Comment: Marxist approach to international politics. (2002, 20 Marks)
The Marxist approach holds that what looks like a system of states is really a system of classes, organised by a single capitalist world economy. Karl Marx wrote no treatise on war or diplomacy, and treated politics as a superstructure resting on the economic base; the approach is therefore better called a school of international political economy. Its claim is that realism and liberalism start in the wrong place: both take the state and the “national interest” as given, when the state is an instrument of the dominant class.
Core commitments
- Totality: history, economics and international relations are one field of study.
- Historical materialism: the tension between forces and relations of production drives change.
- Class conflict, not harmony: the liberal harmony of interests is ideology.
- Commitment to change: the order is historical and can end; theory exists to emancipate.
Strands
| Strand | Thinkers | Central claim |
|---|---|---|
| Classical imperialism | John A. Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir I. Lenin | Export of capital drives expansion and war |
| Dependency | Raúl Prebisch, André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin | The periphery is underdeveloped by its integration |
| World-systems | Immanuel Wallerstein | Core, semi-periphery and periphery in one world-economy |
| Neo-Gramscian | Robert W. Cox, Stephen Gill | Hegemony rests on consent |
| Neo-colonialism | Kwame Nkrumah (1965) | Formal independence, external economic control |
Lenin‘s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) made war the mechanism by which monopoly capitals redivide a fully partitioned world, and his idea of a labour aristocracy explained why European workers marched to war in 1914. Cox‘s dictum that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (1981) turned the approach against the discipline itself.
The Indian contribution
- Dadabhai Naoroji‘s drain of wealth thesis (Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901) showed, before Hobson’s Imperialism (1902), that a colony could be impoverished by its integration with a richer economy.
- Manabendra Nath (M. N.) Roy, at the Comintern’s Second Congress (1920), argued against Lenin that the colonial bourgeoisie would compromise with imperial capital, anticipating the critique of neo-colonialism.
- India’s championing of the New International Economic Order (UN Declaration, 1974) carried the dependency critique into diplomacy; Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik (A Theory of Imperialism, 2016) carry it forward, and B. S. Chimni (2004) reads today’s economic institutions as a nascent imperial global state.
Contribution
- It is the only major approach whose central question is inequality. Oxfam (January 2026) puts the top 1% at 43.8% of global wealth.
- It explains global value chains, labour arbitrage, debt and IMF conditionality as relations of power.
- It reads the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026), with its call for IMF, World Bank and WTO reform and its criticism of unilateral tariffs, as a semi-peripheral challenge to core-written rules.
Limitations
- Economic reductionism: nationalism, religion and the Sino-Soviet split resist a class reading; Kenneth N. Waltz (1979) called the Hobson–Lenin theory reductionist.
- Neglect of the state: Ralph Miliband (1965) conceded that Marx never set out a systematic theory of the state.
- Failed prophecy: Soviet socialism collapsed; East Asia and China rose through integration; absolute poverty fell sharply.
- Return of geopolitics: the Ukraine war fits realism better.
Conclusion
The Marxist approach is weak as prophecy and as a programme, and its orthodox form overstates the economic. Its structural insight, that sovereign equals are unequal in fact because they occupy unequal positions in one world economy, remains indispensable, and its neo-Gramscian form has answered much of the reductionism charge.