Teschke calls his approach: political Marxist, what does this mean?

What is political and what is

Marxist about it? Which connections or divergences between this approach and those studied before
in this course are most noteworthy in your view?

Marxism criticises capitalism and liberalism, because these systems are focused on the self instead of
the common good. According to Marx, humans are not self-interested naturally. When they do act
self-interested, this behaviour is socially constructed by the relation they have with one another and
developed through history. Marx’ view on humans is more relational and process-oriented, rather
than liberalistic and self-interested. Marx criticizes the idea of capitalism being a free system,
because capitalism includes not only the economy, but the people as well. “Marx believed that
although capitalism develops the productive powers of human societies to unprecedented heights, it
does so in ways that are undemocratic, disabling, exploitative. 133” He comments on the fact that in
the capitalist system, human labour is being sold and bought on the market, which makes the people
very dependent on private owners, and far from free.

To begin with, Teschke does not mention explicitly why he is a political Marxist. Marxism can be
divided by the terms “political Marxism” and “economic marxism”, which originated in the Brenner
debate about the distinction between the economic sphere and the political sphere of capitalism.
Political Marxism argues the origins of capitalism, and focusses on the class conflict. Teschke states
that the roots of capitalism does not lay in the economic sphere, but rather follow from a class
structure in the middle ages. He analyses this by looking at the economic and the political class
struggle between the producing and the ruling class in the feudal society.

In his essay, Teschke explains his political Marxist theory by analysing the development of capitalism
from feudalism in the middle ages. He argues that the theory of social property relations does not
only lack in logic, but questions that there is a distinct international level in Europe in the middle
ages. Teschke adds: “The state and the market, the domestic and the international, are not yet
differentiated into separate spheres”. In his opinion, the shift from a feudalist system to capitalism in
the middle ages did not change much for the working class: “absolutist appropriation continues to be
a political process, because taxes are politically enforced on free peasants by the state”, thus, the
relationship between state and economy remain the same, and “state and economy remain
undifferentiated”.

I believe Teschke is a political Marxist, because he acknowledges that capitalism is not just in the
economic sphere, but in the cultural and political sphere as well. He explains that in the middle ages
the lords owned all the property, and the working class had to work on the lords’ lands to survive. In
capitalism, property is privatised and a small group of people (elite) owns most of the ‘land’ (big
companies) and the citizens are still working for the elite which make them more money. The
hegemonic elite gets more influential and powerful, hence the working class is depending even more
on them. The elite act out of self-interest, rather than the common good.
Political Marxism focusses on the position of the working class in capitalism, which I think is not done
enough in other approaches of IR theory. In neo-liberalism for example, the focus lays (in short) on
the free market, equality and freedom. These values are great, but in practice, not achievable for
everyone. Freedom is especially for a small elite, provided by the and the majority (working class).
The neo-liberal narrative focusses on the idea that everyone can achieve anything, as long as one
works hard enough. Sexism, racism and other power imbalances are things one can “overcome”, and
with hard work and motivation, success will be achieved. This is obviously not true in practice, as
there are many systematic inequalities in society between the hegemonic majority group and the
minority groups. With the capitalist/neo-liberal society, the elite stays wealthy and become more
wealthy, while the poor people are depending on the jobs and loans the elite offer.

I think the Marxist approach is comparable to normative theory in a certain way, because in
normative theory scholars study whether actions of actors are moral or immoral. Since Marxism
criticizes capitalism heavily, and seeing this system as immoral and unfree for the working class, I see
a comparison between these two.

Definition is not easy, but “the desire to provide a critical interpretation of capitalism, understood as
an historically produced – mutable- form of social life, rather than as the ineluctable expression of
some essential human nature. Marx posited a relational and process-oriented view on human beings
In stead of liberalistic self interested.

Humans are what they are not because it is hard wired into them to be self-interested individuals ,
but by virtue of the relations through which they live their lives. Marx suggested that human alive
their lives at the intersection of a three sided relation encompassing the natural world social
relations and institutions and human persons. Relations are organic: everything in context. P 129.

If contemporary humans appear to act self interest individuals, then it is a result not of our essential
nature but of the particular ways we have produced our social lives and ourselves.

Marx dialectical understanding of history: humans are historical beings, the producers and the
products of historical processes. Dialectic of agents and structures: agents are social actors : interplay
between individual actions and the institutions that form the framework for individual action is what
marx means by dialectic.

Marx dialectical framework of relations in process als has important implications for the ways in
which we think about politics freedom and unfreedom. Politics, in short, shapes and concerns our
future possible world.

Critiques of capitalism

Capitalism was about human labour sold and bought on the market.

Capital: Socially necessary means of production reconstituted as the exclusive private property of a
few and wage labour as the compulsory activity of the many. Means of production are under the
ownership and control of a class of private owners, workers are compelled to sell their labour to
members of this owning class in order to gain access to those means of production, engage in socially
productive activity and secure through their wages the material necessities of survival: capitalist
freedom, free labor must work 131

Marx believed that although capitalism develops the productive powers of human societies to
unprecedented heights, it does so in ways that are undemocratic, disabling, exploitative. So
capitalism is a contradictory social system with endemic tensions, political struggles, and potential
for change. People under capitalism are prevented from realizing the full implications of their socially
producted powers, and the fuller forms of freedom this powers might make possible.

Teschke writes

I argue that the nature and dynamics of international systems are governed by the character of their
constitutive units, which, in turn, rests on specific property relations prevailing within them.
Medieval "international" relations and their alterations over the centuries pre- ceding the rise of
capitalism have to be interpreted on the basis of changing social property relations. The dynamics of
medieval change, however, are bound up with contradictory strategies of reproduction between and
within the two major classes, the lords and the peasantry

In his essay, Teschke explains his political Marxist point by analysing the development of capitalism
from feudalism in the middle.

Study the texts by Rupert and Teschke. Teschke calls his approach “political Marxist.” What does that
mean? What is political and what is Marxist about it? Which connections or divergences between this
approach and those studied before in this course are most noteworthy in your view?

I seek to uncover the dynamics of these systems in class-related strategies of reproduction, both
within and between polities. Property relations explain institutional structures that, in turn, condition
conflictual relations of appropriation explaining the dynamics of change. "Internal" changes in
property relations, themselves subject to "external" pressures, alter external behav- ior. This
perspective combines a substantive theory of social and international international. For a powerful
related argument in IR, see Rosenberg 1994, the term lord (nobility) refers generically to all
members of the land-holding ruling class, secular and ecclesiastical. All use subject to IR in the
Middle Ages action with a theory of sociopolitical structure

The theory of social property relations does not only vindicate the common objection to neorealism's
lack of a generative grammar and transformative logic but questions its very assumption that there is
a distinct international level in medieval Europe that can be meaningfully theorized in abstraction
from the internal properties and reproductive logic of feudal society. The state and the market, the
domestic and the international, are not yet differentiated into separate spheres. This opens up the
question of the genesis and constitution of the modem international system. Although serfs no
longer pay politically enforced rents to their lords, absolutist appropriation continues to be a political
process, because taxes are politically enforced on free peasants by the state. Despite the pooling of
military power in the absolutist state, state and economy remain undifferentiated. The relation
between the producer (free peasant) and the nonproducer (state) remains politically constituted.

The personal element of domination persists, since absolute power is invested not in the state, but in
the person of the king. "L' Etat c'est moi" connotes sovereignty as the personal property of the king

On the basis of the nonmodernity of absolutist sovereignty, we must go a step

further. If the parcellation of "sovereignty" under feudalism expresses the politico-
military nexus between serfs and lords, and if absolutist sovereignty expresses the
politicomilitary nexus between free peasants and king, then modern sovereignty pre-
supposes depoliticizing this nexus. Only after historically accomplishing this depoliticization can
sovereignty be pooled, in an abstract state, above economy and soci-
ety.

This process is intimately connected to the transformation of politically constituted

property into private property and the concomitant transformation of free peasant
proprietors into wage labor.117 Since the labor relation is henceforth based on a pri-
vate, "noncoercive" contract, accumulation turns into a "purely" economic process.
The economic then becomes disembedded from the political.118 A "purely" political
a purely political state, based on monopolizing the means of violence, and a "free" market, based on
commodifying all factors of production, spring into existence. Contrary to Ruggie's
assertion, "modern" sovereignty expresses precisely the separation between private
property and public authority.119 However, if this argument holds, it follows that in
the leading European nation-states the "decaying pillars of the Westphalian temple"
already lay in ruins in the nineteenth century, if not earlier
If private property marks the constitutive principle of capitalist sovereignty, international
anarchycontrary to what constructivists argue is more than "what states
make of it." The critical theoretical claim that "sovereignty is a practical cat-
egory" applies only to the state's functional dimension, not to its constitutive
dimension. In other words, the generative structure of capitalist property relations
sets absolute limits on what a community of coreflective political leaders can practically do. The
secret of the state lies outside its own sphere of influence. This then points to the question of
whether the present international system of sovereign states
is necessarily linked to the persistence of private property. What can be maintained is
that although anarchy endures, the primary dynamic of interaction between advanced
capitalist states is no longer military competition over territory as a source of income.

By identifying social property relations and their conflictual contestations as constitutive of all
international systems and their distinct geopolitical dynamics, I advance a theory of IR based on
dialectical metatheoretical premises that combines a

transformative logic with a principle of generative structure. Thus, the argument goes

decisively beyond current assumptions in IR, be they of neorealist, realist, constructivist, or "critical
theoretical" persuasion.