From the series Principles of Marxism
The German Ideology arose from a party necessity: Marx and Engels’ struggle to guide the Communist League; in turn, the theses of The German Ideology laid the foundation, albeit indirectly, for Lenin’s conception of the party and the reflection on the science-party linked to it. Are there other theoretical-political battles in which we can trace that imprint? We limit the discussion here to three examples: the ideologies of State capitalism in the century of imperialism, the dialectic of unity and scission in world market relations, and the concept of external collision in the theory of international relations. [...]
In the editorial The Political Ideas of Economic Dominance
[September 1977], Arrigo Cervetto challenged one of the most foolish criticisms of Marxism
according to which Marx did not want, or could not have wanted, to account for State intervention in the economy
. Cervetto linked the theoretical principles of The German Ideology to Marx and Engels’ criticism of Friedrich List’s statism:
In accusing the English school of assuming the universal harmony of nations in the world market, and of not seeing that these nations had divergent interests, List wanted the State to protect German competitive capacity through protectionism. For List, moreover, the State must plan the development of the productive forces — material, intellectual, and moral — which form the basis of the Nation.
These are theories, noted Cervetto, which unsurprisingly anticipated the themes and the myths of the present imperialist ideology
; Marx judged them for what they represented — the backwardness of the German economy at the beginning of the 19th century
. Cervetto continued:
The practical and strategic statements of The German Ideology reveal more of their political meaning in the light of the text entitled Anti-List:The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance[...].
An article from April 1980, Marx and Engels on the Question of Relations Between States
, serves as an introduction to Unitary Imperialism. Cervetto noted that, since Marx and Engels formulated their materialist conception of politics
in The German Ideology, it is not surprising that the basic principles of a specific theory about international relations
were also established there.
The first principle is the nations’ interdependence
, wrote Cervetto, as it appears in The German Ideology: By universal competition, [big industry] forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. and, where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations
.
Big capitalist industry creates world history because it creates the world market
, noted Cervetto; the individual nation now depends
on the entire world. However, universal competition and the nations’ interdependence still do not explain the specific nature of international relations between States
.
Consequently, the second principle of the analysis of international politics, in Marx and Engels’ own words is: Generally speaking, big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, thus destroying the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it
.
The consequences that Cervetto drew from this are: Although competition and interdependence universalise the bourgeoisie, they also conserve its specific national interests. The world politics of the bourgeoisie therefore reflect the universality of competition and interdependence and the particularity of interests. International relations are therefore relations of universality and particularity. The Marxist theory of international politics becomes the science that deals with the contradictory dialectic between the general and the particular in the world history inaugurated by capitalism
.
We note how, in this dialectic of universality
and particularity
of the world market and of the confrontation between the powers expressed in it, we find the theoretical origin of the conception of imperialism as a unitary
phenomenon, but driven by the dynamic of unity and scission: unity because the world market is universal competition and the nations’ interdependence
, scission because the individual shares of social capital and the national fractions of the bourgeoisie retain the particularity of interests
. Cervetto concluded that already in the principles derived from The German Ideology there is the critique, subsequently developed by Lenin, of every theory that foresees capitalism becoming super-capitalism, a super-nation, a super-imperialism, and a super-State
. [...]
In the introduction to Unitary Imperialism, Cervetto drew a third thesis from Marx and Engels’ text: Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of relations. Incidentally, in order to lead to collisions in a country, this contradiction need not necessarily have reached its extreme limit in this particular country. The competition with industrially more advanced countries, brought about by the expansion of international relations, is sufficient to produce a similar contradiction in countries with a backward industry (e.g., the latent proletariat in Germany brought into view by the competition of English industry)
.
Marx and Engels most likely drew the notion of historical collisions from a concept developed by G.W.F. Hegel, who, in exemplifying the great collisions
of great historical circumstances
, cites Julius Caesar among the world-historical individuals
, with an implicit allusion to Napoleon Bonaparte. From this perspective, Napoleon may be regarded as the first example of a historical collision provoked from outside. As the interpreter of the Révolution bottée
— the Revolution in boots
in Marx’s image — he bursts into European history with his army because bourgeois France needs a Europe shaped by bourgeois conditions; and it is here that we find the foundations of Marx and Engels’ conception of revolutionary strategy.
This is the direction in which Cervetto’s interpretation is moving when he cites the links between war and revolution in 1905 and 1917 as examples of collisions in history:
.
The thesis of ‘historical collisions’, or of social and political upheavals provoked from outside, is an important component of the Marxist theory of international relations [...]
The 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions confirm the validity — in the two senses of the world market and of the balance of powers — of the scientific approach to the Russian question developed by Marx and Engels and by their faithful disciple Lenin, who more than anyone else grasped the great lesson of ‘historical collisions’ provoked from outside, and did not indulge in philosophical games about the contradiction between productive forces and social relations of production within the national garden
.
Marx and Engels teach us that this contradiction is global, since economics and politics are global.
Competition in the world economy determines world politics and, consequently, also national politics which must adapt — bearing all its contradictions — to the movements of a history that has become global. It cannot elude this destiny by withdrawing into itself or by refusing adaptation.
In this dual meaning of the notion of historical collisions provoked from outside
— that is, in the two senses
of the world market and the balance of the system of powers — we can see Cervetto’s intent to clarify, refine, and develop the conceptual tools drawn from The German Ideology for the purposes of the struggle of the early 1980s. [...]
It has been shown that The German Ideology was born from a political struggle, to provide the principles of scientific materialism to the Communist League, the same task that The Communist Manifesto would later assume. [...] These concepts became weapons in political battles against the ideologies of State capitalism and in imperialist contention, against wars and crises of unitary imperialism. Born out of a political battle, a weapon for other political battles: this is the theory of Marx and Engels for every revolutionary militant.