Core Assumptions of Marxist IR Theory

Most introductions to international relations begin with states, armies, and treaties. Realists talk about power, liberals talk about cooperation and institutions, and the conversation usually stays at the level of governments negotiating with one another. The Marxist approach starts somewhere else entirely. It argues that to understand why countries behave the way they do on the world stage, you first have to look at who owns what, who works for whom, and how wealth is produced and distributed. In other words, the engine of world politics is economics, and the central drama is class struggle. This blog post breaks down the core assumptions behind this powerful and often misunderstood theory.

Why economics sits at the centre 🔗

The starting point of Marxist IR theory is a simple but radical claim: economic forces fundamentally shape the structure of societies, and this extends to the international system as a whole. Where realists see a world of sovereign states pursuing security and power, Marxists see a world organised around the production and distribution of wealth. Global politics, in this view, is shaped by the economic relations and class struggles between capitalists and workers rather than by abstract principles of law, justice, or morality.

This is the first assumption to grasp. The international system is not a neutral arena. It is built on material interests, particularly the struggle for control over resources and labour. When a powerful country signs a trade deal, intervenes militarily, or props up a friendly government, a Marxist analyst asks a single guiding question: whose economic interests does this serve? The answer, more often than not, points back to a dominant economic class.

The base and the superstructure 🔗

To understand how economics shapes everything else, Marxists rely on a foundational idea borrowed directly from Karl Marx: the relationship between the base and the superstructure. This framework appears most clearly in Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, considered by many scholars the canonical formulation of historical materialism.

The base refers to the economic structure of society, the mode of production, including the forces of production (technology, labour, raw materials) and the relations of production (who owns the means of production and who works for them). The superstructure refers to everything built on top of this economic foundation: the state, the legal system, politics, religion, culture, and ideology.

The crucial argument is that the base shapes the superstructure. A change in the economic foundation eventually produces change in the political and cultural institutions above it. Marx argued that the economic structure of society is the foundation upon which its political and legal institutions are built, and that people enter into definite relations of production that are independent of their will. For a Marxist studying international relations, this means you cannot understand a country’s foreign policy, its laws, or even its dominant values without first understanding its economic structure.

Ideology serves the ruling class 🔗

One important consequence of the base-superstructure model is the claim that dominant ideas in society are not neutral. The Marxist approach holds that the dominant ideology and culture in international relations are determined by the interests and values of the ruling class and serve to justify and legitimise their exploitation of subordinate classes. Ideas about free trade, the rule of law, or the natural superiority of certain economic systems are therefore seen as tools that protect the position of those who already hold economic power.

Everything is interconnected 🔗

A second core assumption is that international relations form a complex, intertwined whole rather than a collection of separate parts. Drawing on Marx’s claim that the relations of production of every society form a totality, Marxist IR theorists believe that world politics is better understood in totality than in fragmentation and isolation. A change in one part of the system ripples through the others.

This holistic outlook is captured by the Marxist term dialectics. As the introductory literature explains, Marxism is characterised by interdependence, and dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world. This is why Marxist scholars often argue that you cannot properly study global issues while staying inside the neat boundaries of separate academic disciplines. Economics, politics, society, and culture all bleed into one another.

Classes, not just states, are the real actors 🔗

Here the Marxist approach makes its sharpest break from realism and liberalism. Mainstream theories treat the state as the primary, unified actor in world politics. Marxism disagrees. It argues that the real actors are economic classes, and that the state is largely an instrument used by the dominant class to advance its interests.

The two classes at the heart of this analysis are the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labour to survive. The state, in this reading, is not a neutral referee standing above society. It serves as an instrument of the ruling class, working to maintain the capitalist system and exploit the working class both at home and abroad. When a government acts internationally, it is often acting on behalf of its capitalist class rather than some abstract national interest shared by everyone.

This also reshapes how Marxists view the nature of international relations. Where liberals emphasise the potential for cooperation, the Marxist starting point is that economic relations are fundamentally conflictual. The interests of those who own capital and those who provide labour cannot be permanently reconciled, and this antagonism plays out at the global level just as it does within a single country.

Historical materialism and the evolution of world order 🔗

If economics drives politics, how do we explain change over time? The answer is historical materialism, the methodological backbone of the entire approach. Historical materialism suggests that material conditions, particularly the economic base, drive historical change. Marx argued that history progresses through the clashes generated by economic systems, and that changes in the economic base lead to transformation of the wider social and political order.

Applied to international relations, this means the global order is not fixed or natural. Different modes of production, such as feudalism and capitalism, give rise to different kinds of states and different patterns of international interaction. One of the most important contributions of Marxism to IR is precisely this point: the capitalist mode of production and the modern sovereign state system are not natural or inevitable, but interdependent products of particular historical conditions. Because they emerged historically, they can also be transformed. This gives the theory an emancipatory or transformative character; it is not interested in preserving the status quo but in explaining how it might change.

The structural nature of global politics: core and periphery 🔗

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Marxist IR is its insistence that global inequality is structural, built into the very architecture of the world economy. This idea is developed most fully in dependency theory and world-systems theory.

Dependency and unequal exchange 🔗

Dependency theory, associated with scholars like Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, argues that the global capitalist system creates a dependency relationship between wealthy, industrialised nations and poorer, developing nations. This relationship is not accidental and it does not simply fade away with time. It actively perpetuates inequality and limits the development of poorer countries. Samir Amin focused on the role of imperialism and unequal exchange in perpetuating economic disparities between nations, and famously advocated that peripheral nations should reduce their dependence on dominant economies to pursue independent development.

The world-system: core, semi-periphery, periphery 🔗

Immanuel Wallerstein extended these ideas into world-systems theory, which views the entire global capitalist economy as a single, interconnected entity. He distinguished three zones: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. The core consists of prosperous, developed, militarily dominant states that control the global economic system. The periphery is made up of poorer, weaker countries that supply raw materials and cheap labour. The semi-periphery sits in between, including declining former core powers and rising middle-income economies.

The relationship between these zones is one of systematic exploitation. Strong states reinforce a differential flow of wealth toward the core through what Marxists call unequal exchange, the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the industrialised core. As critics and supporters alike note, world-systems theory follows Marxist logic in treating the core and periphery as groups standing in opposition within the world market, with a built-in conflict of interest between them. The key insight for students is that peripheral countries are structurally constrained to experience a kind of development that reproduces their subordinate status. Poverty in the periphery, in this analysis, is not a sign of being “left behind” but a product of the system actively working as designed.

Imperialism as the international face of capitalism 🔗

The concept that ties many of these assumptions together is imperialism. Vladimir Lenin gave this its classic Marxist formulation in his 1917 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin argued that mature capitalism inevitably expands beyond national borders in search of profit. He identified key features including the concentration of production and capital, the merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital, the export of capital, and the formation of international monopolies.

For Marxists, imperialism is not a policy choice that a country can simply abandon. It is the international expression of capitalism’s internal drive to accumulate. Imperialist powers exploit peripheral regions to sustain their own growth, imposing unfavourable trade terms and extracting wealth. Importantly, this domination is not limited to the old model of physical colonisation. It can operate through economic means as well, such as the influence of multinational corporations or debt-based dependency in the modern global economy. Lenin even argued that the uneven division of the world among rival powers could only be resolved through war for redivision between these powers, linking economic competition directly to great-power conflict.

Conflict over cooperation 🔗

Pulling these threads together reveals the final assumption. Because the system is built on exploitation and competing class interests, the Marxist approach expects conflict to be the basic condition of world politics, not the exception. The economic relations between classes and between core and periphery are inherently antagonistic. Wars, trade disputes, and interventions are, at root, expressions of underlying economic contradictions.

This does not mean Marxists believe nothing can change. On the contrary, the theory’s emancipatory streak insists that recognising these structures is the first step toward transforming them. By revealing the hidden economic foundations of power, military dominance, and even cultural hegemony, the Marxist approach tries to divulge the latent sources of power that other theories tend to overlook.

How Marxist IR differs from realism and liberalism 🔗

It helps to summarise the contrast directly. Realism focuses on states pursuing power and security in an anarchic world. Liberalism focuses on states and institutions finding ways to cooperate. Marxism focuses on classes locked in economic struggle, with the state acting as an instrument of the dominant class. Where realists and liberals largely take the existing order as a given, Marxists treat it as a historical product that can be analysed, criticised, and ultimately changed. This is why Marxism is sometimes grouped with the critical and post-positivist theories that question whether any social structure should be accepted as natural or permanent.

Of course, the approach has its critics. Some argue that its class-based analysis oversimplifies the genuine complexity of social relations and power, and that it underestimates the influence of non-state actors and non-economic motivations like nationalism, religion, and identity. These criticisms are worth keeping in mind. Still, as a framework for spotting the economic interests hidden behind diplomatic language, the Marxist approach remains one of the most penetrating tools available to students of world politics.

What do you think? If the global economy really is structured to keep the core wealthy and the periphery dependent, can a developing country truly “catch up” by playing along, or only by changing the rules of the game itself? And in an age of multinational corporations and global finance, do you think states or economic classes are the more decisive actors in shaping world politics today?

References

1. https://jgu.edu.in/blog/2024/02/21/theories-of-international-relations/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351708699_Marxist_Approaches_to_International_Relations
4. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/02/25/introducing-marxism-in-international-relations-theory/
5. https://dennana.in/2024/03/31/marxist-theory-of-international-relations/
6. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1482583/FULLTEXT01.pdf
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism
8. https://juriscentre.com/2022/08/08/marxist-approach-to-international-relations/