Internationalism
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Last updated: 2026-08-26
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
Within the analysis of political Philosophy, Marxist internationalism is one of the most influential doctrines, but also one of the most criticized by defenders of the free market and individual liberty.
What is Proletarian Internationalism?
For Marxism, internationalism starts from the famous premise of the Communist Manifesto: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" This doctrine holds that the working class has no fatherland and that its interests are global.
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The nation as a tool of control: Marx argued that nation-states and borders are inventions of the bourgeoisie designed to divide workers, prevent their joint organization, and protect national markets.
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Global solidarity: The individual’s loyalty should not be directed to his country of origin, but to the world working class, since capitalist exploitation operates under the same dynamics regardless of geography.
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Revolution of worldwide scope: To abolish the capitalist system effectively, the revolution cannot be isolated in a single State; it requires a coordinated global uprising that dismantles the market economy at the international level.
What Marxism says
The Manifesto (1848) concentrates the doctrine:
The communists are reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.
Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
[…] In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
And the slogan: «Proletarians of all countries, unite!»
The two halves must be read together. It is not pure national nihilism:
- In content, the struggle is international: capital is already a world market; the worker of Manchester and the worker of Lille have the same structural adversary.
- In form, the struggle begins at home: “one’s own” bourgeoisie must be defeated, the national State taken, constituting itself as a nation —a workers’ nation, not a nation of owners.
The communists distinguish themselves from other workers’ parties in that, in the national struggles, they bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of nationality.
How it differs from liberal internationalism
| Marxist internationalism | Liberal / Austrian internationalism |
|---|---|
| Subject: world proletariat | Subject: individuals who exchange |
| Means: party, revolution, class State | Means: trade, law, voluntary emigration |
| Nation: a form to be conquered and then dissolved with the classes | Nation: language, law, sentiment; not an economic unit |
| Peace: when classes cease | Peace: international division of labor and limits on the State |
| Borders: irrelevant to class loyalty | Borders: barriers to exchange or, at most, legal enclosures |
The classical liberal (Cobden, Bright, Bastiat, Mises) is also an “internationalist” against protectionism and cabinet wars. He does not deduce from that a class-subject or a general headquarters of the revolution.
Critiques of the Austrian School of Economics
a) There is no homogeneous world proletarian interest (Mises)
The same objection as to the class struggle, now on the scale of the planet.
The German worker protected by a tariff does not have the same interest as the Argentine exporting worker; the one in the war industry, not the one in the civilian sector; the immigrant, not the trade unionist who closes the labor market.
“Proletarians of the world” is a verbal aggregation, not an actor.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), in Nation, State, and Economy and Omnipotent Government, takes seriously the nation as a community of language and of communication.
In an interventionist State, the language of the decree decides who accesses public employment, the school, and the norm.
That generates real national conflict, not “bourgeois ideology.” Denying it in the name of class does not dissolve the conflict; it leaves it without a liberal institution (autonomy, secession, equality before the law) and hands it to whoever shouts loudest.
Peace, for Mises, does not come from class brotherhood. It comes from the international division of labor: the more trade there is, the more costly war is.
Marxist internationalism wants peace after the world civil war.
Libertarianism wants to strip the State of the capacity to close economic borders and to conscript.
b) 1914 as a crucial experiment
The Second International had sworn to oppose “bourgeois” war.
In August 1914 the great parties —starting with the German SPD— vote war credits.
Social-democratic workers kill one another with the blessing of their leaderships. Kautsky admits that the International is not an instrument for wartime.
For an Austrian that is not an “opportunist accident.” It is the refutation of the postulate: when the cost of class loyalty rises (invasion, conscription, stigma), national, local, linguistic loyalty prevails.
Lenin calls it a betrayal by the labor aristocracy. The explanation spares the fact: the premise (“a single world class with a single interest”) did not survive the first serious test.
c) State internationalism is imperialism under another flag
The Third International did not coordinate equals.
It coordinated sections around a State that had borders, an army, police, and diplomacy. “Proletarian internationalism” meant, in practice, aligning French unions or Latin American parties with Moscow’s reason of State (pacts, tactical turns, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, “Great Patriotic War”).
Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) and the liberal anti-imperialist tradition read here the obvious: a State that speaks in the name of humanity is still a State. The world class does not vote in the Politburo.
Trotsky objected to “socialism in one country” with Marxist coherence: without international revolution the workers’ State degenerates.
The liberal replies that any center that claims to direct the world revolution reproduces the problem: someone monopolizes the representation of the universal subject.
d) Free trade is not the Comintern (Rothbard, Cobdenite tradition)
Libertarian internationalism is negative: no tariffs, no conscription, no empires, no central banks coordinating wars.
There is no “fatherland of the proletariat” to defend.
Rothbard: in a free market there is not even “international trade” as an economic category; there are individuals who trade across lines that the State draws.
To subsidize a world order or a world party is as interventionist as the tariff. Statist globalism (top-down governance) is not liberal internationalism; it is another form of planning.
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), in the 1939 essay on interstate federalism, did dream of a legal order that would limit sovereignties in order to prevent economic nationalism. That looks more like a rule of law among States than like a class party. To confuse the two is the error of whoever calls “globalist” everything that is not autarky.
Internal tensions that the critique exploits
The Marxist camp itself never resolved the triangle:
- Revolution in the weak link (Russia) vs. revolution in advanced capital (the Manifesto).
- Defense of the “socialist fatherland” vs. defeatism in all fatherlands.
- National self-determination (Lenin) vs. priority of class unity.
Those tensions are not accidents. They are born of wanting a world subject and, at the same time, taking States that are national. The Comintern, the popular fronts, and the “people’s democracies” are attempts to square that circle. The liberal sees in them what Mises sees in all planning: a center that speaks for a whole that does not exist.
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
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Last updated: 2026-08-26
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