Towards a political economy of socialist international relations

ABSTRACT

Several decades ago, the field of Cold War history banished political economy from its discussions. Political economy had been the main theoretical medium through which the first generation of Cold War historians had made its critique of power. But while subsequent historians banished political economy as an explicit theoretical tool of historical analysis, political economy remained very much present, only it took crude, unreflective neoclassical and even neoliberal forms that echoed the concerns of state and corporate power over efficiency, rather than more analytical concerns of social transformation. This was achieved through the thorough decoupling, indeed the binary reconstitution, of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’. So, while historically informed political economic analysis thrived elsewhere, from the 1990s, so-called postrevisionist Cold War historians were free to celebrate a heroic United States, and an assumed capitalist dynamism triumphing over sclerotic socialism. Most surprisingly, these historical terms themselves (capitalism and socialism, usually juxtaposed with a ‘vs.’), so central to the analytical core of Cold War narratives, were left unexamined. Three decades hence, as capitalism continues to generate one crisis after another, this motivated ignorance so favourable to the exercise of state and corporate power has reached its limit. Any analysis of capitalism and socialism and the Cold War those social forms generated will need to once again ground itself in some conception of political economy. This article presents some ideas for that task.

KEYWORDS:

• Socialism
• Soviet Union
• Cold War
• China
• political economy
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is the so-called Wisconsin School, consisting of the scholar William Appleman Williams, his foundational book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and his influential students Loyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber and Thomas McCormick among others; also included is Gabriel Kolko, who received a Master’s diploma there, but his PhD elsewhere.

2. For example, Herbert Feis, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and George F. Kennan. This line of critique is originally Cumings’ in ‘“Revising Postrevisionism.”’

3. In the political science field of international political economy, following John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi, the view of the foundational importance of the Great Depression and the political economy it generated advocated by the ‘revisionist’ diplomatic historians was uncontroversial, indeed more or less a common denominator in seminal works like Kindleberger, The World in Depression, or, later, Eichengreen, Golden Fetters. By contrast, later developments in diplomatic history undid the work of that earlier generation and successfully protected the field against concerns of political economy, effectively burying the consensus in a Cold Warrior focus on ideology. This development in the historical profession ran parallel to the rise and long-term dominance of neoliberal ideas socially that erased the transformative historical role of the Great Depression and buried the study of political economy more generally; in diplomatic history this arc of historiographical erasure runs from Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War to Westad, The Global Cold War.

4. As in the West, a mathematical modelling of economics came to be favoured in the socialist world. For the trans-systemic importance of neoclassical economics see Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism. Meanwhile, Kyung Deok Roh chronicled the fall of Marxist economists and the rise of those influenced by the likes of statistical economist Wesley Mitchell in Stalin’s Economic Advisors.

5. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity.” For the Soviet Union, see Sanchez-Sibony, “Economic Growth in the Governance of the Cold War Divide.”

6. Of course, the most egregious discipline in this trend was economics itself, which continued its imperial expansion to all corners of academia while popularizing approaches to thinking about society that were, more or less, voided of politics and power structures and populated by individualistic, utility maximizers, most famously during the triumphalist interregnum expressed in Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics. This division of labour with the economists allowed Cold War histories to concentrate on causal mechanisms that re-centred personality and ideology as the core subject of study. An apotheosis of this trend was Gaddis, The Cold War.

7. Riesman, “The Nylon War.” An excellent discussion that problematizes this simple triumphalist notion of superior Western consumerism is David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Introduction: Pleasures in Socialism?,” in Crowley and Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism, 3–51.

8. This move is very often, and very explicitly, carried out in the introduction to Cold War tracks, most notably in Leffler and Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, 8–11.

9. Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances.

10. One excellent exception embraced by the Cold War field was Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea.

11. Stephen K. Vogel has convincingly shown that the conceptual shorthand embedded in terms like ‘free market,’ ‘government intervention’ or ‘deregulation’ is deeply misleading of what markets are and of their irreducible heterogeneity, in Marketcraft, 117–21.

12. These were the paradigms informing the still relevant work generated by the Harvard Interview Project of the early 1950s, of which two standard-bearers were Bauer, Inkeles and Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works and Inkeles and Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian.

13. The professional trajectories of the field-defining authors of the Cambridge History of the Cold War embody this change. Their approaches in the 1990s were informed by earlier revisionist approaches and left doors open to issues of political economy, expressed in works like Leffler, A Preponderance of Power and explicitly in Westad, “Secrets of the Second World.” A decade and a half into the triumphalist era, their narratives evolved into ideologically driven history with a superficial understandings of capitalism in books like Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind and Westad, The Global Cold War. Leffler’s frank assessment of his own work is telling: ‘The West won the Cold War precisely because statesmen realized that national security meant proving the superiority of life,’ Leffler wrote recently in a text meant to convey his rejection of triumphalism, ‘that was done not so much by diplomacy or strategy, but by making democratic capitalism and social democracy serve the needs of their people’. In Leffler, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism, 20. Leffler’s triumphalism is all the more striking for its absolute innocence, coming as it did almost 30 years since the stagnation of the middle classes throughout the West and the chronic impoverishment of the poor classes, which were tendencies that well preceded the end of the Cold War.

14. Capitalism had remained an important analytical term in sociology, anthropology and geography, but had more or less disappeared in history. Its comeback is embodied by what is now too large a body of work to cite, mostly by Americanists; it took institutional form with the Program on the Study of Capitalism in Harvard University. Led by the Program’s co-chair Sven Beckert and his Empire of Cotton, this line of studies is quickly spreading to all area studies.

15. The argument was made three decades ago in Kaldor, The Imaginary War. Erasures of the socialist role in the history of feminist movements, for example, has been explored in Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms.”

16. Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” 687–8.

17. These were already apparent in one of the first archival efforts at an encompassing history of Sino–Soviet relations in which contributors disagreed on core elements of the story, Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms. In Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, Shen and Xia have argued that national security concerns were the main driver in the ups and downs of the relationship. This stands in contrast to many recent works of Western academia, for example Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, or indeed Westad in the aforementioned edited book, both of which propose ideology and personalized political approaches to have been crucial to the organization of the relationship.

18. The quote is in Odd Arne Westad, “Preface” to Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms.

19. Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance.

20. An essential critique of these metanarratives is Krylova, “Soviet Modernity.”

21. Consider this statement of one such recent publication on an ostensibly ‘economic’ aspect of the Cold War: ‘The path to victory could be mapped in terms of the spread of economic systems; each superpower sought to replicate a stylized version of its own economic system around the world, and to construct a world economy in which it played the central role.’ Engerman, The Price of Aid, 7. The rest of the book, a very good one, in fact refutes this closely held tenet of Cold War studies by showing nothing remotely like this goal for Soviet aid policy towards India. On the claim for two world economies, read on.

22. For example, the term organizes much of Friedman’s Shadow Cold War, despite the book’s thorough lack of engagement with what capitalism is, other than in breezy, idealized terms.

23. Exemplified in Kotkin, Armageddon Averted.

24. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. A quick primer from the perspective of IPE is Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital.

25. We might sketch it this way: Lawyers for the international capital of the United States’s pre-Second World War imperialism like John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson gave way to technocracy-minded accountants leading a national Fordist order like Robert McNamara, only to be replaced by a string of financiers starting in the 1980s, such as one-time Merrill Lynch CEO Donald Regan. The cultural world that made John Foster Dulles, for example, is best captured, not in Cold War tracks on ‘ideology,’ but in the reverential but useful Oller, White Shoe.

26. Sloin and Sanchez-Sibony, “Economy and Power in the Soviet Union”; and Sanchez-Sibony, “Global Money and Bolshevik Authority.”

27. I refer here to Stalin’s famous 1946 two-camp speech, whose invocation of ‘two world economies’ has done much to periodize cold warrior tracts and Sino–Soviet relations; for example Kirby, “China’s Internationalization in the Early People’s Republic.” It is difficult to understand why historians take Stalin at his word when he invokes ‘economy,’ when they are so rightfully sceptical when Stalin argues for the superior ‘democracy’ of the Soviet Union.

28. This chafing from the United States’ primary ally, the United Kingdom, is fully documented in Jackson, The Economic Cold War.

29. Generally referred to as the Cultural Revolution. Wemheuer, A Social History of Maoist China.

30. On the issue of autarky, see Link, Forging Global Fordism.

31. The classic study on this is Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital.

32. Lin Chaochao, who participated in the conference that produced these articles, showed as much in her discussion of the Great Leap Forward in China and the many evolutions of the Chinese socialist system at that time.

33. More or less, the whole of Lin Chaochao’s intervention.

34. For example in Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”

35. On Soviet environmental history see Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power; and Demuth, Floating Coast. On the history of technology see for example Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems. Systems also blur when examined through the prism of consumption, another signifier of American exceptionalism, as argued for China in Gerth, Unending Capitalism. They blur again at the level of ideology in the construction of desire and community-building, as Kate Brown demonstrated in Plutopia. Even in such cultural realms as music, the binary paradigm with its Western-centric definitions of ‘Soviet socialism’ has come under fire, in Cornish, “Synthesized Socialism.”

36. Link, Forging Global Fordism.

37. Oberländer, “Cushy Work, Backbreaking Leisure,” 590. An important recent contribution to the varieties and developments of labour regimes in the socialist world is Siefert, ed. Labour in State-Socialist Europe.

38. All contributions here confirm this. For the Soviet Union this was established in Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization; for China, much of Zanier’s work has been dedicated to showing this, for example, in ‘“Energizing” Relations’; a more recent effort is Kelly, Market Maoists. Meanwhile, Marc-William Palen has demonstrated that not autarky, but free trade, was a core tenet of socialist thought, in “Marx and Manchester.” The construction of ‘Communist autarky’ ranks as a rather scandalous invention of Western Cold War myths, but a necessary prop for holding analyses of political economy at bay, in other words, for the creation and maintenance of the Cold War binary.

39. The first port of call for this is the excellent Stone, “CMEA’s International Investment Bank.”

40. One of the most productive tracts on the theory of money is Ingham, The Nature of Money.

41. For the rise of the oil-rich Middle East as important markets for socialist country exports, see Stanek, “Buildings for Dollars and Oil.”

42. Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade.

43. Aaron Hale-Dorrell, “The Kolkhoz Market and Provisioning the Home Front during World War II,” paper presented at the conference ‘Stalinism and War,’ sponsored by the Higher School of the Economy, Moscow, May 24–26, 2016.

44. The later Kosygin reforms involved a degree of labour flexibilization that has largely gone unrecognized. See James Nealy, Jr., “Making Socialism Work.” In fact, ‘flexible production,’ usually attributed to neoliberal capitalism, was socially general under socialism as well, as Cucu, “Going West” has recently argued.

45. A useful, readable book here is Gertner, The Idea Factory. On the overriding importance of state support for innovation see Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State and The Value of Everything.

46. An entry point into the growing literature on the performativity of economics is Mitchell, “The Work of Economics.”

47. It is no coincidence that some of the leading lights today of this archaic Cold War analysis are also the main interpreters of our ‘inevitable’ coming war with China, many of whom gathered on cue at historian Niall Ferguson’s now infamous 2018 ‘Applied History’ conference in Stanford. Applied history indeed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council [HKU17605920].

Notes on contributors

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches on the history of the Soviet Union, energy, capitalism and late socialism. He is the author of Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khruschev (2014), and more recently The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (2023), both published by Cambridge University Press.