Marxist Approaches — assumptions and imperialism

Marxism offers a critical framework centred on economic structures and class relations. It draws not from Marx’s diplomacy but from later interpretations, and is often called a “Critical Theory” for its commitment to radical change; from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it shifts attention from international politics to international political economy.

Basic assumptions Society and culture cannot be separated from the economic system · classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat), not states, are the primary actors · world politics operates within a capitalist world-system with a core–periphery structure · the system is inherently conflictual · historical materialism

material conditions shape social and political structures.

Three traditions: the Instrumentalist / Dependency / Orthodox school, the Critical / Frankfurt school, and the Gramscian school.

• Marx and Engels — proletarian internationalism; bourgeois greed drives capitalism’s global expansion.
• Vladimir Lenin — Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916): mature capitalism produces monopolies; the export of capital yields imperialism, dividing the world into wealthy and exploited nations; imperialism is capitalism’s final stage, ending in revolution.
• J. A. Hobson — Imperialism: A Study; tied imperialism to the malfunctioning of capitalism. Kenneth Waltz called Lenin’s theory “elegant and powerful.”

Dependency and World-Systems Theory

The Dependency School (1960s–70s)

• A counter to modernisation theory. Scholars: Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Samir Amin, Raul Prebisch, Immanuel Wallerstein. The development of underdevelopment — integration into global capitalism produces underdevelopment in the periphery; unequal exchange reinforces dependency. Prebisch: the centre–periphery model; protection and industrialisation. Criticism: over-external; ignores internal governance.

World-Systems Theory · Immanuel Wallerstein

Definition “A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence” — a multicultural territorial division of labour, integrated through the market since the sixteenth century.

One capitalist world-economy, three structural positions. Periphery (Labour-intensive production · raw-material export · weak states) → Semi-periphery (A shock-absorbing buffer · larger political than economic role) → Core (Capital-intensive, high-technology production · strong institutions). Unequal exchange — surplus flows periphery to core (Wallerstein: perpetual).

• Nation-states are variables; imperialism is the domination of the periphery by core states; hegemony is one core state temporarily outstripping the rest, and is temporary. Criticism: Arrighi and Drangel (generalisation, not falsifiable), Robert Brenner (neglects social class), Theda Skocpol (blurs state and business), Ramon Grosfoguel (economy over culture), and Eurocentrism; China does not fit neatly. It still explains persistent impoverishment in Africa and Latin America.

Gramsci and Cox · Critical Theory · New Marxism

• Antonio Gramsci — hegemony as consent plus coercion: political society (coercion) and civil society (consent, which manufactures agreement); the superstructure stresses culture and ideology over the purely economic.
• Robert Cox — Social Forces, States and World Orders; integrates ideas, institutions and material capabilities. Structural realism is “problem-solving theory” that accepts the prevailing order, against critical theory that contemplates alternatives; international organisations spread the hegemon’s norms by co-opting peripheral elites.
• Critical Theory — Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School (knowledge is socially situated; the goal is human emancipation); Jurgen Habermas (communicative action, discourse ethics; a dual moral identity); Andrew Linklater (the state is inclusionary and exclusionary; cosmopolitan citizenship).
• New Marxism — Justin Rosenberg (The Empire of Civil Society); globalisation is not recent but intrinsic to capitalism; uneven and combined development.

Criticism and relevance

• Edward Said — Marx as “orientalist”; John M. Hobson — Eurocentric; realists — a reductionist view of the state. Relevance: David Harvey (“accumulation by dispossession”; the “race to the bottom” in labour standards); Thomas Piketty (a world of haves and have-nots); against Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, rising inequality keeps the critique alive. The point is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.

“Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.”

Robert Cox