Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed a revolutionary framework during the industrial revolution to understand capitalism through historical materialism, asserting that human relations are determined by material survival conditions. Marxist theory rejects the separation between the capitalist mode of production and the modern sovereign states system, treating both as interdependent historical products rather than natural phenomena.
Early twentieth-century revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, and Vladimir Lenin applied these concepts to classical theories of imperialism, leading up to the First World War. Immanuel Wallerstein subsequently introduced world systems theory in 1974, categorising states into core, semi-periphery, and periphery regions to explain global economic dependency. Meanwhile, neo-Gramscian analysis focuses on hegemonic consent and the role of the transnational capitalist class in reproducing global inequalities. Historical sociology later challenged Eurocentric assumptions and Westphalian origins by examining nineteenth-century socio-economic transitions. Finally, Marxist approaches to migration critique fixed state borders for restricting labour access and reinforcing international inequality.
Historical materialism anchors Marxist critique in the tangible transformation of labour, production relations, and state forms rather than abstract systemic anarchy. By treating the capitalist mode of production and the sovereign state system as co-constitutive, this framework exposes how international financial institutions and multinational corporations structure global hierarchies. In the world-systems model developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, this dynamic manifests as structural dependency between core economies and peripheral resource extractors. Consequently, the persistence of regional inequalities is not an incidental market failure but a structural necessity for maintaining high consumption levels within core states.
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