Discuss the commonalities between the Marxist and Realist approach to the study of International Politics. (2022, 10 Marks)
Realism (Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 1948; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1979) and Marxism (Karl Marx, Vladimir I. Lenin, Immanuel Wallerstein) sit at opposite poles: one state-centric, the other class-centric. Set beside liberalism, however, both offer a hard-headed, structural and conflict-centred reading of world politics.
Shared foundations
- Materialism: explanation runs from material forces, the distribution of capabilities for realists and the mode of production for Marxists, not from norms or good intentions.
- Structuralism: actors behave as their position demands. Waltz’s states are disciplined by anarchy; Wallerstein’s states act as their place in the core–periphery hierarchy requires.
- Conflict as endemic: realists trace it to the security dilemma; Marxists to the contradictions of capitalism. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) read the First World War as a struggle to redivide colonies, a conclusion a realist reaches by another route.
- No harmony of interests: Edward Hallett Carr‘s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) dismantled the liberal harmony of interests with tools borrowed from the Marxist critique of ideology. Robert Gilpin (The Political Economy of International Relations, 1987) grouped economic nationalism, realism’s economic face, with Marxism against liberalism: both treat economic relations as conflictual.
- Hegemonic cycles: Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (1981) and Wallerstein’s sequence of Dutch, British and American hegemony both read order as the product of a rising and declining dominant power.
- Hierarchy behind formal equality: great powers, or the core, write the rules. Institutions mirror the strong, whether in John J. Mearsheimer‘s “false promise” of institutions (1994–95) or Robert W. Cox‘s reading of the Bretton Woods bodies as props of hegemony. From the Global South, Mohammed Ayoob‘s subaltern realism (1998) and dependency theory alike read the order as stratified.
Where the convergence ends
| Criterion | Realism | Marxism |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | The state | Class and the world economy |
| Structure | Anarchy, permanent | Capitalism, historical |
| Purpose | Prudent statecraft | Critique and emancipation |
Cox (1981) captured the gap: realism is problem-solving theory, Marxism critical theory.
A contemporary illustration
The US tariff that took India to 50% in August 2025, before an interim understanding cut it to 18% in February 2026, and US–China chip controls are read by realists as hegemonic competition and by Marxists as inter-capitalist rivalry. Both reject the liberal claim that interdependence pacifies.
Conclusion
The kinship is one of method, not purpose. Both are materialist, structural and sceptical of idealism; they part over whether the structure is a permanent condition to be managed or a historical order that can end.