Marxist international law methodology?

Abstract

In this chapter I take as my starting point the 2007 entry in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law on “Methodology of International Law” by Martti Koskenniemi. Second, I turn to Marx and Engels themselves, who said very little about law, save for a rather pithy 1887 article by Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky on “Juridical Socialism”, and, to my knowledge, nothing at all about international law. Indeed, Marx declared famously that if anything was certain, he was not a Marxist. Third, I tackle the most impressive attempt to work out a Marxist theory of law, Yevgeny Pashukanis’s General Theory of Law and Marxism, as promoted and reinterpreted by China Miéville and Robert Knox. Fourth, I turn to the recent work of B. S. Chimni, with his Integrated Marxist Approach to International Law, IMAIL, before concluding with some thoughts of my own. It is my contention throughout that while scholars who identify as Marxist wrote about international law, and some, particularly Chimni, have sought to outline a Marxist course in international law, a Marxist methodology is almost always nowhere to be found. Instead, as Marx and Engels themselves insisted, legal demands are an essential weapon in the class struggle, but there can be no socialist law or indeed socialist legal theory.