Teschke, Benno. "Marxism". In Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, 163-187. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Teschke, Benno. "Marxism". In Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, 163-187. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels never systematically addressed the fact that different societies developed at different rates, and were thus unable to account for the reason for this phenomenon or the nature of relationships between more and less developed societies (164).
• The core dynamic underlying Marx and Engels's understanding of capitalism was that it was liberal and cosmopolitan in character, destined to expand constantly and transform the entire world into a interconnected capitalist economy with a shared class structure (164).
• The growth of interconnected capitalist economies is predicted to change the nature of politics, reducing the occurrence of war and reducing the state to its function to protect property rights and retain an oppressive class system. Eventually, all politics would occur alongside class lines, culminating in a global proletariat revolution (164).
• Marx and Engels predicted that the bourgeois world order would be created through wars between the 'revolutionary' bourgeois states and conservative anti-revolutionary states, in which the former would triumph. When the 1848 revolutions failed, the changed this assumption to the steady expansion of bourgeois capitalism through revolutions taking place in states at war (165).
• Marxist theory underwent severe changes during the 1870s in response to beliefs that the nature of capitalism and world politics had undergone a significant change since the financial crisis of 1873, the aftermath of which had seen significantly reduced rates of return on investment, as well as a massive expansion of military spending and colonialism (166).
• The economic system which emerged from the 1873 crisis was characterized by monopolies, a massive concentration of capital compared to the period prior to the 1870s. This period witnessed the cooperation of finance and industrial capital and the heavy reliance of capital upon the state (167).
• The concentration of capital and the connections between capital and governments meant that governments supported tariffs domestically, designed to reduce competition from other centers of concentrated capital, and imperial expansion internationally, since this generated new resources which could be exploited by national capital at the expense of indigenous inhabitants and foreign capital. Profits from colonialism also helped fund social welfare programs domestically, which warded off revolutions (167).
• The imperial rivalries generated from disputes over accumulated resources between national monopolistic capitalists created the environment for war. Marxist of this period thus predicted that war between capitalist nations would created the opportunity for proletariat revolution, which would occur in the weakest link (167).
• The Marxist theory of imperial generated during the 1870s and afterwards faced significant deficits, particularly because monopolies were not actually especially common during this period, finance and industry did not really cooperate outside of Germany and Austria, and capital was not as concentrated as they predicted. Moreover, trade between imperial states increased during this period, meaning that capital had not caused states to separate economically. Colonialism was, in fact, driven by factors other than economic desire, and did not always receive the endorsement of domestic capitalists (167-168).
• The Marxist theory of imperialism also experiences a major failing because it only seeks to explain the existence of imperialism during a definite historical time period from 1873 to 1917. It does not provide insight on imperialism prior to nor after this period (168).
• This theory also failed to account for unique and historically-specific political developments. By trying to create a general theory of capitalist imperialism, albeit limited to a specific time period, Marxists ignored the other historical factors that led to specific outcomes, instead trying to include these into a general theory (169).
• Immanuel Wallenstein developed world-systems theory, designed to provide a comprehensive theory of the world capitalist economy from its emergence in the 16th Century onward. The world economy includes all countries at different stages of economic development, with that level of relative development equating to their position towards the center or periphery of the world economy. The world economy takes surplus from the periphery towards the core (169-170).
• The theory is historically illiterate, as it tries to connect the expansion of European imperialism with the emergence of capitalism despite significant time gaps between these phenomenon. Moreover, the theory fails to capture the important distinctions between different forms of capitalism, or understand the unique historical contingency of different forms of labour relations and capitalist systems (170-171, 173).
• World-systems theory holds that the state system of international relations is intrinsically important to the existence of capitalism, creating the structures necessary for division of labour the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the core. No evidence, however, is provided for this claim. This poses an special problem because state systems did not exist during the 16th Century, but emerged after the development of capitalism (172).
• Neo-Gramscian thought takes the ideas of Antonio Gramsci on hegemony and expands it to cover topics of international relations. The hegemonic power of states is now no longer determined through material factors, but the creation of a hegemonic ideology of their power manifesting itself in transnational civil society and the ideas that shape and structure the contemporary international system (173-174).
• In contrast to realist views of hegemony as concentrating around the power of one state, neo-Gramscian theory conceives of hegemony as constituting a concept of the state and society that has spread from one hegemonic state to other state that adopt the same conceptions of society (174).
• The major issue with this theory is that it does not account for the role of historical capitalist expansion in creating and forming the dominant views that state that would become hegemonic. It assumes that these conceptions of society develop internally, whereas in reality they developed through interaction with other societies, often during periods of capitalist expansion and primitive accumulation (174-175).
• This issue is addressed by Kees van der Pijl, who theorizes the expansion of capitalism and its hegemonic system through the gradual incorporation of more states into a liberal capitalist heartland -- based around Britain and the Low Countries -- over the course of history through a series of wars, revolutions, and imperial conquests that, through different historical methods, incorporate all states into the hegemonic capitalist system (175).
• The essential idea of a global hegemony is incorrect, however, as, even when states gained hegemonic economic control over some areas, they were still restrained in others. British hegemony, for example, did not extend to the European continent itself. Since the liberal capitalist bloc did not have a unified leadership, state actors cannot be associated with capitalist hegemony in a direct way (176).
• The concept of a single hegemony really only applies to the Pax Americana, in which the United States became the unchallenged leader of all capitalist nations after 1945. The concept works well here, but not in any other historical circumstance (176).
• Fred Halliday claimed that the modern state system and the dominant realist IR theory were both dependent upon, and had emerged from, capitalism. Dr. Halliday stated that the dispassionate and rationalist approach of realist IR was predicated upon the separation of the political and economic spheres, something made possible through capitalism (177).
• Beyond this core point, the theoretical structure of Dr. Halliday's work faces the same issues of Marxism itself, failing to account for human agency and reducing historical change to advances in economic modes of production (177-178).
• Hannes Lacher contests that capitalism and the state system are not, actually, mutually reinforcing. Instead, they simply developed in relation to one another during the same historical time period. This is because the state system actually creates barriers to interstate trade that inhibits the creation of a global capital class. The development of global capitalism actually required the retreat of the state (179).
• Leon Trotsky's theory of unevenness provides a more encompassing theory of interstate interaction within Marxist assumptions, as it states that the level of economic development in a society determines and structures its interaction with other societies, as well as the mode of its internal political and economic development. Disparities within countries also affect internal and external political and economic development (179-180).
• Globalization following the 1970s has produced a new corpus of Marxist scholarship, largely focusing on the declining roles of states and the development of a transnational capitalist class. Although these new class exercises power independent of states, it also bends states to its will to create domestic conditions for further extraction of surplus (181).
• This view of globalized capital is problematic because it fails to account for regional and national variations in capitalism, as different areas still face very different class relations. This means that, rather than being united into a single class, transnational capitalists will still have different interests (182).
• Whereas most Marxist theorists claim that globalization has reduced the role of states, Ellen Wood argues that states are necessary to globalized capitalism because they protect property rights and control social relations in defined territories. The existence of global capitalism is thus still predicated and dependent upon states (182-183).
• David Harvey claims that American imperialism and the expansion of globalized capitalism since the late 1960s are deeply interlinked. The fall in returns on investment due to over-accumulation in the 1960s prompted the US to engage in more fiercely imperialist endeavors to force client states to engage in mass privatization through neoliberal policies. Since this point, Dr. Harvey claims that US political and economic interests have been in synch (183-184).
• There are many problems with these theory, the first being a number of cases of US political and military involvement without economic benefits, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This demonstrates that, counter to Dr. Harvey's claims, the US continues to articulate separate political and economic interests (184).