Key Points

• World-system theorists argue that world politics occurs within a world-system dominated by the logic of global capitalism.

• One of the key effects of the world-system is that the rich and powerful prosper at the expense of the poor and the weak.

The Origins of World-System Theory

In his inaugural address to the Working Men's International Association in London in 1864. Karl Marx told his audience that history had 'taught the working classes the duty to master (for) themselves the mysteries of international polities'. However, despite the fact that Marx himself wrote openly about international affairs, most of this writing was journalistic in character. He did not incorporate the international dimension into his theoretical map­ping of the contours of capitalism. Given the vast scope of Marx's work, this 'omission' should per­haps not surprise us. The sheer scale of the theoret­ical enterprise in which he was engaged, as well as the nature of his own methodology, inevitably meant that Marx's work would be contingent and unfinished. That said, since his death many of those who have taken inspiration from Marx's approach have attempted to apply his theoretical insights to international relations.

The first sustained attempt to utilize Marxian ideas to analyse the international sphere was the critique of imperialism advanced by such thinkers as Hobson, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Hilferding, and J. Lenin (see Brewer 1990) at around the turn of the twentieth century.

Without doubt, the most well-known and influ­ential work to emerge from this debate about the nature of imperialism was a pamphlet written by Lenin, and published in 1917, called Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin's ideas repre­sented both a development on and a departure from those of Marx. A development on Marx in that Lenin accepted Marx's basic thesis that it is the eco­nomic mode of production that ultimately deter­mines broader social and political relations: a relationship usually summarized via the famous base-superstructure model. Lenin also accepted Marx's contention that history can only be correctly understood in terms of class conflict In capi­talist society this means the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

However, Lenin argued that the nature of capi­talism had changed somewhat since Marx pub­lished the first volume of his monumental work Capital in 1867. Capitalism had entered a new stage—indeed, its' highest and final stage—with the development of monopoly capitalism. One of the effects of this transformation was that—analyti­cally speaking—capitalism now had to be viewed in a broader, international context, rather than the predominantly domestic context scrutinized by Marx. This 'departure from' Marx's work had far-reaching implications in terms of Lenin's analysis.

Marx's conception of capitalism led him to posit a simple divergence of interests between the prole­tariat on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie on the other. This divergence was the same no matter what the geographical location of the worker or the cap­italist. Thus, objectively speaking, there was no conflict of interests between the workers of different countries, and if they could break themselves free from the binds of dominant bourgeois ideolo­gies they would recognize this. As Marx famously proclaimed: 'Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains?

However, Lenin argued that imperialism had cre­ated a two-tier structure within the world-economy with a dominant core exploiting a less-developed periphery. Such a structure dramatically complicates Marx's view of a simple divergence of interests between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. With the development of a core and periphery, there was no longer an automatic harmony of interests between all workers. The bourgeoisie in the core countries could use profits derived from exploiting the periphery to improve the lot of their own prole­tariat. In other words, the capitalists of the core could pacify—or bluntly, buy off—their own work­ing class through the further exploitation of the periphery. Thus, according to Lenin's analysis, the structural division between the core and periphery determines me nature or the relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariat of each country.

Even this rather simplistic summary of Lenin's theory of imperialism should alert us to two important features of the world-system approach to the understanding of world politics. The first is that all politics, international and domestic, takes place within the framework of a capitalist world-economy. The second is the contention that states are not the only important actors in international relations, rather social classes are also very significant. Moreover, it is the location of these states and classes within the structure of the capitalist world-economy that constrains their behaviour and determines patterns of interaction and domination between them.

Marxist-influenced analyses of world politics remained widely influential at least until the early years of the cold war. In retrospect, it is easy to understand why this may have been so. The First World War seemed—and indeed, still seems—like a pointless and futile quarrel between rival imperialistic cliques in the capitalist core. That grotesquely bloody war was followed by a sustained period of economic crisis which led many to believe—and not only on the left of the political spectrum—that capitalism had entered its final death-throes. In this climate, it is not surprising that Marxist categories of analysis, and the critique of imperialism in particular, fell on fruitful ground. It is particularly significant in this respect that the book seen by many as heralding the genesis of modern Realism, E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), is obviously heavily influenced by Marxist ideas.

However, after the Second World War, interest in Marxist-influenced conceptual tools as a means of understanding world politics waned quickly. The long post-war economic boom meant that capital­ism appeared to have overcome the problems of the inter-war period. Furthermore, the decolonization process suggested that the core countries could sur­vive and even prosper without having to exploit colonies in peripheral areas. In addition, in the post-Hiroshima age of mutually assured nuclear destruction the Marxists' preoccupation with eco­nomic issues may have seemed a rather frivolous distraction from the 'real issues' of world politics— the possibility of the annihilation of the human race.