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- Marxism is a distinct tradition in IR theory. It rejects the liberal world view of self-interested individuals and the realist world view of sovereign states and anarchy. It views both perspectives as limited and limiting and as characterized by conservative politics.
- Instead of a focus on pre-constituted actors (think of the centrality of the state and attending black-box theories), Marxism seeks to uncover social processes as modes of self-production that shape particular actors and their actions, as well as possible points of intervention and alternatives.
- Marxism is a varied tradition. It conceptualizes the social world in terms of historical materialism, building upon the dialectical social philosophy of Karl Marx.
- Marxism’s central focus is on providing a critical interpretation of capitalism as a historically produced form of social life to be challenged. Its simultaneous forms of freedom and unfreedom, empowerment and disempowerment are regarded as endemic tensions, which point towards the possibility of political struggle and potential for change.
- Thus, Marxism advocates a relational and process-oriented understanding of human life. It sees humans as productive agents who continuously remake their world and themselves through their interactions.
- Human beings are therefore seen as both the products and producers of historical processes.
- According to a dialectical perspective human agents (actors) sit within relatively enduring social structures (normative and social orders that precede individual actors), which define the possibility of certain types of actions, although they do not determine them.
- Through their (inter)actions, agents reproduce or alter the social structures around them. The dialectical view of society challenges the empiricist approaches that study laws of social life, and reject objectivist claims to ‘human nature’.
- Marxism defines politics in a more extensive way than realist and liberal approaches do. Politics is seen as a struggle over the shaping of the kind of world we live in and the kind of people we are.
- For Marx capitalism is not just an economic system to be equated with markets or exchange. It is a wider political and cultural form of organization and social life in which human labour itself is bought and sold on the market. It is based on historically specific class relations between capital owning and wage labour classes. In capitalist systems workers sell their labour to members of the capital owning class.
- Marx believed that while capitalism is productive, it is also disabling, exploitative and undemocratic:
- It is disabling in distorting the possibilities for social self-determination by the exploited. Society under capitalism takes on the appearance of objective and natural social form. This obscures the fact that such social structures are continuously reproduced, and thus simultaneously harbour the potential to be altered (to be produced other-wise).
- It is exploitative in that the owners of the means of production control the production process and expropriate its product, that is, the surplus value created by labour.
- It is undemocratic in that capitalism creates private social powers in the economic sphere, which are nonetheless externalized from the political sphere and thus institutionalized structures enforcing democratic accountability.
- One of the most important and lasting contributions of Marxism is the study of imperialism. While it has been suggested that colonialism is not essential to capitalism, it is evident that the latter is not merely a domestic phenomenon, and will benefit from imperial structures where they exist.
- Drawing on economic determinism, where processes intrinsic to the economy determine the shape of social and political life, theorists of imperialism therefore argue that capitalist accumulation drove major capitalist countries into colonial expansionism, and in many ways, continue to do so. Internationally, this causes instability due to inter-imperialist rivalry on a global scale.
- Western Marxism highlights the importance of consciousness, subjectivity, ideology and culture. It formed as a counterpoint to Soviet Marxism, Marxist theories of economic determinism, and positivism as a school of thought.
- Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is one of the most crucial reconceptualizations of Marxist thought. Gramsci argued that political power is exercised through consent rather than coercion, where dominant classes articulate social visions in terms of the interests of all.
- Such conceptions of power were later taken up by Frankfurt School thinkers, who have significantly emphasised close ties between aesthetics and politics as a means of reinscribing existing power relations within societies.
- Beyond this, the notion of hegemony has been crucial in analysing prevailing modes of theorizing international politics. Robert Cox, for example, is famous for critiquing positivist (problem-solving) theorizings of IR. Instead, Cox advocates for a critical Gramscian inquiry into the emergence of historical structures (political, cultural, and economic); their differential empowering of particular social agents; and possible resistance to such power relations.
- Case study. In accounting for US global power as a form of imperialism, Marxism claims that realist understandings are inadequate in capturing the structural determinants of US action, as there is little concern over the ideologies and actions of human agents. Marxism brings to the fore, that the capitalist structure makes possible global hegemonic power through ideological politics of consent, rather than coercive force. From here, Bacevich’s analysis links mass consumerism in the US to its drive for global military supremacy.
- Case study continued. The political economy of Fordist capitalism played a central role in the great global order struggles of the twentieth century. It enabled a period of unprecedented economic growth and capital accumulation. However, Fordist capitalism depended not only on politically quiescent industrial labour but also oil.
- Case study continued. This explains both US dominance of the Gulf in the post-war era, and actions in Iraq post-9/11. Under this premise, the latter is an expression of the historically-correlated US geopolitical project of economic security and military supremacy. Both foreign policy measures such as the Bush doctrine and continued military might under the Obama administration exemplify this.
- Marxism is not a mere domestic theory, nor a mere economic theory. It understands capitalism as a social form that entails political, cultural as well as economic relations and one that is not containable within states.
- With the rise of Western Marxism, this strand of thought was no longer economically deterministic but dealt with politics, culture and ideology much more widely.
- While some critical theorists have been pessimistic about Marxist transformative politics in the current era, new social movements in the 21st century hold out some hope for opposition to capitalist globalization. These movements explicitly connect capitalism with US imperial power thus reinforcing the remaining relevance of Marxism in world political explanation to this day.