Making ‘class’ visible: Logics of power and the debate on ‘Marxist’ geopolitics

Marxist IR’s renewed engagement with geopolitics took an ‘imperial’ turn with the new millennium. Two developments played a pivotal role in putting the study of the ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ back on the agenda of IR. First, the publication of Empire,Footnote ²⁵ the influential book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the deterritorialised character of the political reconstitution of global capitalism; and second, the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan under the aegis of ‘War on Terror’. While the former has been found lacking a serious analysis of ‘the practical political, economic and military business of imperial governance’,Footnote ²⁶ the latter development, in stark contrast, accentuated the acute reality of ongoing territorial conflicts and the necessity to develop frameworks with which their sources and modi operandi can be unpacked.

David Harvey’s The New Imperialism emerged directly as a strong candidate to theorise and contextualise the US’s decision to revert its foreign policy outlook from empire ‘lite’ to a belligerent territorial power.Footnote ²⁷ Contrary to Hardt and Negri who boldly claim that ‘[i]mperialism is over’,Footnote ²⁸The New Imperialism maintains that ‘capitalist imperialism … a contradictory fusion of “the politics of state and empire”’ still reigns supreme and is constitutive of the processes through which the ‘War on Terror’ unfolded.Footnote ²⁹ According to Harvey, the US’s catastrophic ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were products of its declining economic hegemony in the face of greater competition driven by Europe and Asia and stemmed from its desire to regain its leading role by securing access to natural resources. Bluntly reaffirming the essentiality of natural resources in these calculations, Harvey summarily suggests that ‘whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy’.Footnote ³⁰ Despite the concurrence of such statements with that of classical geopoliticians like Halford Mackinder,Footnote ³¹ Harvey’s main aim in emphasising the importance of controlling natural resources is to signal how ‘[g]eographical expansion and spatial reorganization’ are utilised to onset the ‘chronic tendency within capitalism’, that is ‘the tendency for the profit rate to fall, to produce crises of over accumulation’.Footnote ³²

Harvey theorises this intermixed dynamic of political authority and capital accumulation within the international system by entering a dialogue with Giovanni Arrighi’s two ‘modes of rule or logics of power’ in the form of ‘capitalism’ and ‘territorialism’. Arrighi’s initial formulation of these two logics articulated first a territorial rule which identifies ‘power with the extent and populousness of their domains’ and subjugates capital as a ‘by-product of the pursuit of territorial expansion’; and second, a capitalist rule which gives primacy to ‘command over scarce resources’.Footnote ³³ Harvey’s appropriation of the territorial and capitalist logics is based on the same blueprint and aims to explain how ‘the relative fixity and distinctive logic of territorial power fit with the fluid dynamics of capital accumulation’.Footnote ³⁴

Despite the influence and popularity the book enjoys in a broad spectrum of the social sciences, it is difficult to conclude that The New Imperialism has solved the perennial Marxist problématique of explaining the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and the (capitalist) state/international states-system. The kind of imperial geopolitics Harvey attempts to unveil in his analysis has been criticised for lacking the ‘political’ part of the equation, or as Noel Castree has bluntly put, ‘[w]hile the molecular logic of capital is explicated convincingly, the territorial logic of the state is given none of the attention.’Footnote ³⁵ Yet what makes Harvey’s account deeply problematic as a template for a geopolitical framework is not necessarily a relative neglect of the ‘empirical’ analyses of the territorial logic, but the ways in which the ‘logics’ are irreversibly abstracted from each other. Thus it is not surprising to find that the recent interventions which ‘[draw] principally on Harvey’s work’Footnote ³⁶ have attempted to provide an integrative framework in which the two ‘logics’ are positioned more or less as heuristic categories to explain functionally different modalities of contemporary geopolitics. In other more sustained interrogations where the emphasis is placed on theorising the ‘dialectical fusion of capitalist and territorial logics of power’,Footnote ³⁷ these two logics – with their concrete manifestations on inter-state competition and cooperation – are inadvertently reified, thus the analyses risk reproducing structural realist assumptions through the substitution of ‘realism’s ahistorical logic of international anarchy with an over-generalized account of geopolitical competition’.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, this tendency to ‘hypostatise’ capitalism and geopolitics ‘as always-already analytically separate elements that are then subsequently combined’Footnote ³⁹ creates a framework within which the issue of how class forces and their multiplex interests shape – and in turn are shaped by – these ‘logics’ becomes largely a secondary concern. The ‘two logics’ argument and its emphasis on the conceptual utility of imperialism, ‘understood as the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition’,Footnote ⁴⁰ thus fails to formulate a convincing rebuttal to the charge that Marxist approaches to geopolitics are prone to replicating structural realist arguments and minimising the role of human agency.Footnote ⁴¹

The reconstruction of the classical Marxist theories of imperialism as captured by the ‘two logics’ argument is not the only available toolkit that offers a distinctly materialist geopolitical analysis. In fact, the proponents of two important Marxist approaches, namely Political Marxism and the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), have not only acutely diagnosed the weaknesses of the logics of power approach, but also constructed sophisticated theoretical maps in which the relationship between capitalism and the states-system can be conceptualised and analysed.Footnote ⁴² Leading the Political Marxist front, Benno Teschke and Hannes Lacher reject the logics of power argument by emphasising that capitalism emerged within a pre-existing system of sovereign states rather than creating or constituting that particular configuration. For Teschke and Lacher, ‘territorial framework established in the early modern period’ is not a sine qua non component of capitalism but rather a particular form of a broader systemic alignment in which the expansion of capitalism was ‘managed’. The corollary of their disassociation of capitalism from the territorial configuration of sovereign states is the rejection of a monolithic conception of ‘capitalist geopolitics’, defined by the pendulum of conflict and cooperation between sovereign states. According to Teschke and Lacher, since ‘[t]here is no straight line from capitalism to any specific geo-territorial matrix or set of international relations’, there is no reason to assume that geopolitical relations under capitalism could only materialise in one specific form or that capitalism could only be maintained in a system of territorially demarcated sovereign states.Footnote ⁴³

While the UCD perspectives broadly project a similar degree of heterogeneity in geopolitical relations, their internal variations make it difficult to talk about a unified stance on why and how these relations take different forms. Reworking Trotsky’s original formulation, Justin Rosenberg has presented the updated theory as ‘a general abstraction of the significance of inter-societal coexistence’ within which the variegated patterns of development across time and space can be brought together as part of ‘an ontological whole’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This ‘generalised’Footnote ⁴⁵ formulation has triggered an extensive debate as many have challenged the analytical utility of creating a transhistorical conception of development and insisted on a strict periodisation of UCD consonant with capitalist development.Footnote ⁴⁶ Strikingly, the ‘generalised’ formula shares Political Marxists’ recognition that ‘the plurality of the geopolitical spaces is not co-emergent with capitalism’, and in contrast to the logics of power approach, it refuses to derive geopolitics ‘from within a theory of capital’.Footnote ⁴⁷

A detailed discussion of these theories falls beyond the scope of this article, but for our purposes it is important to highlight that both theories, while carefully avoiding the shortcomings of the logics of power approach, have shied away from fully exploring the implications of class relations in shaping the linkages between the dominant mode of production and the inter-state interaction. Political Marxists have unearthed the empirical paucity of the rebranded theories of imperialism and stressed the variable character of capitalist competition, but their important goal of uncovering ‘how international relations are internally related to politically instituted class relations’Footnote ⁴⁸ has been hampered significantly by ‘a formidable narrowing of the historical development of capitalism’ due to their theoretical allegiances.Footnote ⁴⁹ One can argue that Political Marxists excel at revealing the variegated impact of class relations in the transition to capitalism but it is difficult to maintain that their interrogation retains its analytical edge once the focus is shifted to the issues of contemporary international relations.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the case of UCD, the neglect of explicating the effect of class partly stems from Rosenberg’s ‘generalised’ formulation, which has been charged with devising ‘a subjectless and autogenerative process operating outside and above the wills of social agents’.Footnote ⁵¹ Corresponding to Neil Smith’s critique of the ‘universalist’ incarnations of the concept of uneven development, the transhistorical UCD ‘tells us absolutely nothing specific about capitalism, imperialism, and the present moment of capitalist restructuring’.Footnote ⁵² As such, in both cases, theories do underscore human agency and class relations but this recognition does not translate fully into the analyses of capitalism and geopolitics.

The ‘value’ of Marxist geopolitics as outlined by Colás and Pozo-Martin surfaces at this juncture. Responding to the shortcomings of the logics of power approach – and pre-empting the Political Marxist critique – Pozo-Martin maintains that ‘it is not necessary to abandon the notion that territorial competition is in some direct way related to capital and that this relationship, this link, which necessarily passes through the workings of each state as key agents of world politics, be addressed head-on both empirically and theoretically’.Footnote ⁵³ On the one hand, the authors’ critique of critical geopolitics as a set of exclusively ‘discursive’ methodological apparatuses is not entirely new or productive. Critical geopolitics scholars, especially the ones who operate in close proximity to Marxist political economy and feminist geography, have already noted that ‘deconstructing the terms and strategies of geopolitics tells us how but not why geopolitical knowledge is constructed where it is and by and for whom’.Footnote ⁵⁴ On the other hand, Colás and Pozo-Martin do offer a substantial reconsideration of materialist geopolitics by underscoring ‘the role of territory as “social infrastructure”, as a domain of class antagonism, or as a source of contested value’:

This brief intervention, however, has not met with much sympathy from the critical geopolitics camp. Among the responses Colás and Pozo-Martin have garnered in and after the Geopolitics forum, critical voices highlighted that their ‘Marxist’ geopolitics is vulnerable to ‘the tendency to downplay the role of human perception of the situation and the extent of choice’ as well as to ‘the old base-superstructure conception of causation that has bedevilled Marxism since its founding’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Felix Ciută echoed Agnew’s above-cited observation that ‘Marxist’ geopolitics looks uncannily similar to ‘old-style realist accounts of international relations’ by claiming that ‘the authors are actually a lot more like the lay geopoliticians they study than they would like to admit’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Put simply, from the heterogenous prism of critical geopolitics, Marxist geopolitics is seen merely as an accidental attempt to revive the shortcomings of the statecentric, non-agential, and determinist pillars of classical geopolitical thinking.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the next section, I portray one possible vision for Marxist geopolitics by engaging with an under-explored set of writings of Marx and Engels. The proposed account does not aim to negate the important contributions of Political Marxism and UCD and it broadly supports Colás and Pozo-Martin’s notion of geopolitics ‘as a specific link between territoriality and power in international relations – one where the dynamics of global capitalism are central to the mobilisation of geopolitics as an expression of global power’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The main aim of the discussion is to place a stronger emphasis on class relations and the ways in which domestic class relations/interests are reflected on international politics. Accordingly, the article fulfils a double objective in the following discussion by: (i) reconstructing the episode of ‘Eastern Question’ as a conceptual lens with which to explicate how Marx and Engels analysed the geopolitical relations and discourse of inter-imperialist rivalry in the nineteenth century; (ii) reaffirming the centrality of class as an analytical register in the study of geopolitics. It is my contention that the ‘Eastern Question’ offers significant tools for the realisation of a non-determinist Marxist geopolitical framework and recovers class from being ‘a gaping hole in the account of the interests that geopolitics stood for’ by recognising its constitutive role in the formulation of geopolitical relations and imaginaries that sustained them.Footnote ⁶⁰

Marx and Engels on the ‘Eastern Question’

The Ottoman Empire’s quest for stability in the nineteenth century was hampered by an increasingly hostile international milieu. Despite the fact that the Ottoman state ‘expanded the area under its direct administration’ through a bold reform programme, it simultaneously lost control of a number of significant territories, including Greece, Algeria, and – by recognising their autonomy – Egypt and Serbia.Footnote ⁶¹ The early multidirectional expansion of the empire that halted by the eighteenth century shifted to a gradual shrinking of territory and sovereign control. Struggling against a relentless Russian expansionism in the Balkans and the Black Sea, the empire was plagued with the secession of Serbia (an autonomous principality as of 1815) and Greece (which won independence in 1830). On the Arab peninsula, Wahabbi revolts gravely crippled the Ottoman authority over an already loosely held territory. The meteoric rise of Mehmed Ali Paşa in Egypt and his ‘desire to carve out an empire for himself at the expense of the Sultan’s own empire’ further deteriorated the state’s attempts to re-exert its authority over provinces.Footnote ⁶² Rapidly turning into a major impediment to the ongoing recentralisation, Mehmed Ali constituted a direct threat to İstanbul by defeating the Ottoman forces in Acre and Konya in 1832. Adding insult to injury, Sultan Mahmud II had to accept first the arch nemesis Russia’s, then the remaining major European powers’ offer to intervene on behalf of the Ottoman dynasty and push back the Egyptian army, which was already stationed at the heart of Anatolia.

The Czar’s rush to the defence of the Ottoman dynasty against Mehmed Ali should not disguise Russia’s own expansionary ambitions, which manifested clearly when it directly marched to İstanbul in 1828 after capturing the previous Ottoman capital Edirne (Adrianople). In the same period, Russia’s attempts to dismember the empire, take over İstanbul and the prized Balkan possessions as well as to control the lengthy eastern Anatolian border intensified and became the ‘ultimate goals of Russian policy’.Footnote ⁶³ The threat of a ‘Greater Russia’ reigning over the entire Black Sea, the straits, and the colossal area covering the majority of southeastern Europe gave enough rhetorical ammunition for Western powers to push for the protection of Ottoman territorial integrity and concomitantly brought about the question that would haunt the European decision-makers for decades: ‘What is to be done with Turkey?’Footnote ⁶⁴

Much of this European anxiety was firmly rooted in the ways in which the post-Vienna settlement functioned. Following the resolution of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the concept of balance of power ascended to the status of sacrosanct for the European powers; none dared to defy it openly, yet all were scheming to utilise it for their own interests. Out of the Ottoman Empire’s perceived weakness and what proved to be a misplaced expectation of its immediate disintegration, European states fashioned themselves a new Pandora’s Box in the form of status quo, which in Trotsky’s description, ‘presupposed not only the inviolability of Turkey, the partition of Poland and the preservation of Austria … but also the maintenance of Russian despotism, armed to the teeth, as the gendarme of European reaction’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Formulated as such, the ‘Eastern Question’ embodied the risk of the collapse of the Vienna settlement, of an all-out war – an imperial scramble for the fragments of the Ottoman Empire should it collapse. According to the established narrative, the prospect of a catastrophic conflict ostensibly led European powers to take measures towards the Empire’s preservation.

Not all were satisfied with this arguably pan-European policy of the protection of a country that William Gladstone defined as ‘the one great anti-human specimen of humanity’.Footnote ⁶⁶ In a letter dated 1854, liberal statesman John Bright lambasted the British foreign policy for its ‘false’ orientation towards the Ottomans and claimed that the British policy was ensuring ‘the perpetual maintenance of the most immoral and filthy of all despotisms over one of the fairest portions of the earth which it has desolated, and over a population it has degraded but has not been able to destroy’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Thus the ‘Eastern Question’, both in the nineteenth-century political discourse and the literature dealing with its manifold aspects, predominantly formulated the nature of the issue as the maintenance of the delicate balance of power between the European powers and Russia, sidelining the Ottomans as either passive observers or benefactors –and sometimes manipulators – of a chivalrous Western campaign for their preservation.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Simon Bromley has highlighted, this orientation has perpetuated a discourse within which ‘the Eastern Question is portrayed either as a European response to a purely degenerative and internally driven Ottoman decline, or as the safety-valve for the pressures emanating from the European balance of power’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet as I shall demonstrate below, the diplomatic practices and the political relationship between Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire betray this image. Despite the increasing territorial contraction of the empire, European powers rarely manoeuvred to assist the Ottomans in maintaining their hold in provinces. On the contrary, Britain and France often pursued an active policy of annexation and encouraged secessionist movements within the empire. Manifestations of this trend can be detected in Britain’s formal support of Greek independence and its two-stage annexation of Egypt in 1882 and 1914 as well as in the French occupation of Algeria in 1830 and Russia’s permanent involvement in the Balkans, which facilitated revolts in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro throughout the century. Thus, as one prominent Ottomanist put, ‘[t]he so-called Eastern Question was like a chameleon changing its colors with the environment’Footnote ⁷⁰ and the pharisaism of European powers was not lost on the Ottoman peoples. While the Porte carefully navigated the perfidious seas of the great power diplomacy to capitalise on the contradictory positions of European and Russia empires (as the Crimean War demonstrated), the dominant public discourse – owing to a great extent to the Young Ottoman literature – was shaped around the unjust treatment of the empire at the hands of European imperialists.Footnote ⁷¹

Outside the empire, a consistent critique of the ‘Eastern Question’ was provided by Marx and Engels. The main body of this series of articles and letters was published in the New York Daily Tribune but a number of them received reprints in the Chartist People’s Paper edited by Ernest Jones. Marx’s extensive research on economic issues of the period, which was utilised in his journalistic pieces, also featured in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 and Capital Vol. 1.Footnote ⁷² The body of work produced by Marx and Engels on the vagaries of the European balance of power can be read as a deconstructive effort aimed at unpacking the ‘official’ discourses on European (geo)political relations – hence not entirely dissimilar to many exemplary efforts in contemporary critical geopolitics scholarship. For example, Marx’s scathing evaluations of leading statespeople in Britain and Russia and the ways in which they articulated their stances on the ‘Eastern Question’ can be read as a form of critique that addresses the question of how (geo)political relations embody a ‘discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft “spatialise” international politics in such a way as to represent it as a “world” characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas’.Footnote ⁷³ Nor would it be entirely inconceivable to read Marx’s acerbic refutation of Count Nesselrode’s defence of Russian policy by utilising Ó Tuathail’s suggestion to perceive geopolitics as dramaturgical metaphors. Marx’s denunciation of this historical legerdemain offered by Nesselrode is a critique of what Ó Tuathail would call a ‘situation description’, which signifies the ways in which ‘foreign policy actors classify the drama under consideration and construct scenarios and analogies to render it meaningful’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Writing on a circular note of 20 June 1853, Marx demonstrates how Nesselrode designs a ‘situation description’ whereby the Russian encroachment on Ottoman territories is depicted as a ‘defensive’ manoeuvre to ‘[save] Turkey from inevitable dismemberment’. An impervious Marx sardonically wrote:

Yet I argue that the ‘Eastern Question’ corpus offers more than a set of interlinked threads that criticise the dominant geopolitical representations and the deceptive post-Vienna strategies of the European policymakers. By examining the sociopolitical effects of the ‘Eastern Question’ on Europe and the ways in which it was instrumentalised to maintain the extant class power in industrialising European societies, Marx and Engels locate class relations at the heart of their analytical enterprise. I argue that the way in which they constructed their critique helps us locate the geopolitical machinations and ephemeral coalitions that underpinned the whole episode, not as parts of a concentrated operation to resuscitate the Ottoman Empire, but as the symptoms of a rapidly developing inter-imperialist rivalry which was driven by a competitive logic to secure markets and resources and bolstered by the uneven development of social forces across the world. To this end, Marx and Engels repeatedly targeted the justification of the great power policies through a vague commitment to uphold the status quo. One of the clearest statements of this occupation emerges in Engels’ ‘Turkish Question’. Exposing the European great powers’ dissonant formulations of an irresolute commitment to status quo, Engels wrote:

Engels’ dismissal of the Western narrative of the ‘Eastern Question’ embodies the first stage of a broader critique of the traditional formulation. In lieu of the conventionally held perspective that affirms the primacy of a narrowly defined geopolitical status quo and the preservation of the Ottoman territorial integrity, an alternative reading – one that was partially developed by Marx and Engels – necessitates the inclusion of social forces into the analytical framework. At the heart of such a reformulation lies the contextualisation of international relations throughout the nineteenth century not merely as a concentrated effort to maintain the status quo between the states, but also between classes.

Marx and Engels repeatedly highlighted the consequences of the ‘Eastern Question’ for both conservative and revolutionary classes in Europe. ‘The real issue in Turkey’ for Marx and Engels was the destabilisation of revolutionary class forces under the constant threat of an inter-imperialist war that the ‘Eastern Question’ prophesied. While Engels initially advanced a stadial perspective, claiming that in the face of Russian absolutism, ‘the interests of the revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand’,Footnote ⁷⁷ Marx’s increasingly critical stance on Britain suggests a departure from the direct association of working-class emancipation with the exponential development of capitalism.

After the repression of the 1848 revolutions, Marx maintained that ‘Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Whereas Britain, ‘the despot of the world market’,Footnote ⁷⁹ represented the full force of the capitalist mode of production reinforced with imperialist expansionism, Russia was the symbol of ‘continental retrogression’ for which ‘every interregnum of the counter-revolution in Europe constitute[d] a right for her to exact concessions from the Ottoman Empire’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus the emergent international context was not a repetition of perennial territorial struggles between the major powers, but represented a specific conjuncture in which the ‘geopolitical’ collided with the global expansion of capitalism, the contradictory expression of which was the proliferation of revolutionary struggles that threatened the status quo of bourgeois ruling coalitions all across Europe. For Marx, the dilemmas of European social reform partly stemmed from the conservative role Britain played in the aftermath of 1848 whereby ‘an enlightened English aristocracy and bourgeoisie lie[d] prostrate before the barbarian autocrat [Russia]’.Footnote ⁸¹ As such, the deification of the European balance of power not only greatly reduced the momentum that the movements for working-class emancipation had gained in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it also locked all involved actors in a state of paralysis. As Antonio Gramsci formulated in an equally forceful manner, ‘[a]ll history from 1815 onwards shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent the formation of a collective will … and to maintain “economic-corporate” power in an international system of passive equilibrium’.Footnote ⁸² As far as Marx and Engels were concerned, status quo was the codification of this counter-revolutionary ‘collective will’; it was ‘the state of putrefaction which forbids the Sultan to emancipate himself from the Czar, and the Slavonians to emancipate themselves from the Sultan’.Footnote ⁸³

An extensive survey of the ‘Eastern Question’ suggests three thematic areas on which Marx and Engels placed greater emphasis. These areas can be broadly categorised as: (i) international relations with a focus on the prospects of revolution; (ii) foreign policy formulations as articulated by statespeople and ‘intellectuals of statecraft’; and (iii) position of the European bourgeois press vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire and Russia.

The first aspect of their analyses was primarily concerned with revealing the effects and consequences of the ‘Eastern Question’ discourse for the revolutionary struggle in Europe. Initially, Marx and Engels welcomed the quagmire in which the European bourgeoisie was entangled. They speculated that the narrative perpetuated by the European statespeople would soon become unsustainable given the extent of Russian aggression and the unwillingness of European powers to provide any meaningful support to the Ottoman Empire. At the onset of the Crimean War, Marx wrote:

This consciously maintained dichotomy between ‘Russian Absolutism and European Democracy’Footnote ⁸⁵ was repeatedly exploited by Marx and Engels to underscore the urgency of working-class revolution. Russia, perhaps not in an entirely unjustified manner, was clad in the mantle of ‘counter-revolution’ and tasked with proving how feeble the European bourgeois states had become since 1789. Yet even Russia was not exempt from the forces unleashed by the uneven development of capitalism. Marx answered his own question regarding Russia’s involuntary role as follows: ‘Does Russia act on her own free impulse, or is she but the unconscious and reluctant slave of the modern fatum, Revolution? I believe the latter alternative.’Footnote ⁸⁶ For Engels, the bourgeoisie’s long lost progressive outlook had to be reclaimed by the ‘revolutionary party’ which was the only agent capable of resolving the ‘Eastern Question’:

Thus a working-class revolution, implicitly a European one,Footnote ⁸⁸ was not only registered as the ultimate outcome of the ongoing (geo)political and social conflicts in Eurasia, it was also poised to unleash a transformative momentum which would invalidate the crises that the uneven development of capitalism was perpetuating:

The second aspect encompasses both detailed analyses of particular policy directives and speeches – which for Marx and Engels were indicative of their underlying class interest – and rebuttals of ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals.Footnote ⁹⁰ An illustrative example is Marx’s consistent interrogation of the exchanges in the British parliament and a series of articles on Lord Palmerston who was ‘never in need of a theme to pique the national prejudices, to counteract revolution abroad, and, at the same time, to keep awake the suspicious jealousy of foreign powers’.Footnote ⁹¹

Marx’s criticism of the British political establishment reaches its crescendo during the Crimean War. As the commercial interest behind the preservation of European status quo translated into a strong political voice represented in the Parliament, Marx charged ‘the Stockjobbers, and the Peacemongering Bourgeoisie’ with ‘[surrendering] Europe to Russia’.Footnote ⁹² The target of Marx’s vehemence was what John A. Hobson would later call ‘the new well-to-do business classes’ who became ‘obtrusively dominant in all issues’ in the arena of national politics.Footnote ⁹³ As Marx attempted to exhibit how the liberal argument for neutrality was devised to maintain the British commercial interests in the continent, he slashed at the proponents of the Manchester school of political economy and their Turkophobic parliamentary wing by claiming that ‘the Czar knows his Cobdens and his Brights, and estimates at its just value the mean and abject spirit of the European middle classes’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In light of the historical evidence, we know that the British bourgeoisie as a whole did not adopt this position, which forces us to pay closer attention to class fractions and how their sectoral interests and their relationship to the world market affect their political preferences. For example, some Manchester merchants with vested interests in the Ottoman market were perturbed with the possibility of a Russian victory that could signal the removal of the Ottoman Empire from the sphere of the British commercial influence.Footnote ⁹⁵ Industrialists and the fractions of the commercial bourgeoisie whose immediate interests laid elsewhere followed Cobden’s line as his staunch resistance to the British involvement in the Ottoman-Russian conflict was coupled with his belief that ‘England would gain rather than suffer’ if ‘Russia were to subjugate Turkey’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Cobden would, indeed, continue to praise the development of the Russian commerce and argue that ‘wherever a country is found to favour foreign commerce … it may infallibly be assumed, that England partakes more largely of the advantages of that traffic than any other state’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Cobden’s pro-Russian ‘neutrality’, which was rooted in the assumption that the commercial interests of the British bourgeoisie would remain secure regardless of Britain’s involvement in the conflict, should not obscure the degree to which the Ottoman market had been colonised by the British up to the 1850s. While ‘[u]ntil c. 1820, trade within the empire and with Russia certainly was more important than that with Western and Central Europe’, by the 1850s, European companies had already ‘made a significant entry into the Ottoman markets to a degree that extended beyond the major urban centers’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The processes that reinforced this expansion materialised largely due to political interventions rather than the ‘economic’ power or ingenuity of the British bourgeoisie. The Anglo-Turkish Trade Agreement of 1838 created a lifeline for the British companies which, as late as the early 1830s were still struggling to dominate the Ottoman market and requesting the British government’s assistance.Footnote ⁹⁹ The treaty constituted a key stage in the liberalisation of the Ottoman economy by targeting ‘local monopolies’ and exempting ‘foreign (but not domestic) merchants from an 8 per cent internal customs duty that had been levied previously on goods transported within the Empire’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Thus the new arrangements would fulfil Palmerstone’s explicitly expressed desire to see the Turkish industry ‘discouraged’ while buttressing the British enterprises in the Empire.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By 1850, the British exports to the Middle East would surpass £3,000,000 (up from £153,903 in 1814), while the number of British ships that ‘entered or passed the port of Constantinople’ would reach 2,504 by 1856.Footnote ¹⁰² Consequently, the British government perceived its involvement in the Crimean War – despite the campaign for neutrality undertaken by a ‘Peacemongering Bourgeoisie’ – as a necessary step to protect its ‘extensive’ interests, which would be endangered not only by Russian aggression but also by the possible elevation of France as the sole privileged partner of the Ottoman trade.Footnote ¹⁰³

In addition to this critique of the bourgeois (fractions’) political positions, Marx also turned the tables on liberals by underscoring that their moral condemnation of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly the treatment of its Christian population, was merely a masquerade with which to valorise and legitimise their particular class interest and ideology.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Aiming at Cobden, Marx hypothetically asked:

This method of interrogation with which Marx and Engels refuted arguments made from/for a narrowly construed class/national perspective becomes even more commanding in their analyses of the European press. In line with the method they followed in their examinations of the policymakers and intellectuals, class relations of their subjects take precedence in their attempts to unmask the ways in which the press constructed narratives of the ‘Eastern Question’. Thus various outlets are described in relation to the specific class interests they promoted and branded, for example, as the organs of ‘the English aristocracy’ (The Morning Herald); ‘liberals’ (The Daily News); or ‘the Austrian bankocracy’ (Wiener Lloyd).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Accordingly, Marx maintained that the British press, in accordance with the dominant policy perspectives within the Parliament, significantly distorted the perception of the Ottoman-Russian conflict and ‘several organs of the Coalition Ministry’ even undertook the ‘the business of soothing down the public’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In similar terms with his critique of liberal moralism, Marx slashed at those press outlets who advocated neutrality or a pro-Russian foreign policy. An illustrative example is Marx’s critique of a leader published in The Times written prior to the first Russian ultimatum to the Porte:

As with his refutation of Cobden’s speech, here too Marx reverses the newspaper’s previously published statements to reveal the contradictory nature of arguments devised for the Russian encroachment towards the Ottoman Empire. Of note here is a set of articles by Marx which demonstrate how the British press perpetuated a misconceived dichotomy between ‘civilised’ Russia and ‘archaic’ Ottoman Empire by resorting to racist justifications and anti-Muslim sentiments.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Marx effectively exhibits the overtly instrumental manner in which the Ottoman-Russian relationship is discussed in the press by singling out an anti-Russian piece published in The Times on the same day the Allied forces reached Varna. Extensively citing the piece, which calls for a European-wide resistance to Russia’s machinations on the Ottoman Christians, Marx notes how the discourse had drastically changed once Britain and France joined the Ottoman camp:

This demonstration of the sensitivity Marx and Engels showed vis-à-vis the material sources, discursive legitimisation, and ideological construction of inter-state relations in the mid-nineteenth century highlights the value of existing conceptual apparatuses for the efforts to construct a framework of Marxist geopolitics. Simultaneously, the multifaceted – but ultimately class and production oriented – framework fleshed out in this article suggests that the source material can also speak to methodologically divergent approaches in critical geopolitics, which, apart from a small number of publications, have largely shied away from entering into a productive dialogue with Marxism.