Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emphasised the economic aspect of the relations between states and said that the main source of instability in the international system would be the capitalist globalization. The anarchic system is developed more specifically due to the conflict between two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat or the working class. Materialism was the guiding idea behind the Marxism theory.
Thus, for Marx human history has been a struggle to satisfy material needs and to resist class domination and exploitation. Despite ideological criticism, Marxism has strong empirical advantages on its side. Firstly, by emphasizing injustice and inequality it is very relevant to every period of time as these two failures of the human society have never been absent.
Marxism is a structural theory just like neorealism and neoliberalism, but it focuses on the economic sector instead of the military-political one. Its analysis reflects the relation between base or modes of production and the superstructure or political institutions. According to Marxism, the capitalist mode of production is the source of unjust political institutions and state relations.
Marxism created the foundations for the critical theory and it is superior in the sense to the other dominant approaches of Anglo-American international relations that are problem-solving theories. As any other critical theory, Marxism has a normative interest in identifying possibilities for social transformation and how theory is instrumental to power. The normative disadvantage of Marxism is that it can be seen as Eurocentric by promoting the enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism.
The economic reductionism is considered also to be a central flaw of the Marxist theory. As a result of this further development took place in the interpretations of the Marxist theory.
Variants of Marxist theory
Gramscian
The neo-Gramscian school proposed further development by combining global capitalism, state structure and political-economic institutions. This tried to create a theory of global hegemony or ideological domination. According to this theory, hegemony is maintained through close cooperation between powerful elites inside and outside the core regions of the world system. Global governance is constituted by political and economic institutions that put pressure on the less developed and unstable peripheral countries.
Dependency Theory
Dependency theory is of the notion that resources flow from a “periphery” of poor and underdeveloped states to the “Core or Wealthy states”, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the “World System”. This theory was officially developed in the late 1960s following World War II.
World-Systems Theory
World-systems theory is a multidisciplinary approach which emphasizes the world system not the nation states as the primary unit of analysis.
“World-system” refers to the inter-regional and transnational division of labor, which divides the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries. The semi-periphery countries act as the pacifier between the core and the periphery countries. They helps in transmission of raw material from periphery to core and act as the stabilizer between the both ends.
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