Marxism, dependency & world-systems theory
Marxist IR, dependency theory and Wallerstein's world-systems analysis: the economic-structural critique of power, polarity and global hierarchy, exam-tuned.
The materialist core
Marxist International Relations rejects the realist premise that anarchy and the state are the primal facts of world politics. For the Marxist, the determining structure is the global capitalist mode of production: classes, not states, are the fundamental agents, and the state is a superstructural instrument serving the interests of the dominant class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), already internationalised the analysis, observing that the bourgeoisie 'must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere'—an early statement of globalisation as capitalist expansion.
The theory of imperialism gave Marxism its IR teeth. V.I. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), argued that monopoly finance capital, compelled by the falling rate of profit and the search for outlets, drove the great powers to partition the globe—the scramble for Africa formalised at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 being the paradigm case. Lenin built on J.A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study (1902) and Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910). For Lenin, the First World War (1914–18) was an inter-imperialist war over the redivision of colonial spoils, not a clash of values.
From base to global structure
Classical Marxism located exploitation at the point of production within a national economy. The innovation of later Marxist IR was to scale exploitation up to the world level, treating the global system itself as a stratified structure that transfers surplus from periphery to core. This required abandoning the assumption that capitalism would industrialise the whole world uniformly. Rosa Luxemburg, in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), insisted that capitalism needed a non-capitalist 'outside' to absorb surplus value—a logic that pointed toward permanent core–periphery asymmetry rather than convergence.
Three analytic commitments unite the tradition. First, historical materialism: the economic base conditions political and ideological superstructure, so foreign policy expresses class interest. Second, structural inequality: the world economy is hierarchical by design, reproducing the wealth of advanced economies through the poverty of others. Third, emancipatory intent: theory exists to change the world, not merely describe it (Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).
The neo-Gramscian school, led by Robert W. Cox ('Social Forces, States and World Orders', 1981), refined this with Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony—rule by consent secured through ideology and institutions, not coercion alone. Cox's dictum that 'theory is always for someone and for some purpose' supplied the critical-theory wing of IR its founding slogan, distinguishing problem-solving theory (which takes the order as given) from critical theory (which interrogates how the order came to be). For the exam, the chain runs cleanly: Marx and Engels → Lenin and Luxemburg (imperialism) → dependency theorists (Latin America) → Wallerstein (world-systems) → Cox (neo-Gramscian hegemony).