Approaching ‘the international’: Beyond political marxism

In rebuke to those mainstream IR scholars who identified Marxist thought with Soviet diplomatic practice, the years since the collapse of the USSR have seen a flourishing of Marxist writing in the field. This trend has been stimulated, in the best traditions of praxis, by the need to account for actually existing international politics:in the debate on ‘globalization’ in the 1990s and the subsequent ‘return to empire’ in the early years of this century. For many Marxists, the issues of empire and imperialism had never really died away. These ‘revived’ debates have, however, revealed the persistence of a series of dilemmas in Marxist thought on international relations. In what follows, we focus on one dimension of these many issues-specifically what has been termed the ‘problematic of the international’ (Rosenberg 2000, 65). Most generally stated, this can be defined as the myriad theoretical, political, normative, and philosophical problems flowing from the division and interaction of humanity into a multiplicity of political communities. Here, we enquire into the theoretical issues emerging from Marxism’s engagement with this international problematique, noting some of its political implications.