Ruling class project their view of the world which becomes the consensus view hegemony. Marxists believe that a key part in the control of the Proletariat is the use of alienation in all aspects of society, including the family, the education system and the media. This provides the Bourgeoisie with a supple mass of workers who do not mind working for the external rewards of a constant wage. Marxists believe that deviance is any behavior that differs from the societal norm.
It is seen as deviant because as a society, we do not accept it. Deviance can vary from simply odd behavior to behavior that can harm society or is considered dangerous or disrespectful. This also means that if the industrial revolution and capitalism in general smells of burning coal, overcrowded factories and petrol fumes, the smells of the next revolution should be less deadly, less polluting and more protective of the earth.
In addition, we must understand that those origins and functioning can simultaneously happen at the domestic and international level. Combining these tasks leads to arguably the most important contribution Marxism offers to IR: that the capitalist mode of production and the modern sovereign states system that emerged roughly at the same time are not natural or inevitable events. They are interdependent products of particular historical conditions and social relations. The work of Marxists is to map and retrace those conditions and social relations and to figure out how the capitalist mode of production and the sovereign states system emerged — as two sides of the same coin, as different coins or maybe as different currencies.
Marxism also advises that concepts are not just meant to help us understand the world — they should also help us change it. Most simply, historical materialism asserts that human beings — including their relations with each other and their environment — are determined by the material conditions in which they can survive and reproduce. Therefore, Marxism asserts that material conditions can be changed by the actions of human beings as well as by events — think of climate change for example, which depends on physical phenomena as well as human behaviour.
In other words, these material conditions are historical, they change over space and time. But they are also always dependent on — and often hampered by — the processes and ideas that preceded them, as the past weighs on the present. If this is correct then the separation between the political and economic, or public and private, is problematic because those categories hide the ways in which states and foreign policies are determined by the social relations and structures of the global economy — such as multinational corporations or international financial institutions.
Whether it is anarchy for realists or international society for the English school, Marxists argue that such concepts are problematic because they make us believe in illusions or myths about the world. For example, the concept of anarchy creates the mirage that states are autonomous agents whose rational behaviour can be predicted.
However, this ignores the endurance of regional inequalities and the structural and historical links between states, violence and the key actors of the global political economy. The first application of Marxist ideas to explain international processes was by communists and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin. These authors developed what we now call the classical theories of imperialism to understand how capitalism expanded and adapted to a world of inter-imperial rivalry leading to the First World War and the slow disintegration of the European empires.
He distinguished three groups of states or regions: the core, the semi-periphery and the periphery. The aim was to understand how states have developed since the sixteenth century in relation to each other, thereby creating relations of dependency between different groups of states depending on the specific types of economies and industries they specialised in.
Therefore, these relations of dependency and groups required that we understand the world through broader units than states. These units — or world systems — helped to address the dilemma of why states all became capitalist, albeit in very unequal and different ways. The core group of states e. The semi- periphery states e. Periphery states e. The core is able to produce high-profit consumption goods for itself as well as for the semi-periphery and periphery markets because the periphery provides the cheap labour and raw materials to the core and semi-periphery necessary to make these high-profit consumption goods.
In other words, although historically some states have changed their group e. Thus, relations of dependency and inequality are essential to capitalism and cannot be significantly reduced. Another influential update of the classical theories of imperialism is the neo- Gramscian strand of Marxism.
It emphasises two things. First, the domination of some groups of individuals or groups of states over other groups also depends on ideological factors. In other words, capitalism is experienced in different ways historically and across the globe because people understand it — and therefore agree to or resist it — in different ways. Second, the relations of dependency and types of groups or units used to understand those relations are more varied and fluid than world systems theory.
Therefore, capitalism dominates our social relations because it is reproduced through coercive and consensual means. A neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony focuses on the consensual ways in which transnational classes, organisations and international law reproduce capitalism and its inequalities.
For example, Singapore, Hong-Kong, South Korea and Taiwan were known as the Four Asian Tigers because of their rapid industrialisation and high growth rates from the s to the s. However, vast inequalities and human rights violations are increasing across and within many societies despite the dominance of neoliberalism globally.
This shows that although neoliberal hegemony is far from producing the success it originally projected, this perceived success remains one of the main drivers of capitalism because it convinces people to consent to capitalism without the threat of force.
A more recent trend of Marxism in IR — historical sociology — returns to some of the more classical problems of IR. Specifically, it looks at the development of the modern state system in relation to the transition s to capitalism and to the different moments of colonial and imperial expansion. Like Marxism, Neo-Marxism is also looked upon as a branch of philosophy. Sometimes the term Neo-Marxism is used in the sense that describes a kind of opposition to some of the ideologies of the foremost Marxist truths.
These are the differences between Marxism and Neo-Marxism. Your email address will not be published. Professor in Social Science and a contributing writer for Difference Between.
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