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Understanding Socialist International Relations and Their Global Role.

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Gramsci argued that the Fordist development of early 20th century American industry, itself a passive revolution that transformed existing forms of capitalist relations, was reshaping European societies and forcing states to adopt structures and policies more supportive of free enterprise and economic individualism.

Gramsci’s comments on socialist international relations are fragmentary and under-developed.

There are hints of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the uneven and combined development of world capitalism here but Gramsci did not develop these ideas.

Passive revolution is central to Gramsci’s analysis of 19th century and early 20th century European history, including Italian unification (the Risorgimento) in the 1860s.

Nor did he produce an analysis of imperialism like those of Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, who both saw imperialist rivalry as a consequence of capitalism’s economic dynamic, particularly the growth of capitalist monopolies and the tendency for economic processes to transcend national limits.

However, in the past few decades a group of radical scholars has drawn on his work to challenge the dominant “Realist” perspective in this field.

Unlike the Jacobins in the French Revolution, these elite failed to mobilize mass activity behind its revolutionary program.

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A New Form of Socialism

But recently, the “neo Gramscian” perspective, initiated by the Canadian Robert Cox, has provided a convincing critique of Realism.

Whatever their historical accuracy, these arguments illustrate Gramsci’s understanding of a national-international dialectic in which international forces both provide the context of change and penetrate and transform national political and Socialist international relations.

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The Role in Developing Economies

The pressure behind this process arose not from domestic economic development, but was “instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery-currents born of the productive development of the more advanced countries”.

Describes a top-down process in which a narrow, modernizing elite brings about a transformation of traditional social relations by piecemeal reform.

The neo-Gramscians have helped enlarge the space for Marxist ideas in international analysis but their selective use of Gramsci and their idealist understanding of hegemony mean that they neither accurately represent Gramsci’s Marxism nor convincingly explain the dynamics of the socialist international relations system.

Given this abstract, a historical approach, in which there is no place for the rise and fall of modes of production or the class dynamics underpinning them, it is not surprising that there was “mutual neglect” between Marxism and international relations for much of the 20th century.

Cox firmly rejects the label “Marxist”, and has merely applied to the study of international relations ideas derived from a selective reading of the Prison Notebooks-of which the most important is the concept of hegemony.

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Realism Steps in

Realism takes the bourgeois view of human nature as a struggle between atomized individuals and transposes it onto the international system.

Its essence is inter-state rivalry and conflict.

Gramsci also suggested that Italian fascism represented a passive revolution designed to preserve the power of a decaying bourgeoisie faced with the revolutionary challenge from Russia.

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of Socialist international relations.

It assumes that since the time of the ancient Greek city-states the world’s states have had coherent national interests that they project internationally, chiefly by military means.

His use of the concept of passive revolution, however, illustrates a consistent appreciation of the interpenetration of the national and international.

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