq wars, the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Afghanistan; followed by a post-911 endless Global War on Terror that involved covert actions and drone-based killing across a wide range of nations. In 2008 a war between Russia and Georgia was added, then in 2011 the regime change operations in Libya, which turned a middle-income nation into a failed state, followed by the Syrian civil war. Underneath this surface of conflict, China was quietly “keeping a low profile” (Yan 2014) while growing into an illiberal challenger to the West. In the 1990s, Russia had collapsed into an oligarchic crony capitalism, losing much of its manufacturing industry. At the end of that decade a new Russian leader emerged, Vladimir Putin, who somewhat tamed the oligarchs and aided by steeply rising oil prices built a nationalist authoritarian coalition that turned away from a West that it considered would not respect its basic needs for security and sovereignty (Cohen 2001, 2018). The 2010s brought a new Cold War, and the 2020s a proxy war between Russia and the West in Ukraine; with another possibly brewing between China and the US in the shape of Taiwan.
The confluence of a climate policy emergency created by a lack of substantive action over three decades and a resurgent great power politics among nuclear-armed states does not provide a propitious background for the ongoing survival of modern industrialized humanity. To understand the possibilities for the future, we must understand how the hopes of the early 1990s became the dark challenges of the 2020s. To allow for such an understanding we must first critically assess the applicability of mainstream social science conceptual framings, especially a general lack of consideration for the physical materiality of the modern world and the class-driven power dynamics within modern societies.
Unembedded and Immaterial Western Social Science
Much of the discussions of social philosophy treat ideas as if they spring independently from the logical processes of the cerebral cortex, irrespective of the social and economic position and interests of the individual in which that cerebral cortex resides. It is relatively rare to find a discussion of the personal interests of a given intellectual, the possibility of them personally benefitting from (or being punished for) the way in which they represent human nature and human societies, the possibility of their own life experiences skewing their views, the ability of those with wealth, position and power to push their philosophies forward at the expense of others philosophies, the philosophical invisibility of those – the vast majority until recent times - that could not read, write or afford the time for such reflection, the philosophical invisibility of those in the present day lacking access to and/or control of the dominant means of cultural production, and even the individual’s state of mind. As Cox (1981, p. 128) states:
Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. All theories have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space, specifically social and political time and space. The world is seen from a standpoint defineable in terms of nations or class, of dominance or subordination, of rising or declining power, of a sense of immobility or of present crisis, of past experience, and of hopes and expectations for the future … There is, accordingly, no such thing as theory in itself, divorced from a standpoint in time and space. When any theory so represents itself, it is the more important to examine its ideology, and to lay bare its concealed nature.
As Parenti (2003) details so well in his treatment of the assassination of Julius Caesar, until the post-WW2 years Western history and the related archeology were overwhelmingly the occupation of the idle rich; rendering an elite “1%” view of history. The same can be said of social philosophy and the social sciences in general; with the threatening insights of political economy removed through disciplinary atomization at the start of the twentieth century (van der Pijl 2014) and any class-based analysis being seen as politically unacceptable “communism”. With respect to the US, war time measures and the post-WW1 and post-WW2 Red Scares, together with such things as the Palmer Raids (1919-1920) and McCarthy Hearings (1954) combined with extensive investigations of government and academic employees served to significantly restrict what were deemed to be acceptable political beliefs – both in society in general and in state and educational institutions (Finan 2007; Jenemann 2007; Storrs 2013). This was reinforced by significant manipulation of media, academic and citizen groups by the security state (Bernstein 1977; Saunders 2000; Wilford 2009; Whitney 2017) and business interests (Fones-Wolf 1995) and extensive domestic spying and political interference by the security state under the COINTELPRO program (US Senate Church Committee 1976/2009 & 1976/2010). In such an environment, “mainstream” (i.e. politically acceptable) academic, policy and cultural work, which included critical theory shorn of any hint of economic class and historical material analysis (Rockhill 2021), provided a socially acceptable space and reliable funding. State, foundation and private funding was readily available for the development of an “anti-communist” critical theory grounded in culture and identity rather than political economy (Anderson 1976; Wheatland 2009), as well as mainstream liberal theorizing (Parmar 2012). As Wood (1997, p. 11) proposed, issues of culture and identity “cry out for a [historical] materialist explanation”.
Who is unaware of the structural changes that have transformed the nature of the working class itself? And what serious socialist has ever been unconscious of the racial or sexual divisions within the working class? Who would want to subscribe to the kind of ideological and cultural imperialism that suppresses the multiplicity of human values and cultures or disdains the particular “knowledges” of non-privileged groups, with their own wealth of experience and skills? And how can we possibly deny the importance of language and cultural politics in a world so dominated by symbols, images, and “mass communication”, not to mention the “information superhighway”? Who would deny these things in a world of global capitalism so dependent on the manipulation of symbols and images in a culture of advertisement, where the “media” mediate our own most personal experiences, sometimes to the point of where what we see on television seems more real than our own lives, and where the terms of the political debate are set – and narrowly constricted – by the dictates of capital in the most direct way, as knowledge and communications are increasingly in the hands of corporate giants? (Ibid.)
It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, with the expansion of academia and cultural production beyond the elites, full employment, decolonization, and a Vietnam War that undermined elite cultural hegemony and made the McCarthy years fade away, that the interests of the 90% (those beyond the rich and their courtier class) were given more voice. One result was “revisionist” and “economic and social” histories and media projects (Hobsbawm 1962, Thompson 1963, Berger 1964, Haley 1976, Cimino 1978, Said 1978, Stone 1986) that took the view of the oppressed; whether it be the working class, the racialized slave, the Amerindian, the colonized, or the disenchanted tool of the elite. Another was the return of critical political economy (Gilpin 1975, Strange 1986, Cox 1987) and the critique of exponential economic growth (Meadows et. al. 1972).
With the end of détente and the return of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Third World Debt Crisis and the defeat of the non-aligned movement’s New Economic International Order (NIEO), and the collapse of the Soviet bloc that seemed to invalidate socialism, a triumphalist veneration of capitalist (neo)liberal democracy took hold. The space for a critical political economic understanding of the interests of the 90% rapidly diminished in academia, policy circles and the media. At the same time a new modernism, eco-modernism, swept sociology to rebut those that claimed that economic growth was not compatible with ecological sustainability; aligned with the positions of both the United Nations and the World Bank.
After four decades of the neoliberal concentration of wealth and income in a small minority, and the increased dominance of that minority over the state and within society generally, the relative paucity of class-based analyses serves as an ironic example of the distance between mainstream social science and social reality. There are also only limited examples of academic texts that integrate human society into the ecology of which it is a part, as against those that assume that ecology can be integrated within human culture. The many books and articles on climate change tend to frame it as a human group dynamics, market signalling and culture problem, rather than one of elite dynamics, capital lock-in, and hard ecological limits; with Foster (2000, 2020, 2022) and Moore (2015, 2016) being some of the few exceptions. Added to this is the vast majority of international relations scholarship that renders elite interests and class struggle invisible (see below in this chapter). What is required for an analysis of both climate change and great power politics is a reembedding and rematerialising of the social sciences; with respect to both the position of human society as embedded within, and dependent upon, the Earth System, and the role of the ownership and control of the means of industrial, cultural, media and intellectual production in allowing a small elite to enjoy hegemony over the rest.
The Delusion of Immaterial Economic Growth
The fundamental belief that that human ingenuity and human culture can override physical materiality is embedded across the social sciences, and within society as a whole. Climate change is fundamentally a material problem: the anthropogenic-driven increase of GHGs within the atmosphere and the reaction of the Earth System to that increase. The social sciences predominantly view this not as a problem with the growth of human economies, but rather the nature of that growth. A nature that needs to be changed to reduce its resource needs and material impacts. This fits within what Dunlap and Catton referred to as the “Human Exemptionalist Paradigm” (HEP), that views humanity as exempt from environmental limits due to the unlimited possibilities of human technology (Dunlap & Catton 1994). It was not until the early twentieth century that the social sciences had to address what drives economic growth, as consistent increases over time in the scale of the human economy were a relatively recent phenomenon; especially after the repeated famines and other vicissitudes of the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the history of human civilization was one of the repeated developments of complex societies followed by the repeated collapses of those societies. Morris (2011) developed an index of social development and noted that only three civilizations could be identified as reaching the low 40s on his index: those of the Roman Empire, the Song Dynasty, and modern civilization. About six hundred years separate the first two, and five hundred years the latter two. Morris notes:
If someone from Rome or Song China had been transplanted to eighteenth century London or Beijing he or she would certainly have had many surprises ... Yet more, in fact much more would have seemed familiar ... Most important of all, though, the visitors from the past would have noticed that although social development was moving higher than ever, the ways people were pushing it up hardly differed from how Romans and Song Chinese had pushed it up. (Ibid., p. 482).
So, what happened to allow modern civilization to push far past the limits set by those two previous civilizations from the late eighteenth century onwards? One factor was the increase in resources afforded by the European annexation of an Americas heavily depopulated by European diseases, and conscious Western genocide and land theft, which allowed Europe to exceed the limits of its own ecological resources; even the guano (bird droppings) deposits that Foster (2010, Chap. 2, para. 15) notes supplied the phosphorous, nitrogen and potassium that helped replenish the depleted European soils whilst increasing yields. The later colonization of much of the rest of the world, and the transfer of wealth from this periphery to the European centre also added to the ecological resources, but only to monopolize more and more of the Earth’s limited ecological resources, rather than expand beyond what those resources could support. Human society was still dependent on its limited ability to harness the energy of the sun through photosynthesis for food and animal feed, conversion of that energy to heat through fire, and to a much lesser extent watermills and windmills (Hall & Klitgaard 2012; Smil 2017). The West had simply gained control of a bigger share of this limited resource.
This quickly changed with the exploitation of coal from the late eighteenth-century; “A long-term perspective shows virtually no growth of major economies before 1750, and accelerated growth in the frontier (that is the richest Western) economies, in the UK after 1750 and the US a century later” (Smil 2019, sources of economic growth, para. 13). By “about 1870 [humans] used more fossil fuel energy each year than the annual global production from all photosynthesis” (McNeill & Engelke 2014, p. 9). Included in this use was the Haber-Bosch process that predominantly utilizes natural gas (methane) as a feedstock to produce the nitrogen fertilizer -ammonia, replacing the rapidly exhausted guano deposits and facilitating an exponential increase in fertilizer usage. In the twentieth century human energy use increased by a factor of eight and has continued to increase in the twenty-first century. Oil, and then natural gas, was increasingly added to coal usage as the twentieth century progressed. These fossil fuels represent the cumulative energy produced by hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis, removing the energy constraint that had limited the scale and complexity of human civilizations; “growth since the industrial revolution has been driven largely by the increased stock of capital and the adequate supply of useful energy due to the discovery and exploitation of relatively inexpensive fossil fuels” (Ayres & Voudouris 2014, p. 27). The resultant phenomenal scale, and historically atypical nature, of energy usage in modern societies is a little-discussed fact within the dominant social discourses. Instead, it tends to be an assumed part of a common sense that is not questioned or problematized within such areas as mainstream economics and sociology, together with society in general.
When looking at the determinants of economic growth, mainstream economists see such growth as a function of labor, capital and technology that are endogenous to human society – energy and other ecological resources are seen as relatively unimportant. The fact that an incredibly energy dense fluid (oil) was required to make the technology of the internal combustion engine useful is a fact that escapes such economists; the dependence of modern technology upon the massive flows of energy provided by fossil fuels (and other materials) is not something seeming to require investigation. Neither are the colossal amounts of minerals and ecological resources made available by the energy provided by fossil fuels. It is assumed that applied human ingenuity, technology, will be able to provide for a dematerialization of economic growth. In sociology this assumption is embedded in the dominant theory of eco-modernism, an updated form of the failed modernist development theories of the post-WW2 years, that considers that reflexive markets and state intervention will utilize human technology to both remove physical resource constraints and moderate ecological impacts (Beck, Bonss, & Lau 2003; Mol, Sonnenfeld & Spaargaren 2009). Eco-modernism aligns well with more amorphous concepts such as sustainable development, green growth and green capitalism. Chapter one empirically and theoretically investigates this embedded assumption that human ingenuity can overcome natural resource limits and finds it to be without proof, even though it has been a hegemonic belief from at least the 1950s onwards. The amount of energy and other resources required per unit of economic activity may have fallen (relative decoupling) but this has not offset the amount of extra economic activity added per year. No absolute decoupling has occurred since at least the 1970s at the global level.
In essence, mainstream economists and sociologists assume that human society can grow independently of the physical ecology of which it is but a part, through the use of human ingenuity and culture. They even reverse physical reality when they assume that ecology can be subsumed by a part of that culture, the “market”. Science tells us that the scale and complexity of any organism, whether it is an individual or a combination of many organisms (e.g. a bacteria, an ant hill or a human society), is dependent upon the supply of energy to that organism; increases in scale and complexity tend to require increases in energy inputs (Tainter 1988; Zotin & Pokrovskii 2018; Smil 2019). Following from this, economic growth and development require that energy and other resources be extracted from the environment to manufacture goods, provide services, and create capital; “The central role of energy is substantiated by both theory and data” (Brown et. al 2011, p. 19).
The discourse of sustainable development, green growth etc. is not supported by ‘extant empirical evidence’ (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 483), and “it seems likely that the insistence on green growth is politically motivated. The assumption is that it is not politically acceptable to question economic growth and that no nation would voluntary limit growth in the name of the climate or environment; therefore, green growth must be true, since the alternative is disaster” (Ibid., p. 483). The hegemonic climate discourse that economic growth and ecological sustainability are compatible supports incremental change and continued economic growth, with “false solutions [that] defend the status quo by proposing minor tweaks to the current system rather than rethinking social priorities and reconfiguring socio- economic relationships” (Gunderson et al. 2017, p. 147).
The Anthropomorphic Representation of Nation States
There are three main theoretical approaches through which Western researchers and practitioners analyze international relations, neo-realism, liberal institutionalism and subjectivism; although the latter may be used to somewhat alter the former two rather than act as an alternative to them. All three tend to include anthropomorphic representations of nation states, which tend to render invisible much of the internal and cross-state reality of international relations.
For the neorealists, these pseudo-human nation states are seen as like objects that operate in the same rational utilitarian way as homo economicus operating within the disciplinary market system of mainstream economics; with a Hobbesian “anarchic” international system fulfilling the role of the market. The state is seen as sitting “above” society, disinterestedly following policies that are best for the national interest; a raison d’état. The possibilities that the state may possibly benefit one internal group over another, or even act as a comprador state that serves external interests as well as its own is not considered; a raison d’élite or a raison d’un autre état rather than a raison d’état. The assumptions that external inter-state dynamics trump internal dynamics, and that each state is a rational self-interested actor may aid in the clarity and parsimony of realist theories, but result in a significant disconnection from reality; a parsimonious theory may also be one that is too over-simplified to reflect reality. As with mainstream economics there is also the tendency to construct universalist ahistorical Eurocentric “rules” which in many cases are at odds with scholarship in other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and history. One such example is the Thucydides Trap, recently utilized by the realist scholar Allison (2017) to represent the fundamental dynamic between China and the US; without any study of the internal dynamics or history of China, as stated by Allison himself. This relies upon the assumption that a small-scale war in a then back-water of the world (ancient Greece) two millennia ago is universally relevant to the present. It also relies upon a somewhat simplistic reading of Thucydides, an author that may in fact be a highly unreliable narrator (Podoksik 2005) and events that are open to significant scholarly disagreement – especially over which state actually started the war and why (Dickins 1911; Tannenbaum 1975; Bagby 1994; Kagan 2013). After failing to accurately account for decades of US foreign policy, two leading neorealist scholars looked for a scapegoat in the “Israel Lobby” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2007). Their investigation may have covered some interesting ground, and certainly ruffled significant US and Israeli establishment feathers, but was still blind to issues of class interests and elite dominance.
Liberal institutionalists disaggregate the nation-state somewhat, proposing that there are multiple channels through which nation states interact, such as non-state actors, corporations, and international institutions, in addition to state-to-state channels. When there is a myriad of such connections, especially between capitalist democracies, a “complex interdependence” develops that it is proposed will inevitably reduce conflict. A group dynamics problem made up of arms-length rational individuals (neorealism) is replaced with one made up of complex interacting families. Left out are the possible negative effects of wealth and power differentials within and between nations, and the use of institutions and channels of interaction for means of manipulation and domination as well as positive-sum cooperation. It is proposed that the West has developed a cooperative liberal international order (LIO) made up of “principles, rules, and institutions” (Ikenberry 2001) that facilitate peace and security between democratic nations that consensually remain part of this order where hierarchy is built upon legitimate authority and only limited coercion. It is proposed that increasing interaction with, and membership of, this LIO will help other nations converge politically and economically with the Western “families”, capitalist liberal democracies that support cooperative peace and prosperity. This is supported by a democratic peace theory that claims that such democracies tend to promote peaceful relations by their very nature; the lack of any military conflict between Western nations since WW2 is taken as proof of the veracity of this theory.
This view of the West is somewhat at odds with centuries of brutal wars within the European continent, a Britain that mixed democracy at home with imperialism abroad, the genocidal clearing of indigenous peoples by white-settler democracies, the intentional throttling of many post-colonial democracies at birth by the Western nations (Williams 2021), and the destruction of non-Western democratic nations such as Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile and Nicaragua (Rosato 2003), as well as the aggressive war waged against Iraq. The peace in the West can much more straight forwardly be assigned to the imposition of a US security umbrella and US occupation forces across the West, with the overwhelming military might of the US (institutionalized within NATO) inhibiting any possibility of inter-state military conflict. This enforced peace then facilitated political convergence (an imposed convergence for West Germany, Japan and Italy) and economic interdependency. The LIO can also be seen as deeply Eurocentric and supremacist, with the Western nations seen as the being more “developed” than others, and reserving the right to judge which nations should be counted as fully part of the “civilized” club. The notions underlying the LIO have also been used to justify the “lesser” treatment of non-Western nations and even wars of aggression and other interventions (Menon 2016) in the name of a Western ”civilizing mission”; one that renders the “white man’s burden” of previous times in more culturally acceptable tones. Other civilizational projects, such as the multi-millennia Chinese civilization, are deemed to be not equal to Western civilization. As I propose in this book, Western civilization should be seen as one of many provincial and equally legitimate civilizing projects.
Subjectivist theories tend to still view nations as individual people or families, but reject the rational actor assumptions, seeing human beings as deeply irrational actors that view the world through a myriad of psychological and social constructions that can both divide and bring people together. Some of the first incarnations of subjectivism, stemming from an understanding that Soviet decision makers may not think the same as Western ones during the Cold War (Snyder 1977), did take into account materialist considerations but mainstream subjectivist scholarship has tended to ignore such considerations (Jervis 1976; Booth 1979; Jacobsen 1990). Ignoring issues of relative power, dominance, subservience and material capabilities that may shape and constrain the behaviours and inter-subjectivities being analyzed; all superstructure and no material base. The English School (sometimes referred to as liberal realism) has overlain institutional and constructivist concepts over the neo-realist model to argue that an inter-subjective “society of states” can exist where ideas, more than materiality, shape nation-state behavior. A recent text on the interaction of great powers with environmental responsibilities (Falkner & Buzan 2022) epitomizes this approach in focusing on the responsibility of the great powers and the emerging powers of the Global South to step up to their responsibilities within this society; a more complex rendering of the “international relations as a group dynamics problem” that still assumes that state action is driven by the raison d’état.
The dominant framing of the lack of progress with respect to climate change mitigation sees the issue as one of collective action with individual nations facing incentives to free ride off other nations climate policies; requiring international institutions and agreements to offset such incentives. This anthropomorphized group dynamics paradigm, “despite being the dominant paradigm for climate policy … [has been] mostly … accepted without extensive empirical testing” as Aklin and Mildenberger (2020, p. 5) note, while finding no “evidence to empirically substantiate this perspective in many important climate politics cases.” They go on to identify the material underpinnings of the ongoing climate policy debacle, “climate policy involves a dramatic renegotiation of the institutions that structure economic and social activity within each economy … Sharp divisions in the material interests of political and economic stakeholders trigger subsequent distributive conflict over climate policy making”; i.e. the political economy within and across nations may be the predominant cause of climate policy failure.
The mainstream international relations approaches may be seen as akin to the apocryphal blind men touching different surface parts of an elephant; each senses part of the whole but none can holistically envisage the whole, the interactions of the parts, or what lies beneath the surface. To do this, the disciplines and differing theoretical approaches must be integrated and the reality of economic, social and political class differences brought to the fore. Chapter two provides a more detailed critique of the mainstream theoretical approaches of international relations, integrated with the dynamics of the international system over the past four decades.
A Historical Materialist Alternative: A Gramscian View of Political Economy
The story of Antonio Gramsci is deeply rooted in materiality, his rise from childhood poverty and physical disability on the peripheral Italian island of Sardinia to become the head of the Italian communist party. Then at the height of his professional achievements, to be imprisoned for the remainder of his life by Mussolini’s fascist state in 1926, to “stop this brain working for twenty years” (Hoare & Smith 1971, p. xviii); becoming an example of the very organic intellectual that his own work conceptualized. In prison, he worked to address the question of why he had mistakenly seen Italian fascism as a possible passing phase of bourgeois reaction to the biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919-1920, during which concessions were made to the Italian working class to regain political stability, rather than a new viable and sustainable mode of authoritarian domination. His investigation was not just based in intellectual curiosity but grounded in his position as a political activist. The result was the prison notebooks, 3,000 pages in more than 30 notebooks, representing the continued working of his brain as his body deteriorated, that have impacted many disciplines, including international relations.
Gramsci’s view of the “intellectual” is very much at odds with the liberal conceptualization of a free and open “market place of ideas”. He sees intellectuals in the functional sense of being of two types, “traditional” and “organic”. The former may appear to be independent of class interests, but exist within “past and present class relations and [conceal] an attachment to various historical class formations” (Hoare & Smith 1971, p. 3) and come from “the petty and middle landed bourgeoisie and certain strata of the petty and middle urban bourgeoisie” (Ibid., p. 11).
The latter represent “the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class” (Ibid., p. 3), which play a central role in the construction of a ruling ideology and the “struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals” (Ibid., p. 10). This ruling ideology becomes a hegemonic culture, which acts as a common sense that structures the way in which citizens view society; a common sense that legitimizes the position of the dominant social group, the historic bloc. This common sense is continually open to contestation and reformulation with respect to changes both within the historic bloc and with necessary compromises made with other classes. Thus, as a group, the intellectuals play a crucial role for the dominant societal group as that “dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government” (Ibid., p. 12). Gramsci sees the massive expansion of intellectual occupations as a function of the greater scale and subtlety required for societal domination in a world of universal literacy, geographic freedom within the nation and suffrage:
In the modern world the category of intellectuals … has undergone unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group (Ibid., p. 13)
Gramsci’s view of intellectuals aligns with Parenti’s observation that pre-WW2 intellectuals tended to be from a rentier background, possessing the financial ability to spend extensive periods carrying out research, and representing an upper class view of society and its history. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California in the 1960s and 1970s moved against the post-WW2 “democratization” of intellectual functions created by such things as the GI Bill and the general expansion of the tuition-free university sector. He initiated the massive real increases in university fees, and the replacement of education grants with loans, that has occurred over the past half century; especially in the US and UK. These serve to both limit those that can attend the elite universities which serve as a gateway to elite intellectual roles, and the subject and future position choices of heavily indebted students. Restricting the ability of lower and middle class students to enter the ranks of many of the intellectual professions that have a proliferation of low paid and even unpaid internships (even the United Nations internships are unpaid!) and post-doctoral positions. The more recent work of Gustavsson and Melldahl (2018) also points to the hidden rentier status of many intellectuals across the academy, the arts, media and politics; who have the independent income that allows them to be relatively indifferent to low wages. Echoing Bourdieu’s remarks on the “freedom from economic necessity” providing a favourable base for such occupations (Bourdieu 1984, p. 53-54).
With the spread of literacy, mass media, and the releasing of the chains of feudalism that restricted geographic and social mobility, the organs of coercion and violence required the addition of cultural control; an elite-serving common sense internalized by the masses. A three-tier hierarchy of preferred modes of control was then available to the historic bloc, from consent (the hegemonic culture) to coercion to violence; moving along a continuum of efficiency from consent (the most efficient) to violence (the least efficient) with respect to the functioning of overall society. Only when a higher efficiency mode fails is a lesser one utilized. Even the generally white middle class students of Kent State University travelled through this hierarchy as manufactured consent and coercion failed to stem their anti-Vietnam War protests; leading to the use of deadly violence against them by the U.S. state apparatus. The French gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protestors have more recently experienced such a journey.
The hegemonic culture represents a bricolage of past and present elements, representing accommodations within, and reformulations of, the historic bloc, accommodations with other elements of society, and historical elements that are deemed useful or too embedded to be excluded; the longer the history of a nation, the greater range of historical elements that may be found within the hegemonic culture. When addressing the European attempts to utilize Fordism, Gramsci notes that its introduction:
encounters so much ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ resistance [as] past history has left behind a heap of passive sedimentation produced by the phenomenon of the saturation and fossilisation of civil-service personnel and intellectuals, of clergy and landowners, piratical commerce and the professional … army. One could even say that the more historic a nation the more numerous and burdensome are these sedimentations of idle and useless masses living on ‘their ancestral patrimony’, pensioners of economic history. (Hoare & Smith 1971, p. 281).
The US Civil War had swept away the feudal and aristocratic structures of the South, and the extremely small (in relation to European nations) scale of the US state represented little resistance to the Fordist changes. In the post-Civil War period the US plutocrats of big business had become dominant in society, crushing the unions in the late nineteenth century, and with the US progressive movement providing only marginal challenges. “America does not have ‘great historical and cultural traditions’; but neither does it have this leaden burden to support” (Ibid., p. 285); a position that has set it apart from the other bourgeois societies.
Accepting the relative specificity and historically deterministic nature of individual societies, Gramsci immersed himself in the history of Italy, and Europe in general, and the nature of the dominant ruling coalitions. He rejected “a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only … movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory” noting that “reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations … it is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema … this conception is nothing but an expression of passivity”; a fundamental critique of both realist and liberal schools of international relations as well as mainstream universalist political, economic and sociological scholarship. “One may term ‘Byzantinism’ or ‘scholasticism’ the regressive tendency to treat theoretical questions as if they had a value in themselves, independently of any practice” (Ibid., p. 200).
Italy had only become a united state in 1871, very much like Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of the previous year. Gramsci’s understanding that the ruling classes could not dominate only though juridical and political processes, but also had to rule through the cultural domination of the subaltern classes, allowed him to understand why some attempts at domination would fail and others succeed. For many years, the “Italian bourgeoisie was incapable of uniting the people around itself, and this was the cause of its defeats and the interruption of its development” (Hoare & Smith 1971, p. 53). In Germany and England, the bourgeoisie allied itself with the old feudal (and mercantile in the UK) aristocracy who remained as a governing stratum. The more radical English Jacobinism of Cromwell’s “roundheads” being defeated and replaced by the bourgeois “Glorious Revolution” (the replacement of the British monarch with the Dutch William of Orange that was fully understanding of the limited nature of a bourgeois “constitutional monarch”) in the seventeenth century. The mercantile nature of British aristocracy that allied itself with the bourgeoisie in the Glorious Revolution created a very different ruling structure to than in the continental European nations. As Hobsbawn (1962, 1975, 1987, 1994) and Thompson (1963) show, it took an extended period of compulsion, violence and elite compromise to “remake” the English working class and co-opt it into the manufactured consent of a hegemonic culture. As in Italy, Gramsci saw the resultant “revolutions” as passive ones, driven by the dominant classes and the state downwards rather than by a mass revolution that replaces the dominant classes (e.g. the Russian Bolshevik Revolution). He saw much of European history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as being driven by the reaction of other European ruling classes to the radical Jacobinism of the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799.
1. Revolutionary explosion in France with radical and violent transformation of social and political relations; 2. European opposition to the French Revolution and to any extension of it along class lines; 3. War between France … and the rest of Europe – initially, in order to avoid being stifled at birth, and subsequently with the aim of establishing a permanent French hegemony …; 4. National revolts against French hegemony, and the birth of the modern European states by successive waves of reform rather than by revolutionary explosions like the original French one. (Ibid., p. 114-115).
A very different history from the elite-serving “official history” versions taught in British and European schools.
Any political analysis must take into account levels ranging from “the relations between international forces” to “the objective relations within society – in other words, the degree of development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties (hegemonic systems within the State); and to immediate (or potentially military) political relations”. Gramsci also states “that there can be no doubt [international relations follow fundamental social relations] … However, international relations react both passively and actively on political relations” (Ibid., p. 176). He rejects the separation of the study of the domestic and the international, seeing both as part of an interacting whole. He also notes the importance of objective relations and the development of productive forces (i.e. the Marxist base structure), while rejecting both economic determinism, a “primitive infantilism” (Ibid., p. 407), and an over reliance on any “ideologism” that over-emphasizes the juridical, political and cultural superstructure. The base and superstructure are seen as interacting rather than the former mechanically forming the latter (economic determinism) or the latter existing independent of its interaction with the former (subjectivism and critical theory which excludes materialism); materialist and subjectivist perspectives are integrated. The complex interactive nature of the relationship between base and superstructure, and the power of a new ideas that become part of the common sense, is detailed by Gramsci:
Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. (Ibid., p. 377)
A further insight is that a given nation may be dominated by foreign forces, with a “foreigner’s party” representing “not so much the vital forces of its own country, as that country’s subordination and economic enslavement to the hegemonic nations or to certain of their number” (Ibid., p. 177). This matches the modern use of the term comprador to refer to national elites that represent foreign interests.
Gramsci conceives the modern state as an integral state, with civil society being integrated with rather than separated from the state; with civil society being lead by political society. Civil society movements that threaten the status quo, such as radical labour unions, can be politically co-opted and the radical threat defused through incremental accommodations. This integral state represents the historic bloc, with civil society representing extra layers of defence against challengers. Where civil society is little developed, as in pre-communist Russia, a direct assault upon the state, a war of manoeuvre, may be successful. Where civil society is well developed, as in the modern liberal capitalist nations, such a direct assault will not prevail. The war of manoeuvre must be preceded by a war of position that challenges the cultural dominance of the historic bloc. The challenging classes must develop their own organic intellectuals and construct their own common sense that legitimizes their drive for power. In this respect, the constant focus of the historic bloc upon “radical” intellectuals, and actions to repress and delegitimize them becomes a first line of defence against the creation of an alternative common sense. Such actions may be blunt such as the jailing of Gramsci and the “Red Scares” after both world wars, or more subtle such as the “cancelling” of such individuals from mainstream media, public positions and the academy. In the Soviet Union, evidence of “bourgeois thoughts” could result in the end of a career, “re-education” or severe punishment; as they threatened the communist hegemonic culture.
To Gramsci, fascism represented the alterations to the Italian hegemonic culture and modes of control required to match the changing circumstances of Italian capitalism in the post-WW1 years. The same can be said of the US Fordist capital-labour compromise (“embedded liberalism”) in reaction to the circumstances of the Great Depression reflecting the changed circumstances of US capitalism; which stood in contrast to the German capitalist support for fascism representing the specific circumstance of Germany at that time. The Gramscian view of modern society integrates both materialist and constructivist concepts, accepts asymmetries in class power, and provides a process of historical change; correcting the shortcomings of the three mainstream theories of international relations. In addition, the disciplines are reintegrated into a political economy that provides a holistic and integrated view of modern society. Gramsci’s conceptualization can also be utilized for non-capitalist class dominated societies, such as the communist Soviet Union, or the modern China dominated by a Party-state class rather than a capitalist one.
A neo-Gramscian View of International Relations
Gramsci’s concepts and overall theory have had a wide impact across the social sciences and humanities; with respect to international relations, Robert Cox was the leading individual to construct a neo-Gramscian framework in combination with other eclectic sources. Cox worked within the International Labour Organization for over 20 years before becoming a professor at York University in Canada, and this experience helped shape his inter-disciplinary and heterodox approach. His two papers in the journal Millenium, “Social Forces, States and World Orders” in 1981 and “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations” in 1983, together with his book “Production Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History” in 1987, introduced his neo-Gramscian view of international relations.
Cox rejected the separation of state and society, developing Gramsci’s view of the integral state into a combined state/society complex. He also rejected the anthropomorphized representation of states, together with the implicit separation of internal state dynamics and the external dynamics of the international system – specifically using the concept of a World Order in which state/society systems interact on many levels. As with Gramsci, Cox’s historical materialism captures the co-creative relationship of institutions and ideas (the superstructure) and material capabilities (the base); integrating the material and the cultural. The state/society complex is seen as a site of hegemonic contestation, both within the ruling classes and between them and oppositional forces; rejecting the liberal pluralist ontology. The process of change is seen as a dialectical one, that transforms one temporally specific historical structure, “a particular configuration of forces [institutions, ideas and material capabilities]’ that provide a decisional context of ‘habits, pressures, expectations and constraints within which actions take place” (Cox 1981, p. 135), into another. Providing both a historicized and politically economic aware definition that can straight-forwardly subsume many mainstream definitions of strategic culture utilized within international relations scholarship. With an ‘alliance of different class forces organized around a set of hegemonic ideas … with not only power within civil society and economy [but also with] persuasive ideas, arguments and initiatives that build on, catalyze and develop its political networks and organization’ (Gill 2003, p. 58); the historic bloc that provides the hegemonic culture. Importantly, Cox accepts that specific cultural elements may outlive the circumstances of their creation and become embedded, with a given historical structure containing elements from many previous structures; a bricolage.
A domestic hegemony can then extended over other nation’s state/society complexes through material, institutional and ideational channels, under the right circumstances. This was the case after WW2, where the US capitalist elite within the United States utilized the state/society complex which they dominated to gain hegemony over the greatly weakened Western European powers, the other white settler colonies and Japan; a group collectively known as the “West” and treated as second-rank powers allowed some policy freedom and control over limited areas (e.g. France with respect to West Africa). At the same time the US forced the UK and others to decolonize their colonial empires, allowing the US elites to gain dominance in many of the resulting nations, using all of the tools of violence, coercion and hegemonic cultural control. These included numerous cases of the murder and overthrow of the democratic leaders of the decolonized (e.g. Congo, Iran), as well as with respect to the nations of Central and South America. The Soviet Union gained the Eastern European nations within its sphere of influence, and China was “lost” to the West with the Chinese communist revolution. The following years of the Cold War included many proxy wars as the West and the communist bloc fought over those nations that were not fully dominated by the West or the Soviets and China (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola). With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the opening up of China to the market, US and Western elites saw the chance to fully dominate the globe, rather than foster peace and the respect for national sovereignty and self-determination
Social forces, the forms of state/society complex and the world system are also seen as interacting in a bidirectional and co-constitutive manner. A good example is the impact of the industrial revolution in Britain that fundamentally changed the position of Britain with respect to other nations. This then lead other nations, such as Germany, France and Russia to attempt to impose top down passive revolutions to catch up with Britain to circumvent British domination and hegemony. As Anievas (2014) notes, the disruption of the world order by this process of differential industrialization was a fundamental cause of the thirty years crisis that included both world wars; a process that is still affecting the world order as China and other members of the non-West industrialize. In chapter 3, the neo-Gramscian framework is further developed and elaborated upon.
The Central Nations: China, the United States and Russia
The combination of the three states of China, the US and Russia could quite possibly dominate the globe and move it toward a low carbon future through consent, compulsion and violence if necessary. China has the largest global economy when measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis – having passed the US in 2013, is the largest importer of fossil fuels, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and is the most advantaged with respect to “green” technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. The US has the second largest economy, is the largest producer of fossil fuels, and the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Russia has the sixth largest economy and is the second largest producer and largest exporter of fossil fuels. The three nations are also dominant in military capabilities, including nuclear weapon arsenals. So why is it that when faced with the existential crisis of climate change, the three are engaged in an increasing new Cold War rather than cooperating?
To understand how such a problematic position came to pass, and the possibilities for active cooperation on climate change between the three nations, the neo-Gramscian framework can be used in a historical materialist analysis of their state/society complexes and leadership cultures. These are not “like” nations as the neo-realists would assume, but rather very different political-economic entities with differing worldviews, internal dynamics and ways of operating with respect to other state/society complexes. Without the knowledge of their differing internal workings and external orientation, an accurate understanding of the possibilities for cooperation will never be possible. As with Gramsci, any analysis must be informed by a historical understanding of the development of the three nations, the nature and objectives of the ruling historic blocs, the dominant common sense ideology, and the source of antagonisms between them. The opposition of the fundamental bourgeois liberal nature of the US to the non-bourgeois Party-state dominance within China stands out; each nation’s state/society complex threatens the other’s at the most basic political-economic level. The historical multi-century global dominance of the West, of which the US is the latest hegemon, can also be seen as a significant factor; four decades of exponential economic growth has placed China in a position to challenge that dominance. The relative sameness of the US and Russian state/society systems also stands out, the competition between the US and Russia may be more in the field of power than ideology; notwithstanding the extensive attempts to point to their differences in the West. In addition, there must be an understanding of the three nation’s energy systems, the reliance on energy export revenues or energy imports, and the political economy of the energy sector. When added to the nature of climatic impacts upon the three nations, this provides a material embedding of the political-economic analysis. Chapters four, five and six provide the analyses of each nation. Chapter seven reviews the usefulness of the neo-Gramscian perspective in these analyses.
A core question is whether the three nations will put climate change actions on a lower priority than their state/society system competition, especially given the “baked in” nature of climatic changes from a given level of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Could some climate change policies and technologies be reconciled with the status quo and continued inter state/society system competition much better than others? Chapter eight addresses these questions and the possible policy avenues that may be chosen by the three nations.
The Use Of This Text
I have striven to provide a text that is accessible to both an academic and a wider audience. For the latter, the more theoretical chapters two and seven may be skipped as they are more directed toward the academy.
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First class work. Many thanks.
My field of study is Chinese governance and I would very much like to see your review of that country.
First class work. Many thanks.
My field of study is Chinese governance and I would very much like to see your review of that country.