A.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emphasized the economic aspect of the relations between
states and said that the main source of instability in the international system would be
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.

B. Thus, for Marx human history has been a struggle to satisfy material needs and 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 as these two failures of human society have never been absent.

C. 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.

D. Marxism created the foundations for the critical theory and it is superior in the sense to the
other dominant approaches to Anglo-American international relations that are problem-
solving theories. Like 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.

E. 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 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 that 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 labour, which divides the
world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and periphery countries. The semi-periphery
countries act as the pacifier between the core and the periphery countries. They help in the
transmission of raw material from the periphery to the core and act as the stabilizer between both
ends.