p. 2. Stalin even had to rebuild the Russian nationalism of ‘Mother Russia’ he substituted for loyalty to party in the 30’s, and had to shift to propagandize, via national terms like ‘Great patriotic War’[6], under the epiphany, Russians would fight harder for nationalism than Marxism in WW2. So, whilst, arguably IR has rejected the labour process as the basic unit of history, Marxist ideas on broadening the discussion of state, to a state society complex is still relevant, as it can suggest reasons for why people turn to nationalist answers. Hegemony then, is a cultural force which filters capitalism as being almost objective truth, in that few cultural channels that express critique or alternatives exist. Gramsci also implies that capitalist democratic society has created the intellectual and a “Great mass of Functions”[20] that are not necessary for the production capabilities of a society, suggesting these are “unproductive…Capitalist”[21] in the Marxist sense, coined by Achille Loria, and are thus hegemonic roles, that take a proportion of income whilst appearing, and maintaining, the consent structure of society that subverts class consciousness from development. Thus, the proletarian Nigerian oil worker is at the wrong end of the relations of exchange, in comparison with his fellow British proletarian LGV Oil tanker driver, who is comparatively better off. ( Log Out /  In contrast, being an economic migrant who has a particular skill needed by the host country is considered legitimate. [4] Andrew Linklater ‘Marx and Marxism’ in Theories of International Relations eds., by Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater, (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) p. 119. A Marxist IR approach to migration shows the importance of historical materialism as an approach to IR. ), Motyl, Alexander J., Encyclopedia of Nationalism, Volume II. (2001, Academic Press), [7] Linklater, ‘Marx and Marxism’, p. 119. The paper “The Relevance of Marxism to International Relations” is a well-turned example of an essay on social science. So, the unequal labour process arguably can be seen to some extent, as contributing to the emboldment of nationalism, and resultant strengthening of the idea of state and sovereignty, a result very different to Marxist predictions. The unequal means of production and relations of production[12] arguably suggests that the only reason, states are emboldened in nationalism, is because of the friction and inequality in the labour process between proletariat and bourgeoisie. In other words, the category of persecuted migrant or refugee is relative – it is not real in the sense that the colour of your eyes is real and cannot be decided differently by someone else. In these countries, a strong ruling elite consented to a specific type of financial economy – often called a ‘neoliberal’ model – which also took hold across the world to varying degrees as other states sought to emulate this ‘success’. What’s more, as a result of this people are still taught, from a young age, that greed is good, and that merciless selfishness is the basis of their so-called (actually distorted) conception of “human nature”. In Jaws, produced in 1975, the shark is finally killed by the protagonist Brody[26], representing the conquering of difficulty and the ability to continue on with life, inducing the consumer, that within the capitalist system, the difficulty to life of proletarian existence can be overcome, deferring and avoiding the development of class consciousness. First, Marxists are critical of the fixed aspect of borders because they create relations of dependency and inequality between peoples by restricting and controlling their access to resources and labour. [12] Stephen Hobden and Richard Wyn Jones, ‘Marxist Theories of International Relations’ in the Globalization of World Politics, (Oxford University Press, 2014) p. 143. Hence its relevance to IR exists at a critical level, in suggesting explanations for the failures of classical Marxist predictions and subsequent results on IR. Put differently, Marxism fundamentally questions what ‘the international’ is in IR. This gradually transformed social relations – the ways in which people could survive and reproduce. In fact, most of Marx’s (and his sometimes co-author Friedrich Engels’) work was not primarily concerned with the formation of states or even the interactions between them. 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