“Marxist approach to the study of international relations has lost its relevance in the post-cold war era.” Comment. (2021, 10 Marks)
The claim belongs to the triumphalism of 1989–91, when Francis Fukuyama‘s “end of history” thesis read the Soviet collapse as the final victory of liberal capitalism. It holds that a theory reading world politics through class and capital was buried with the states built in its name. The verdict is half right: Marxism lost its political programme, not its analytical power.
The case for the statement
- Neglect of the state: Ralph Miliband (“Marx and the State”, 1965) conceded that Karl Marx never set out a systematic theory of the state, and Kenneth N. Waltz (1979) dismissed the Hobson–Lenin theory of imperialism as reductionist. Yet states remain the principal actors.
- A failed prediction: the Communist Manifesto (1848) expected capital to dissolve national divisions; nationalism, religion and ethnicity have repeatedly overridden class.
- History’s test: the Soviet bloc collapsed, and China’s communist party presides over the largest capitalist accumulation on record.
- Reductionism: privileging the mode of production leaves gender and race as forms of domination it struggles to theorise.
- Return of geopolitics: the war in Ukraine and alliance hardening fit realism better than a theory reading states as functions of capital.
The case against
- Inequality is its home ground: Oxfam (January 2026) puts the top 1% at 43.8% of global wealth and the poorest half at 0.52%; the World Inequality Report 2026 finds the top 10% earning more than the other 90%.
- Renewal after 1991: Justin Rosenberg (The Empire of Civil Society, 1994) and Benno Teschke (The Myth of 1648, 2003) rebuilt a historical-materialist account of sovereignty itself; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri‘s Empire (2000) theorised globalised power; Robert W. Cox‘s hegemony and David Harvey‘s accumulation by dispossession (2003) explain value chains and labour arbitrage.
- Crisis theory vindicated: the 2008 crash socialised losses and privatised gains.
- A Global South voice: B. S. Chimni (2004) reads the WTO, IMF and World Bank as a nascent imperial global state serving a transnational capitalist class; Ha-Joon Chang‘s Kicking Away the Ladder (2002) shows how today’s rules foreclose tools the core once used.
- Semi-peripheral contestation: the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) criticised unilateral tariffs and sanctions and sought IMF, World Bank and WTO reform.
Conclusion
The statement confuses the fall of Soviet socialism with the fall of a method. Marxism is weak as prophecy and as a theory of the state, but its structural claims about one unequal world economy explain post-Cold War globalisation better than its obituary allows.