4 Marxism

Lineage: Marx and Engels (class conflict, capitalism's expansionary logic); Lenin's Imperialism:The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) — inter-imperialist rivalry for colonies/markets caused the First World War; the dependency school (Prebisch, Frank — "the development of underdevelopment" core-periphery structures lock the South into raw-material export); Wallerstein's world-systems theory (a single capitalist world-economy with core, semi- periphery, periphery); Gramsci's hegemony (consent plus coercion in world order — revived by Robert Cox's critical theory: "theory is always for someone and for some purpose").Core claims:1. Economics precedes politics — the international system is a capitalist world economy; states are managers of class/geoeconomic interests;2. Exploitation structures the system — unequal exchange, debt, technology dependence reproduce the core-periphery divide; "free trade" is the strong's ideology;3. War and conflict are produced by capital's needs (markets, resources, cheap labour — hence the critique of resource wars and the arms economy);4. Change requires structural transformation (revolution, delinking, South-South cooperation), not reform of rules made by the core.Critique: deterministic economism; undersells the autonomy of security politics (why did communist states fight each other?); predicted capitalism's collapse — it globalized instead; weak on agency of small states that have prospered.Nepal from the Marxist lens: the classical Nepali left's worldview — remittance-exporting, raw- material-importing Nepal as a peripheral economy; foreign-aid as structural power; the Gurkha- recruitment and labour-migration systems as international labour…