The Great Power Tradition in Marxism, Soviet Thought, and Soviet Policy

• In Event: Developments of the Marxist Tradition in Soviet Intellectual History

Abstract

Marx and Engels open the Manifesto of the Communist Party with a reference to “all of the Powers of old Europe,” and an effort to analyze the actions and policies of states runs through many of their works. These efforts were not confined to identifying those state actors ranged against the “power” of communism but also extended to the analysis of the political motivations of states in international great power rivalries. After tracing examples of this tradition in the work of Marx, Engels, and other thinkers, this paper will analyze how a number of Soviet thinkers, particularly Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin, also thought at times in terms of the actions of states rather than, in addition to, or in a sphere separate from, class relations. These positions had their roots in this earlier Marxist tradition and in a specific tendency of analysis in the writings of Marx and Engels, which these Soviet thinkers adapted and extended. This tradition had an important influence on Soviet thinking and policy. The tension between inter-state politics and national and international class conflict urgently needed to be worked out for the first socialist state. This paper will provide an intellectual history of the ways Soviet leaders and thinkers adopted these tendencies, particularly in their analyses of imperialism, in the Civil War period, and in their calculations of the balance of power in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the great power calculations of the late 1930s.

Author

• Samuel Coggeshall, UNC at Wilmington