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Back to the future of 'one logic or two'?: forward to the
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John M. Hobson a
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Cambridge Review of International Affairs,

Volume 20, Number 4, December 2007

Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’?: forward to the past

of ‘anarchy versus racist hierarchy’?

John M Hobson1
University of Sheffield

Abstract This article argues that while the attempt by Alex Callinicos to construct a
non-reductionist approach for theorizing the international is brave, it falls short of the
target due, in part, to the failure to look in the right place for a non-reductionist Marxism.
In taking us ‘back to the future’ of the debate on ‘one logic or two?’ (‘economics’ or
‘geopolitics and economics’), the quest can at best result only in the construction of a thin
materialist reductionism. This article develops an approach that takes norms and (racist)
identity seriously—one that simultaneously reconfigures our conception of the
international as a hierarchy rather than as a pure anarchy, thereby prompting a
reconsideration of Callinicos’s commitment to a neorealist anarchic conception of the
international. This article closes by suggesting that the Eurocentrism of much Marxist
International Relations scholarship obscures the role of non-Western resistance in the
making of global politics.

Introduction
On reading Alex Callinicos’s article, ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’,
which forms a part of a wider Marxist debate, I was immediately struck by how
Marxist intellectual history in International Relations (IR) seems to be repeating
itself. The main issue under consideration takes us back to the future of the 1980s
debate on ‘one logic or two?’, which explored the issue of whether the
international system was governed by a purely economic logic or whether it was
shaped by two—economic and geopolitical (Chase-Dunn 1981). In a strange twist
of fate, Callinicos enters the current neo-Marxist debate, revived more than two
decades on, albeit under fresh circumstances. His central claim is that economics
is not the only driver of IR. Rather, capitalism must be combined with the logic of
geopolitical competition. In short, he and a rapidly growing number of neo-
Marxists are seeking to provide a fresh non-reductionist Marxist approach for
understanding the current conjuncture (and history) of the international system.
Moreover, this quest is combined with Callinicos’ critique of various recent neo-
Marxist approaches of IR, which assert that geopolitical competition, at least
between the great (capitalist) powers, is no longer relevant in today’s world.

1
Without implicating them, I thank Alexander Anievas and John C Smith for their
extensive and extremely useful comments, as much as I wish to thank the three reviewers.

ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/07/040581–17 q 2007 Centre of International Studies

DOI: 10.1080/09557570701680563
Downloaded By: [Hobson, John M.] At: 10:05 10 December 2007

582 John M Hobson

In the first part of this article, I consider Callinicos’s attempt to construct a non-
reductionist Marxist theoretical approach to IR. I argue that while his is an
exceedingly brave attempt that goes a long way to succeeding, nevertheless at the
last hurdle (or ‘in the last instance?’) he retreats back to the comfortable territory of
economic reductionism. Moreover, I make much of the ‘back to the future’ theme
because I feel that Callinicos and other neo-Marxists are speaking to a debate that
has not just been superseded in IR theory by that between materialism and
ideationalism (issued by post-structuralists and constructivists), but also because
this particular quest can ultimately lead only into the cul-de-sac of a thin
materialist reductionism, given that only economic and geopolitical factors are
considered.
In the second part of this article, I suggest that Callinicos and other Marxists
might want to consider the role that norms and identity play in the international
system in order to avoid this particular reductionist trap. This in turn leads
directly into my main substantive argument, which asserts that taking racist
identity seriously as a factor in understanding imperialism and IR, past and
present, requires us to consider the role of racist hierarchy in the world, past and
present. I make this argument in part to challenge Callinicos’s claim that the world
is currently constructed as anarchy. But I also do so to register my dissatisfaction
with the attendant problems of Eurocentrism and the reification of top-down
processes of power found in many Marxist IR writings, given that these
tendencies obscure both Eastern agency on the one hand and the ‘power of the
powerless’ on the other.

Beyond economic reductionism: between a Marxist reductionist rock and a

bourgeois hard place?
The quest for a two-logics approach takes us back to the future of the 1980s debate
that emerged in the light of numerous interventions—both Marxist and
Weberian—which saw in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory an unsatisfactory
economism and which also sought to re-establish the autonomy of political forces.
More than two decades later, this debate has reappeared within Marxist IR circles.
This is in part a function of a series of recent and prominent Marxist analyses of IR
concerned with ‘how the existence of an inter-state system in the capitalist system
can be explained’ (Lacher 2002, 148), and in part a response to the renewed interest
in the issue of empire. It is certainly these twin contexts that fuel Callinicos’s
agenda.
This, in turn, takes us back to the future of a debate conducted between Vladimir
Lenin and Karl Kautsky that revolves around the issue of ‘ultra-imperialism’.
Kautsky (1914/1970) argued that the great capitalist powers would join together
and cooperate in exploiting the rest of the world, thereby making ‘inter-imperial’
geopolitics obsolete. Lenin countered by insisting that ‘capitalist cooperation’
between imperial powers is a non-sequitur (Lenin 1916/1933): for so long as
capitalism remains, war and geopolitics would inevitably continue as a
fundamental property of inter-state behaviour. In this way, we find ourselves
going back to the future of liberal ‘democratic peace theory’, except that in the
Marxist canon it might better be labelled ‘capitalist imperial peace theory’. It is
within this context that Callinicos comes in, issuing a refutation of neo-Marxist
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 583

ultra-imperialist theory that he discerns in the recent works of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2000), William Robinson (2004) and others. Thus, much as Lenin
sought to refute the ‘renegade Kautsky’, so Callinicos seeks to refute neo-Marxist
‘imperial capitalist peace theory’ in order to retain Marxist integrity. And so with
respect to Marxist IR theory, the early years of the 21st century appear to replay
those of the early 20th century—though with an important ‘non-reductionist’ twist.
Callinicos certainly draws on Lenin, but he also draws on Leon Trotsky who,
unlike Lenin, placed significant emphasis on the role of geopolitics in issuing
social and political change—arguably more so than any other Marxist in history
(Trotsky 1965, chapter 1; 1969, 37 –45; 1973, chapters 1– 3). This point has not been
lost on neo-Weberians. John Hall, for example, readily quotes Trotsky’s idiom that
‘war is the locomotive of history’ in order to support the neo-Weberian claim that
war and inter-state geopolitics occupy a certain ontological autonomy (if not
primacy) in promoting social and political change (Hall 1996).2 Indeed, such is the
degree of emphasis that Trotsky placed on the role of war in promoting social
change that it invites obvious comparisons not just with neo-Weberian analyses
(Mann 1986, 1988; Giddens 1985), but also with realist approaches (Gilpin 1981)
—a point that I return to below.
Still, Trotsky also placed special emphasis on capitalism—in particular its
tendency to promote ‘combined and uneven development’ across the world
economy. Though one can search in vain for theoretical statements in Trotsky’s
work to this effect, there can be no doubt that he came close to a two-logic
approach: class economics and statist geopolitics. It is noteworthy, for example,
that Justin Rosenberg’s superb recent and innovative Trotskyist analysis of post-
1989 globalization embodies a geopolitical and economic moment (Rosenberg
2005). And it is this Trotskyist emphasis that, I suspect, provides Callinicos with
the cue for his claim that there are two logics rather than the traditional one found
in much of Marxism.
By contrast, Lenin, I believe, fundamentally rejected a two-logic approach.
States must not be accorded any ontological weighting. This would, in Lenin’s
view, open the door to social democracy that would lead us into the realm of
‘bourgeois theory’ and in the opposite direction to that of a revolutionary Marxist
politics. It was this that informed Lenin’s critique not just of the ‘renegade’
Kautsky, but other ‘bourgeois revisionists’ such as Eduard Bernstein (Lenin
1916/1933, 1934/1978). Thus, for Lenin, granting non-economic factors any
degree of ontological weighting is to necessarily enter the realm of bourgeois
theory. For if the state or geopolitics are granted autonomy, this means that neither
capitalism nor class relations wholly underpin states, war or imperialism. More
problematic still is the point that to assume that states have autonomy means that
class interests between the bourgeoisie and proletariat are potentially reconcilable;
which, of course, contradicts Marx’s whole critique of liberal political economy
that was outlined in his three volumes of Capital. It was for this reason that Lenin
asserted in characteristically forthright fashion in State and Revolution that:
[t]he state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class
antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that the class
antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And conversely, the existence of the

2
This quote is found on the opening (unnumbered) page.
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584 John M Hobson

state proves that class antagonisms are irreconcilable (Lenin 1917/1932, 8, original
emphasis).
In essence, the implication of a non-reductionist model is that class struggle
and the capitalist mode of production do not lie at the base of all things, the
political implication of which is that the overthrow of capitalism will not deliver
mankind to a free and equal world, since the problem of war and imperialism will
remain. And granting states autonomy jeopardizes Marx’s most fundamental of
claims that the state will wither away under socialism. Thus, maintaining
economic reductionism was for Lenin the political issue that underpinned classical
Marxist theoretical-revolutionary integrity.
Turning now to the present debate that Callinicos engages in, it is clear that
there is also a political issue at stake here. Thus, Callinicos seeks to refute the
quasi-liberal, neo-Marxist capitalist imperial peace theory, which clearly joins
hands with present-day liberal democratic peace theorists at the level of
geopolitical outcomes. He seeks to show, as Lenin did before him, that war and
geopolitical competition remain an important property of the (present) capitalist
world order such that imperial cooperation in the absence of geopolitical conflict
between the great capitalist powers—the leitmotif of much liberal IR theory—is an
impossibility.3 But in implicit contrast to Lenin, he seeks to develop this argument
by constructing a non-reductionist Marxism that accords ontological weighting to
both class economics and geopolitics. In so doing, one possible paradox emerges—
that Callinicos himself has constructed (or unwittingly seeks to construct) a
‘bourgeois’ Marxist approach in order to refute the bourgeois neo-Marxist theory
of ultra-imperialism. While this may derive from his desire or quest to construct a
non-reductionist Marxist approach, the question is: does he succeed? Here I want
to begin by briefly reviewing the lineages of non-reductionist Marxist theorization
since the 1960s in order to frame the subsequent discussion of Callinicos’s
proposed solution.
The pursuit of a non-reductionist Marxism has, I think it fair to say, obsessed
neo-Marxists ever since the 1960s. Part of this was politically inspired, given that
Western Marxists had finally turned against Stalinism and the economism of the
Third International. This task initially went in tandem with the quest for a non-
reductionist Marxist theory of the state. Louis Althusser’s famous argument
developed in For Marx constructed a schema that differentiated a ‘young Marx’
from a ‘mature Marx’; with the latter inter alia developing a non-reductionist
approach after the so-called ‘epistemological break’ that was undertaken in 1845
(Althusser 1969). But while many subsequent neo-Marxists turned their backs on
Althusser on account of his anti-humanist structuralism, following EP
Thompson’s (1978) famous critique in The poverty of theory, Althusser’s (and
Nicos Poulantzas’s) non-reductionist schema has remained pretty much intact
ever since.
Indeed, from these pioneering beginnings, a long line of neo-Marxists have
sought to develop a non-reductionist approach by focusing on the ‘relative
autonomy’ of the state. Claus Offe’s account of the state as an ‘ideal collective
capitalist’ was important, framing the relative autonomy of the state by arguing

3
Still it is significant to note that Callinicos defines geopolitics broadly, covering
conflicts over security, territory, resources and influence among states (Callinicos 2007).
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 585

that the state often goes against the short-term interests of individual capitals in
order to secure the long-term reproduction of the capitalist mode of production
(Offe 1984). This formula, pre-empted by Poulantzas’s and Althusser’s notion of
‘economic determination in the last instance’, became the solution to the
reductionist charge levelled by Marxism’s critics and has underpinned a variety of
subsequent prominent formulations in the development of contemporary Marxist
state theory (for summaries, see Jessop 1990 and Hobson 2000, chapter 4). This is,
however, a potentially dangerous strategy, for investing the state with autonomy
tacks close to the Weberian proposition that the state can reconcile class interests.
This is why, ultimately, such Marxists elevate the economic by according it
‘determination in the last instance’ and it is also why the state gains ‘relative’
rather than ‘absolute’ autonomy.
The ‘relative autonomy’ of the state conception preoccupied Marxist theorists of
the state from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s (for example, see Miliband
1973, Poulantzas 1973 and Offe 1984). But during the 1980s, following on from
Theda Skocpol (1979), a number of neo-Weberians presented a major challenge to
Marxism by effectively arguing that a theory of state autonomy could not be
conducted in the singular but could only be achieved by recognizing the state’s
position in the inter-state system—namely, by recognizing states in the plural
(Colin Barker, cited in Callinicos 2007, 542). At this point, prominent neo-Weberians
unwittingly invoked a realist conception of the state, arguing that states do not
simply or exclusively function to maintain the mode of production, but exercise
their autonomy through geopolitics. They insisted that the inter-state system
constituted or socialized not just states, but also national social change (Skocpol
1979; Giddens 1985; Mann 1986; Hall 1986). Thus, the challenge to neo-Marxism
now lay in its alleged inability to accord ontological weighting to the geopolitical
system of states—otherwise known as the debate on ‘one logic or two?’
In the light of this powerful challenge, a number of Marxists sought to produce
analyses that gave weighting to the logic of territoriality alongside the logic of
capital (for example, Arrighi 1994). And it is specifically at this point that
Callinicos enters into this old debate, revived in recent years, by insisting that
capitalist and territorial logics must be theorized as having a certain autonomy,
even if they are at the same time reinforcing and entwined (Harvey 2003; Teschke
2003; Lacher 2005). The issue at stake here is whether Callinicos has succeeded in
embracing the non-reductionist mantle. While the argument of his article
proceeds successfully through a logical sequence of signposts on the road towards
a non-reductionist terminus, we nevertheless hit a major roadblock at the
penultimate stage.
Callinicos begins by correctly claiming that many Marxist accounts embody a
‘soft functionalism’—a term that he borrows from Vivek Chibber—wherein the
inter-state system owes its existence to the needs of capital (Callinicos 2007, 538).
Rather than being criticized for being economically reductionist, Callinicos prefers
Gonzalo Pozo-Martin’s criticism that he veers towards a realist explanatory model
(Pozo-Martin 2006, 236). In this vein, Callinicos insists that territoriality or
geopolitical competition has a logic of its own, different from that of economic
competition:
Of course the state system has distinctive properties: if it did not, it could not play
an explanatory role. One implication of this point is that there is, necessarily, a
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586 John M Hobson

realist moment in any Marxist analysis of international relations and conjunctures:

in other words, any such analysis must take into account the strategies, calculations
and interactions of rival political elites in the state system (Callinicos 2007, 542).
Moreover, at the end of the article Callinicos seeks to show that capitalist
imperialism occurs through the interaction of economic and geopolitical
competition. And because these logics differ in structure, their interrelations
will necessarily vary over time. This insight is deployed to reveal how patterns of
inter-state competition differed between the first and second halves of the 20th
century.
But, while this is indeed interesting, the question that it throws up is: has
Callinicos succeeded in producing a genuinely non-reductionist approach, or has
he produced a lopsided economic approach that ‘adds geopolitics and stirs’?
I suggest that at the crucial moment his argument enters extremely rocky terrain.
This takes the form of his strategy of avoiding ending up in the cul-de-sac of
Weberian multi-causality by according greater weighting to the economic logic,
thereby issuing a causal hierarchy in contradistinction to causal pluralism. In
order to understand this move, it is necessary to contextualize it within Marxist
theory.
It is clear that Callinicos is completely aware of the pitfalls of a Weberian
ontologically pluralist model. Though he does not mention it, it was of course Karl
Marx who argued that the tendency to accord ontological autonomy to the state or
geopolitics (or any other ‘superstructural’ process, for that matter) is to fall into the
trap of ‘bourgeois fetishism’. And this claim was not a minor point that Marx
issued simply in respect of liberal political economy’s ‘commodity fetishism’;
rather, it provided the essence of his whole ‘dialectical science’. That is, he insisted
that the everyday appearance of (all) things must be penetrated for their
underlying essential base; a base that comprises contradictory social relations of
production. Failure to reduce things to class struggle is to fall into the trap of
fetishism that is the leitmotif of bourgeois theory (Marx 1867/1954, 366, 483, 567–
570; 1867/1959, 45 – 48, 168, 392– 399, 827, 829– 831). Or, as Marx famously put it,
‘All [dialectical] science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the
essence of things did not coincide’ (Marx 1867/1959, 817). Of course, it was
precisely this formulation that informed his ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor that
was famously outlined in his ‘Preface’ to A contribution to the critique of political
economy (Marx 1859/1976).
In light of this, Callinicos is fully aware that having got this far he now finds
himself on the borderline of, or at the crossroads between, the realms of Marxist
and bourgeois theory. And the dilemma that he faces is one that every other neo-
Marxist has confronted (or will confront) when trying to construct a non-
reductionist Marxism. Plough on and end up in a so-called bourgeois dead-end, or
retreat from the abyss and reverse back into the cul-de-sac of Marxist economic
reductionism. The former strategy naturally protects him from the reductionist
charge, though it comes at a high political price, namely, the sacrificing of a
revolutionary Marxist politics; while the latter strategy enables him to maintain
Marxist theoretical and political integrity at the cost of a reductionist ontology. It is
in this sense that he finds himself between a Marxist rock and a bourgeois hard
place. Which road does Callinicos take? The clue is found in his prescient
recognition, in summarizing his critics’ arguments, that ‘[b]y positing two distinct
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 587

logics . . . economic and geopolitical—we have surreptitiously embraced the

explanatory [bourgeois] pluralism of Weber and of historical sociologists such as
Mann and Skocpol’ (Callinicos 2007, 585).
At this critical juncture he steers a course that, like the theorists of the ‘relative
autonomy of the state’ before him, seeks to elevate the economic to create a causal
hierarchical model in order to avoid the pitfalls of a bourgeois-Weberian
ontological pluralism. This ‘elevation of the economic over the geopolitical’ entails
revealing that there is something inherent in capitalism that keeps states plural.
Though sharing in their non-reductionist aspirations, here he critiques Hannes
Lacher (2002) and Benno Teschke (2003) who assert that there is a highly contingent
relationship between capitalism and the state system and, most importantly, that
capitalism could do away with the multi-state system and replace it with a
different form of state—specifically a transnational state (Callinicos 2004, 429).
Paradoxically, this schema is emerging as an important one in the construction of a
non-reductionist Marxism in IR.
But Callinicos charts an alternative course, which sets out to reveal how
capitalism secures the reproduction of a multi-state system in order to avoid
falling into the trap of bourgeois pluralism. Specifically, he argues that it is the
tendency to uneven and combined development inherent within capitalism that
ensures the multi-state system’s reproduction. Thus, the logic of competition
between capitals ensures the unequal development of capitalism. And, while he
rightly notes that ‘it would contradict what I have already argued simply to
assume that it carries over to the political’, he then goes on to say that
[a]ll the same, there would seem to be good reason to believe that it does carry over:
the tendency not simply to uneven development, but to destabilizing shifts in its
pattern, would constantly subvert attempts to construct a transnational state....
[T]he centrifugal pulls generated by the inherently geographically uneven
distribution of resources under capitalism play an irreducible role in keeping the
state system plural (Callinicos 2007, 544– 545, emphasis original).

But in so doing, Callinicos opts ultimately for an economistic explanation of the

geopolitical system. Of course, there is nothing problematic in arguing that the multi-
state system is (at least in part) reproduced by capitalism when constructing a non-
reductionist approach: failure to do so can lead to a geopolitical reductionism and all
the attendant problems that this throws up. But to secure non-reductionism, he must
also show how the multi-state system constitutes not just the reproduction of
capitalism, but also the directions that it takes beyond an economically functionalist
framework. Indeed, he would need to show how geopolitics enters into the
constitution of global economics—and how this partially constitutes the uneven
development of capitalism—as well as to reveal how class relations are shaped not
only by the mode of production but also by geopolitics. Unfortunately, it is these
imperatives—which would square the circle, so to speak—that are missing in his
analysis. Instead, in the section on ‘changing patterns of inter-state competition’, he
sketches a picture that reveals how geopolitical competition between the great
powers remains important especially in the modern era. Though interesting, this
approach effectively ‘adds geopolitics and stirs’ it into an economic mixture, thereby
side-stepping the crucial issue at stake.
Of course, this retreat from bourgeois multi-causal doomsday has the
advantage of retaining Marxist integrity, even if it comes as the cost of the
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588 John M Hobson

theoretical target that he set himself at the beginning of his journey—that of

achieving a genuinely non-reductionist Marxist model of IR. None of this,
however, is to deny the point that much of what he has to say is insightful and
original. Indeed, his capitalist explanation of the multi-state system certainly adds
something to IR that currently does not exist (cf. Rosenberg 2006). Nor is this to
belittle his efforts, for I believe that he has gone further than most, whether they be
Marxists or otherwise. But either way, more work at least needs to be done before I
am fully convinced that he has succeeded in arriving at the non-reductionist
terminus.
In closing this section, I think it relevant to qualify one significant assumption
made by Callinicos: that neo-Weberians have produced a non-reductionist theory
of IR. As various commentators have argued, much of the ‘first wave’ of Weberian
historical sociology of IR (Skocpol 1979; Mann 1986, 1988; Giddens 1985; Hall
1986; Tilly 1990) has frequently slipped into a neorealist analysis (Hobden 1998;
Hobson 2000, 174 –191). This is problematic because neorealism is fundamentally
geopolitically reductionist (Hobson 2000, 17– 44). This means that despite all the
talk of the interdependence of international economic and geopolitical factors or
of the state being Janus-faced—having a dual anchorage in domestic socio-
economic relations on the one hand and the inter-state system on the other
(Skocpol 1979, 32), the causal role allocated to a neorealist conception of
‘geopolitical anarchy’ inevitably negates the multi-causal promise. Thus, while
I feel that a Weberian IR needs to attain an ‘economic moment’ as much as a non-
reductionist Marxism logically needs to attain a ‘non-economic moment’,
I disagree with Callinicos’s claim that Marxism requires a ‘realist moment’. For
the implication of the argument made above is that it is ontologically impossible to
integrate a rigid (neorealist) geopolitical reductionism into a non-reductionist
approach—Marxist or Weberian.

A thin reductionist materialism that contradicts the quest for a non-reductionist

Marxism?
I now consider whether the non-reductionist approach that Callinicos seeks to
develop (even if in the last instance it falls short) is itself sufficient to explain and
understand the conduct of IR in the last two centuries. For even if he and other
neo-Marxists were to succeed in granting economic and geopolitical factors
ontological weighting, this would still lead into the cul-de-sac of a thin,
reductionist materialism—a point that is reinforced by his complete omission of
norms and identity. I have played a great deal on the ‘back to the future’ theme not
simply as a descriptive exercise, but one that ultimately seeks to make the point
that the main debate in IR theory has moved on to new terrain. Thus since the
fading away of the debate on one logic or two, ‘economics over geopolitics’ versus
‘geopolitics and economics’, a new debate has emerged at the behest of post-
structuralism and constructivism. Albeit in different ways, these major
approaches have provided a rigorous challenge to mainstream materialist and
positivist IR theory; so much so that they unleashed a new debate that took off in
the early 1990s and remains with us today.
Beginning with the so-called Third Debate in IR that emerged after the end of
the Cold War, post-modernists and post-structuralists challenged mainstream IR
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 589

theory largely through an epistemological critique of positivism (George 1994;

Walker 1993). This thrust was harnessed to post-structuralist analyses of IR that
sought to reveal the role of identity in shaping the global realm (Campbell 1992;
Weber 1995). Later on, the constructivist critique carried the ‘ideational
revolution’ forward largely through an ontological challenge (see especially
Wendt 1999)—specifically via the claim that norms guide and define actor
behaviour and interests (Finnemore 1996; Katzenstein 1996).
My criticism of Callinicos’s framework lies less with what he has said and
more with what he has not said. Of course, no scholar should be criticized for not
saying what a reviewer would have wanted (otherwise the reviewer should have
said it himself!). But failing to engage seriously with ‘ideationalism’ challenges not
only his quest for a non-reductionist materialist Marxism. More substantively, my
emphasis on racist identity challenges his representation of the international realm
as anarchic by revealing the presence of a (racist) hierarchy, thereby engaging with
a major part of what he has said.
It is significant to note that in the light of the strong challenge that neo-
Weberianism posed for Marxism in the 1980s regarding the need for a ‘realist
moment’, Marxists have come a long way to responding and answering this
criticism by developing more complex approaches (Harvey 2003; Teschke 2003;
Rosenberg 2005; Lacher 2005). For this reason, and given the strong challenge that
ideationalist scholars pose for Marxist materialism today, it is striking that Marxist
IR scholars have responded either far less robustly or in a highly defensive
fashion. Put bluntly, it might be argued that the quest for a two-logic materialism is
something of a side debate within IR today; and I feel that it would be a shame if it
is one that is destined to become an internecine debate within Marxist circles. My
aim is not to dismiss its importance, but rather to push Callinicos and other IR
Marxists to enter this new terrain and to engage their non-reductionist ambitions
to enhance the vitally important revival of Marxism in IR. This objective is by no
means straightforward, given that Marx himself fundamentally rejected
ideationalism—so much so that he famously claimed to have stood Hegel on his
head. But I ask whether it would be possible to stand Marx not on his head, but on
his side. I begin this section by briefly posing this ‘ideational ontological challenge’
to Marxist materialism before proceeding to outline my critique of Callinicos’s
preference for viewing the international system as an anarchy.
It is striking how much of the most recent and innovative Marxist IR
scholarship has either ignored the role of norms and identity in the making of IR
(Rosenberg 2005, 2006) or has been hostile to ‘ideationalism’ (Teschke and Heine
2002). Nevertheless, the obvious response to this claim would be that Gramscian
analyses grant ontological weighting to discursive factors, thereby avoiding
materialist reductionism. Within IR, Robert Cox’s Gramscian statement outlined
in his seminal article is thought to provide an important cue. As he put it,
[t]hree categories of forces (expressed as potentials) interact in a structure: material
capabilities, ideas and institutions . . . . No one way determinism need be assumed
among these three; the relationships can be assumed to be reciprocal. (Cox 1986, 218)
This statement, as it stands, is strikingly close to the three-logic neo-Weberian
approach of John Hall (1986) and Walter Runciman (1989) and, of course, in spirit
to Mann’s four-logic ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) model
(Mann 1986); a point also recognized by Callinicos (2002a, 257 –258).
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590 John M Hobson

But, on closer inspection, it is clear that Cox’s analysis of ideology returns us to

economic reductionism. For while he does indeed emphasize the importance of
hegemonic discourse—something that is clearly missing in neorealist hegemonic
stability theory—the giveaway lies in his point that hegemonic discourse serves to
conceal the naked class interests that underpin hegemony in the first place. It is, to
borrow the useful term, a return to ‘soft functionalism’. This problem can be
expressed through using constructivist language, which differentiates ‘regulatory’
ideas or norms from ‘constitutive’ norms. Regulatory norms—or what Mann
(1986) calls immanent ideology—function to reproduce the interests of powerful
elites. By contrast, constitutive norms—or what Mann (1986) calls transcendental
ideology—serve to inscribe, or define, the interests of actors, whether they be
individuals, classes, or states and great powers. Clearly, the former leads to
materialist reductionism, while the latter succeeds in granting non-material forces
a genuine ontological primacy—even if constructivists and post-structuralists
often fall into the trap of ideational reductionism (Bieler and Morton 2008).
Accordingly, it is clear that the analysis of ideology found in Cox and many
other neo-Gramscians fits into the ‘regulatory’ category. For, in the main, there is
little sense in which norms and identity construct or constitute hegemony in the
first place and infuse the hegemon with a desire to project its will outwards into
the world (but see Augelli and Murphy 1988). Here I think it worth explaining that
I prefer the terms ‘norms’ and ‘identity’ over ‘ideology’, since the former terms
tend to be more extensive and deeper than the latter term. Indeed ‘ideology’ is
often treated as inherently superstructural, while norms and identities tend to
have a thicker and more fundamental constitutive ontology.
Still, I believe that it is possible to develop a theory that deals with constitutive
norms and identity within a Gramscian or qualified Marxist approach (Chatterjee
1986; Hall 1997; Rupert 2000). This would, inter alia, entail an analysis of how
organic intellectuals as well as the oppressed are able to construct alternative,
counter-hegemonic ideas that challenge the hegemony of capitalism or
(neo)imperialism in order to overthrow it (Morton 2003; Bieler and Morton
2008). And this in turn raises the point that I make elsewhere: that the overthrow
of (formal) empire after 1945 was achieved by the counter-hegemonic rhetorical
resistance strategy that was articulated by Third World nationalist movements as
they succeeded in delegitimizing empire, thereby bringing about decolonization
(Hobson 2007a, 2007b). Thus, the challenge for Marxists is the need to factor into
their accounts the role of constitutive norms and, above all, identity. And so I can
now finally turn to discussing the role of racist identity and racial hierarchy in
structuring world politics in the last two centuries.
I follow the lead pioneered by Edward Said (1978, 1994) and pursued by
subsequent post-colonialists, namely, that imperialism owes its existence, to a
significant extent, to the role of Western racist identity that emerged after c 1750,
which in turn replaced the Christianized Eurocentrism that had come to the fore
after 1453. It was after about 1750 that European thinkers went about constructing
European racist identity by defining the Western Self negatively against a no less
imaginary Eastern Other. This involved the ‘production of alterity’, through
which an imaginary line of civilizational apartheid between East and West was
constructed. And, having separated East and West from each other, the latter was
then imbued with all manner of progressive and virtuous properties (democracy,
individualism, liberalism, rationality), while the East, which was imbued with
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 591

antithetical and regressive properties, was relegated to a backward and inferior

periphery that was incapable of self-development. Important in this construction
was the idea that the West is independent and paternal or masculine (patriarchal),
while the East is dependent and child-like or feminine. Accordingly, this led on to
the idea of the White Man’s Burden, which prompted the launching of a Messianic
Western imperial civilizing mission that would save or ‘civilize’ (ie, raise up) the
so-called savages and barbarians of the East (Hobson 2004, chapter 10). However,
the practice of imperialism belied the benign intentions of the imperialists, for it
entailed ‘ethnocide’ (the attempted eradication of the target country’s culture or
identity), apartheid, war and genocide, as well as the mass exploitation of Eastern
land, labour, raw materials and markets (Hobson 2004, chapter 11). In this respect,
the venerable lineage of Marxist theories of imperialism that reveals this
exploitation—which, I am proud to say, was in part influenced by my great-
grandfather’s book, Imperialism: a study (JA Hobson 1902/1961)—provides a
partial complement to my analysis.
One vital twist in my argument, however, lies in the claim that imperialism
was constructed through the constitutive power of Western racist identity and
norms. Surprisingly, even pioneering Marxists such as Eric Williams (1944)
insist that racism is epiphenomenal: that it is an ideological cover to legitimize
imperial exploitation—something that is, so to speak, constructed after the event
so as to conceal the naked exploitative interests of capitalists. My argument,
however, suggests that racism also constitutes or defines the interests of Western
imperialists who, we should remind ourselves, were not just capitalists but also
scientists, politicians, administrators and missionaries. Of course, one outcome
of imperialism was precisely the enhancement of profits for the imperialist
countries. It is also the case that imperialism served to cement the hierarchical
class relations within the imperial countries which, inter alia, aided domestic
capital in maintaining its hegemonic position at home (and abroad). At the same
time, capitalists not only fed off this discourse, but embraced it and thereby
deepened its effectivity; an argument that was initially developed by JA Hobson
(1901; see also JM Hobson 2008).
Even so, it is important to recognize that the discourse of empire as a ‘civilizing
mission’ was not simply something that was dreamed up to justify capitalist
imperialism. Indeed, from the government down to nobles and capitalists and on
to the masses, it was sincerely believed that imperialism would ‘help the world’,
despite the many facts to the contrary that belied this ‘noble’ project. This is
important to establish so as to avoid a materialist reductionism that would see in
this discourse a conspiratorial cover for exploitative capitalist interests. Moreover,
the discourse of empire also served to glorify Western civilization in general and
imperial nations in particular, thereby making Westerners feel superior
and, therefore, good about themselves (JA Hobson 1901, 2008). Furthermore,
recognizing the co-constitutive links between racist identity, imperial discourse
and capitalist exploitation (domestic and international) also guards against a thin
‘ideational reductionism’. Thus, as I hope is clear by now, it would not be possible
to simply reduce these moral norms and identity to the needs of capital (as in soft
functionalism), though equally it would be fair to say that all three elements
described above are ontologically overlapping and embedded in each other.
To contextualize this, I would argue that Western industrialization and racism
were born more or less simultaneously (much as Christianized Eurocentrism went
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592 John M Hobson

hand-in-hand with the exploitation of the Americas after 1492). Racism infused
the outward expression of Western capitalism, thereby promoting its expansion
through the imperial civilizing mission. And as Western capitalism became
dominant in the world, so this simultaneously strengthened the roots of Western
racism.
Thus, to return to the issue of geopolitics, the upshot of this argument is that
viewing world politics in the period of formal empire as a pure anarchy is highly
problematic. To a certain extent, such a conception presupposes that all states are
sovereign. But under formal empire this is a non sequitur, since the so-called
dependencies were deprived of sovereignty. Coupled with this point is that the
Western imperial powers conceived of the world as a hierarchy, filtered through a
racist lens (Hobson and Sharman 2005). The British, for example, constructed the
world through a kind of civilizational league table. In the Premier League stood
the White Anglo-Saxons, with the rest of the European countries situated in
Division One (with the Germans at the top and the Catholic Portuguese at the
bottom). Division Two countries comprised the ‘yellow barbarians’ (comprising
most of East Asia), while Division Three was reserved for the ‘black savages’ of
Africa and Australasia or Polynesia as well as the ‘white Irish savages’ (Hobson
2004, 222 –239). And it was precisely because the ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ were
constructed as inferior that it became axiomatic that they were deemed ripe for
imperial exploitation, repression, war, apartheid, genocide and ethnocide. In
short, world politics was governed down to the 1960s through this racist
hierarchy, thereby problematizing the existence of anarchy. But what of the post-
1945 era, in which the sovereign state became the major form of political
expression in the world? At this point, I argue that since 1945 a new ‘post-racist’
hierarchy has come to inform the direction that IR takes.
Post-racism is, in essence, ‘racism without racialism’, or what Etienne Balibar
calls ‘neo-racism’ (Balibar 1991, 21); that is, cultural racism without scientific
racism (though vestiges of scientific racism undoubtedly lurk beneath the
surface). In the aftermath of World War II and the defeat of racist Nazism, it
became politically unacceptable to publicly evoke scientific racist ideas so that, in
effect, ‘racism went underground’. This was given further impetus by the United
Nations and, of course, the challenge to racist empire that was issued by the Third
World Nationalist movements. But Eurocentrism—conceived of largely in cultural
racist terms, albeit with a dash of genetic racism—continued on and has informed
the US neo-imperial civilizing mission. Indeed, the discursive conception of the
‘three worlds’ of global capitalism has continued on pretty much unchanged. And
the racist ‘standard of civilization’ has continued on at a cultural level, even
though it no longer formally underpins international law.
Thus the Cold War, which has been sold as a West –West conflict based
supposedly on either geopolitical or economic or ideological differences, obscures
the point that in the context of US foreign policy, the Eurocentric civilizing mission
has continued on from the previous era of European imperialism pretty much
uninterruptedly (Bowden 2004). This includes the imposition of free trade and
International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs across the
‘East’, the disciplining and punishing of Japan in the 1980s and, not least, the
present ‘war on terror’ and the ‘democratic imperative’ (Hobson 2006). That is,
post-racism has informed the outward imperial expression of American
capitalism, which in turn has reinforced this discourse.
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Back to the future of ‘one logic or two’ 593

Once again, while this has served capitalist interests admirably, US neo-
imperialism emanates significantly from American identity, which has been
constructed according to the idiom of ‘regeneration (of the American Self) through
violence’ (Slotkin 1973). Thus, the ‘winning of the West’ that was achieved
through the civilizing mission waged at the Western frontier domestically came to
be replaced by the opening-up of a global frontier and the waging of a global
civilizing mission, which emerged at the end of the 19th century but took off only
after 1945 (Campbell 1992; Williams 1972). Now it is no longer the (red) Indians
who are subjected to American frontier violence and pacification, but the Eastern
other; a mission that passed through the Cold War (a story that is obscured in
realist discussions) before intensifying after 1991 with ‘humanitarian wars’, only
to culminate in the ‘war on terror’.
Thus, conceiving the contemporary world as comprising an anarchic realm
of competitive states, as does Callinicos (as much as does Waltz (1979)), obscures
the presence of a post-racist hierarchy that has governed the interactions between
the West in general and the US in particular, on the one hand, and the ‘East’ on the
other. And, of course, this means that post-racism and racist hierarchy continue to
constitute the racial sinews of the global economy or polity. Still, much of my own
analysis echoes some of the themes of Marxist analyses of US imperialism, even
though I accord far greater weighting to the constitutive power of post-racist
identity and norms. Given this latent synergy, I urge Callinicos and other IR
Marxists to enter into this area of discursive analysis not least to counter
conservative mainstream theories of IR, of which not just liberalism but above all
realism remain the dominant expressions, if not the ‘dominant ideologies’.
In closing, I feel it important to qualify one potential misreading of my own
argument. For I would not want to convey the false impression that world politics
or economics can be understood simply by focusing on the West in general or the
US in particular. In this way, I simultaneously problematize Callinicos’s argument
that the international is dominated by economic and geopolitical competition that
occurs mainly within the Triad (Callinicos 2002b). For the problem I have here is
that this obscures the vitally important ways in which, for want of a better term,
the ‘East’ not only contributes to global politics or economics but also shapes and
retracks the West through inter-civilizational ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectical resistance’
(Hobson 2007b).4 Thus, the East does not passively conform to the directives that
are issued by the West, but negotiates and remakes them. All of which brings to
the fore the resistance side of the story, on the one hand, and the constitutive
agency that Eastern peoples and countries exercise in the international system, on
the other.
This in turn leads on to my criticism that beneath the revival of Marxism in the
contemporary IR literature often lurks a Eurocentric narrative that subliminally
naturalizes Western power. This is reflected in those variants that reify the
transnational ruling class, or US hegemony and ‘its’ international institutions, or
the ‘transnational state’, or globalization as Westernization. Elsewhere, Callinicos
has briefly defended Marxism in general against the Eurocentric charge levied by
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey (2002). He cites the work of Mike Davis (2001) on

4
For a fuller discussion of dialectical resistance, see Nederveen Pieterse (1990, chapters
14 – 15).
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594 John M Hobson

the grounds that Marxism is able to ‘expose the dependence of the economic
mechanisms of capitalist expansion on the infliction of “permanent violence” on
the South’ (Callinicos 2002b, 321). But this appears to be the thin end of the
‘subliminal Eurocentric’ wedge (Hobson 2007b). Merely ‘retrieving the imperial’
does not necessarily guard against Eurocentrism, but can reinforce it. This is
because ‘subliminal Eurocentrism’ portrays the Eastern peoples as but passive
victims of anthropomorphic Western capitalist-imperial power, thereby denying
them agency. Accordingly, the antidote to such Eurocentrism lies in recognizing
that those who reside on the ‘Other’ side of the imperial frontier have agency not
just to resist colonialism or imperialism but, more importantly, to shape and
retrack the West in all manner of ways (Hobson 2004). This integrative conception
of Eastern and Western agency enables a break with Eurocentrism and its
fetishization of top-down conceptions of an autonomous Western civilization on
the one hand and a passive, victimized East on the other.
Interestingly, as part of his defence against the Eurocentric charge, Callinicos
takes Barkawi and Laffey to task for what he sees as their reification of American
power. But bringing in the importance of ‘non-Western’ great powers as a means
to counter Eurocentric conceptions of IR is a necessary but insufficient move. It is,
in effect, to ‘add non-Western great powers and stir’ them into a Eurocentric
mixture. For what is missing is the constitutive role that is played by bottom-up
resistance in the non-Western world and its impact on the West. There is, in short,
no sense in his writings of the dialectical interplay between East and West across
the imperial frontier in the making of both these civilizations on the one hand and
global politics on the other; an omission that applies more widely to much, though
not all, of Marxist IR scholarship.5
Ultimately, though, I raise this criticism at this point to signal my
dissatisfaction with the tendency of many Marxist IR theories to reify top-
down, elite processes of power on the grounds that this obscures the agency and
resistance of subordinate groupings, not only in the East but also in the West (see
also Colás 2002; Hobson and Seabrooke 2007, chapter 1; Morton 2007). For in the
present context, perhaps the greatest irony lies in the point that I can think of few
greater scholars who have allocated prime focus to the agency and resistance of
subordinate groupings than Karl Marx. Indeed, the irony is that the ‘empathic
Marx’ has been left aside in much of the Marxist IR literature, which paradoxically
seems often far more at home in talking about the power of the powerful than it is
with the ‘power of the powerless’.

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