Marxism, International Law and the Enduring Question of Exploitation: A History

Until the 1990s, there was a longstanding disdain on Marxism amongst jurists especially international lawyers, with non-Soviet international lawyers only paying scant attention or lip service to Marxist thinking, based on a number of misgivings. Firstly, reminiscing of legal history in general, Marxism was perceived as activism reserved for a distant past and irrelevant to the present and future. Secondly, Marxism was long perceived as the prerogative of non-jurists, most especially as Marx himself did not pay attention to jurisprudence. Moreover, Marxism was throughout the cold war period generally associated with the Soviet Union. Any legal analysis from a Marxist perspective was tantamount to being misinterpreted as a defence for Soviet communism—a derogatory position for any scholar in the West at the time. Lastly, although many Soviet publicists did examine Marxism in their studies, Soviet international law was however often excluded from mainstream considerations —and framed as alternative international law rather than conventional discourse. With Soviet International law restricted to rules consented or acquiesced to by states (at least in principle), the Soviet brand of international law was perceived in the West as the most extreme form of positivism.