How does Marxist approach explain contemporary International Relations? (2013, 15 Marks)
The Marxist approach explains international relations from beneath the state. What looks like a system of sovereign equals is, for it, the political surface of a single capitalist world economy, and war, alliance and aid are events inside that structure. It aims to interpret capitalism’s whole history as a world system, and so to show that the order can change.
The lens
- Totality and the economic base: politics, law and the balance of power belong to a superstructure shaped by the global organisation of production.
- The state as instrument: the “national interest” is the interest of the class that controls the state.
- Capitalism as the source of conflict: Vladimir I. Lenin (1916) traced great-power war to rivalry among monopoly capitals over the redivision of the world.
The mechanism: Wallerstein’s world-economy
- Unit of analysis: Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, 1974) takes the world-economy as the unit, one international division of labour spread across many states.
- Labour regimes and zones: free wage labour concentrated in the core, sharecropping in the semi-periphery and coerced labour in the periphery; a state’s strength tracks its zone.
- Unequal exchange: power differences fix monopolistic terms of trade, so surplus flows from periphery to core and hierarchy reproduces itself. Arghiri Emmanuel (Unequal Exchange, 1969) added that wage gaps transfer value even under free trade.
- World-economy versus world-empire: empires extracted tribute through one political centre; capitalism extracts surplus through markets across many states, which is why the interstate system and capitalism coexist.
Dependency and hegemony
André Gunder Frank‘s “development of underdevelopment” (1966) adds a class alliance: core capital grows rich in partnership with a comprador elite in the periphery. Robert W. Cox (1983) explains why the order is accepted: hegemony rests on consent to rules presented as universal.
Applied to the present
- Hegemonic transition: Wallerstein’s sequence of Dutch, British and American hegemony frames US–China rivalry over semiconductors and supply chains as a contest for the next core.
- Semi-peripheral assertion: the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) backed local-currency settlement, criticised unilateral tariffs and sanctions, and sought IMF, World Bank and WTO reform.
- Economic coercion: the US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil (October 2025) and the 50% tariff on India (August 2025, cut to 18% in February 2026) show market access used as power.
- Institutions as a global state: B. S. Chimni (2004) reads the WTO, IMF and World Bank as a nascent imperial global state serving a transnational capitalist class.
- Inequality: Oxfam (January 2026) puts the top 1% at 43.8% of global wealth.
Limits
The approach underplays nationalism, religion and the autonomy of the state, as Kenneth N. Waltz‘s (1979) charge of reductionism stressed, and East Asia’s rise through integration strains its pessimism.
Conclusion
Marxism explains contemporary international relations best where others are weakest: why sovereign equals are unequal in fact, and who writes the rules. Read with the state’s autonomy restored, it remains a powerful frame that carries class struggle onto the world stage.