Explain the relevance of the Marxist approach in the context of globalization. (2019, 20 Marks)
For mainstream theory, globalisation is a story of growing interdependence; for the Marxist approach it is the worldwide consolidation of capitalism as a single, hierarchical order. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels anticipated it in 1848: capital’s need for ever-wider markets drives the bourgeoisie across the planet, so that “it must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” The approach is relevant chiefly because it alone makes global inequality its central question.
Globalisation as a capitalist project
- Imperialism, updated: Vladimir I. Lenin‘s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) identified the export of capital as the driver of expansion. Foreign investment and offshore finance now pull every economy into one circuit, producing rich and poor nations just as capitalism produces rich and poor classes within each.
- Core, semi-periphery, periphery: Immanuel Wallerstein‘s world-systems theory reads globalisation as an uneven, polarising process. In global value chains, design, brands and finance in the core capture value while assembly in the periphery is squeezed, and labour arbitrage disciplines workers everywhere.
- A transnational capitalist class: as production and finance become transnational, interests converge across borders. Leslie Sklair (The Transnational Capitalist Class, 2001) describes executives, globalising officials, professionals and consumerist elites bound by the culture-ideology of consumerism; B. S. Chimni (2004) sees the WTO, IMF and World Bank as a nascent imperial global state serving that class.
- Hegemony and the hollowing of democracy: Robert W. Cox (1983) shows how the liberal order is accepted as serving everyone; Stephen Gill‘s new constitutionalism (1998) explains how central-bank independence, fiscal rules and investment treaties place economic policy beyond electoral reach, while corporate power erodes democratic accountability.
- Accumulation by dispossession: David Harvey (The New Imperialism, 2003) explains privatisation, land acquisition and the enclosure of commons as capital’s answer to overaccumulation.
What the evidence shows
- Concentration: Oxfam (January 2026) puts the richest 1% at 43.8% of global wealth and the poorest half at 0.52%, with billionaires passing 3,000; the World Inequality Report 2026 finds the top 10% out-earning the other 90%.
- Corporate reach: by OECD estimates (2018), multinational enterprises account for almost a third of world output and about half of world exports.
- Imposed policy: Joseph E. Stiglitz, in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), likened IMF-driven market opening to the forced opening of the nineteenth century, the Opium Wars included.
- The South’s grievances: resistance to the India–South Africa TRIPS waiver proposal on COVID-19 vaccines (2020), settled only by a narrow 2022 decision, and climate damages borne by those who emitted least, read cleanly as core–periphery politics. India’s defence of public stockholding for food security at the WTO is a semi-peripheral state defending its policy space; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (A Theory of Imperialism, 2016) read imperialism as income deflation imposed on tropical producers.
Limits of the approach
- Absolute poverty fell: the World Bank (March 2026) counts 847 million extremely poor in 2024 at the $3.00-a-day line, a tenth of humanity but far below 1990 levels. Bill Warren (Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, 1980) argued, from within Marxism, that capital develops the periphery rather than blocking it.
- East Asia and China rose through integration, not delinking.
- The backlash is nationalist: the revolt against globalisation runs through tariffs and identity politics rather than socialism, though the 2025–26 tariff wars can also be read as inter-capitalist rivalry.
Conclusion
Marxism failed as a political model but succeeds as a diagnosis. It explains why a more integrated world has also become more unequal, and why the rules of globalisation favour those who wrote them; that critique is the starting point for any fairer international order.