Towards a political economy of socialist international relations

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.