The Necessity of Contingency

Of all the standard criticisms of Marxism, the claim that it is wedded to a mechanical and deterministic account of history is among the most pervasive. It is also among the least defensible. This chapter argues that Marxism affords an especially strong set of analytical tools for explaining the contingencies of international law. Romanticising the concept of contingency as illuminative of aporia or ruptures—moments of radical uncertainty utterly at odds with the broader social contexts in which they register—risks relegating the events under scrutiny to the status of mutually unrelated accidents, to be lauded or lambasted in isolation or loose association. By contrast, a Marxist analysis of international law, one that is alive to the co-constitutive relations between class power and juridical authority, provides an explanatory framework within which contingencies may be comprehended. My argument proceeds in two stages. I first revisit some of the ways in which Marx engaged directly with questions of law and rights. I then draw upon Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to propose a new Marxist approach to international law. My contention is that the question of law under capitalism is closely related to the question of contingency under capitalism, that the Marxist tradition’s responses to both questions are considerably more nuanced than they have generally been made out to be, and that being a ‘Marxist’ requires commitment not to the view that all contingency is illusory but simply to the view that contingency (like agency) is socially conditioned.