Exploring the Marxist Approach to International Relations

Most theories of international relations try to explain how the world works so that states can navigate it more effectively. The Marxist approach does something different: it asks why the world is structured so unequally in the first place, and whether that structure can be changed. Instead of treating states and their pursuit of power as the natural starting point, Marxists begin with economics. They argue that to understand wars, alliances, trade deals, and global inequality, you first have to understand the global capitalist system that shapes them. This makes Marxism a radical and critical approach, one more interested in transforming world politics than in managing it as it is.

Why Marxism is a radical, not a status-quo, theory 🔗

Realism and liberalism, the two mainstream theories of international relations, are often described as status-quo perspectives. They take the existing world of competing states as given and ask how cooperation or stability can be achieved within it. Marxism rejects this starting point. Karl Marx famously wrote that philosophers have only interpreted the world, while the real task is to change it. That spirit runs through the entire Marxist tradition in international relations.

What makes the Marxist approach critical is that it refuses to accept the international system as a permanent, natural arrangement. Where realists see anarchy and the eternal struggle for power, Marxists see a historically specific economic system that emerged at a particular time and can therefore be transformed. The theory is openly emancipatory: it aims not just to describe global inequality but to expose its roots and point toward its end. This is why the Marxist approach is one of the most lively and contested perspectives in the discipline.

The economic base shapes world politics 🔗

The foundation of the Marxist approach is historical materialism. This is the idea that the way a society organises production-how it makes and distributes goods-forms the economic base on which everything else is built. Politics, law, culture, and even ideas about morality form a “superstructure” that rests on and reflects this base. As economic systems evolve through stages like feudalism, capitalism, and socialism, the political and social world evolves with them.

Applied to international relations, this means global politics cannot be understood by looking only at diplomacy or military strategy. Marxists argue that the international system is driven not by abstract principles of law, justice, or morality, but by material interests-particularly the struggle to control resources and labour. Wars, treaties, and shifting alliances are surface events. Beneath them lie the deeper movements of a global economy organised around the accumulation of capital.

Class struggle goes global 🔗

A second pillar of the approach is class struggle. In classical Marxism, society is divided between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who sell their labour to survive. The state, in this view, is not a neutral referee but an instrument that protects the interests of the dominant economic class.

Marxists extend this logic beyond national borders. The fundamental division in world politics, they argue, is not between nations as such but between classes that cut across them. A factory owner in Mumbai may have more in common with a factory owner in Manchester than with the workers in either city. From this angle, much of what we call “national interest” in foreign policy is really the interest of a ruling class dressed up in patriotic language. World order, then, reflects the balance of forces in an ongoing global class struggle rather than a contest between equal sovereign states.

Lenin and the theory of imperialism 🔗

One of the most influential applications of Marxist ideas to world politics came from Vladimir Lenin. Writing during the First World War, Lenin argued in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that the war was not an accident or a mistake of policy but a direct product of capitalism’s development. As competition within capitalist economies intensified, large monopolies and finance capital came to dominate, and these powerful interests pushed their states to expand abroad in search of new markets, raw materials, and places to invest surplus capital.

Lenin identified several defining features of the imperialist stage: the concentration of production into monopolies, the merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital, the growing importance of exporting capital rather than just goods, and the carving up of the entire world among the biggest capitalist powers. From this perspective, colonialism and great-power rivalry were not separate from economics. They were capitalism playing out on a global stage. For students in formerly colonised societies, this analysis offered a powerful explanation of why empire happened and whose interests it served.

Dependency theory and the gap between rich and poor nations 🔗

While classical Marxism focused heavily on the state and domestic class relations, later thinkers shifted the level of analysis to the relationship between rich and poor countries. This neo-Marxist turn is captured in dependency theory, which developed largely among scholars in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century.

Dependency theorists challenged the popular idea that poor countries simply needed to “catch up” by following the path of developed ones. Instead, they argued that underdevelopment is not an original condition but something actively produced. The wealthy, industrialised core profits at the expense of the periphery-the underdeveloped and poor nations. International trade, they pointed out, is not trade between equals. Stronger economies can set terms that allow surplus value to flow steadily from poorer regions to richer ones.

The result is a cycle. Poorer countries export cheap raw materials and import expensive manufactured goods, which keeps them locked into a subordinate role. For Marxists, this shows that inequality and dependence are not flaws that capitalism will eventually fix on its own. They are built into how the global system functions.

Wallerstein and world-systems theory 🔗

The most ambitious neo-Marxist framework is Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, developed in the 1970s. Wallerstein argued that the right unit of analysis is neither the individual state nor even the relationship between two countries, but the entire global economic system that has existed since roughly the sixteenth century. To understand any single country’s fortunes, you have to look at its position within this larger whole.

Wallerstein divided the world into three zones rather than the two of dependency theory. Core countries are economically advanced, technologically sophisticated, and dominant in global trade and finance-nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan. Peripheral countries supply raw materials and cheap labour and remain economically dependent. Between them sits the semi-periphery, which is exploited by the core but in turn exploits the periphery, giving the system a degree of stability by blurring the line between exploiter and exploited.

A system that keeps reproducing inequality 🔗

Importantly, Wallerstein did not believe countries were permanently trapped in their position. He accepted that former colonies could climb the ladder, as some have. But he argued that the capitalist world system still requires some regions to remain poor so they can be exploited by wealthier ones. Even when individual countries move up, the underlying core-periphery structure persists. Mechanisms such as debt relationships, intellectual property regimes, and control over global supply chains ensure that wealth keeps flowing toward the core, even after formal colonialism has ended.

Gramsci, Cox and the idea of hegemony 🔗

Not all Marxist thinking about international relations reduces everything to economics. A more sophisticated strand draws on the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose concept of hegemony has been especially influential. Gramsci argued that a ruling class maintains its power less through brute coercion than through its ability to win the consent of the people. It does this by shaping a whole lived reality in which the existing order comes to seem natural and beyond question.

The scholar Robert Cox brought this insight into international relations in the 1980s. In a much-quoted line, Cox argued that theory is always “for someone and for some purpose”-meaning no theory is neutral, and mainstream approaches quietly serve the existing order. Cox distinguished between problem-solving theory, which takes the world as it is and tries to make it work more smoothly, and critical theory, which questions how the present order came about and whether it could be different. He used Gramsci’s idea of hegemony to show that world order is held together not only by military and economic power but also by widely shared ideas and institutions that make a particular arrangement appear legitimate. In doing so, Cox moved beyond the rigid base-superstructure model, treating material conditions, ideas, and institutions as interacting forces in the making of world orders.

Strengths and criticisms 🔗

The Marxist approach offers real analytical power. It draws attention to economic forces, global inequality, and the interests of the powerful that other theories tend to ignore. It explains imperialism and uneven development in ways realism and liberalism struggle to match, and it gives the Global South a vantage point from which to understand its own history.

Yet the approach faces serious criticism. The most common charge is economic reductionism: by tracing nearly everything back to economics, Marxism may overlook the independent influence of culture, ideology, nationalism, and identity in world politics. Critics also note a degree of state-centrism in some versions, which can underplay the role of non-state actors like NGOs and transnational movements. Others point out that the tradition is highly fragmented into many competing strands, making it hard to identify a single, unified theory, and that its predictions about revolution and the collapse of capitalism have not been borne out as expected.

What do you think? If the global economy really is structured to keep some regions poor, can a developing country genuinely rise within the system, or only by challenging the system itself? And when you read about a trade deal or a foreign policy decision, how much of it do you think is shaped by economic class interests rather than national interest?

References

1. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/02/25/introducing-marxism-in-international-relations-theory/
2. https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/marxist-international-relations-theory/
3. https://dennana.in/2024/03/31/marxist-theory-of-international-relations/
4. https://liberationschool.org/study-guide-imperialism-the-highest-stage-of-capitalism/
5. https://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/WorldSystem.pdf
6. https://revisesociology.com/2015/12/05/world-systems-theory/
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254108310_Robert_W_Cox_and_Critical_Theory_of_International_Relations
8. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230627307_2
9. https://juriscentre.com/2022/08/08/marxist-approach-to-international-relations/